Noonan asks - is Bush a Liberal?

Peggy Noonan asks a question that is intended to distance the Republican Party from Bush's profligate spending.

This week's column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

This is Peggy Noonan, Reagan's speechwriter and conservative propagandist extraordinaire.

Can you imagine her sitting around her office staring at prominent notes on how Bush has run government spending into the stratosphere, joining it with a deficit that even Reagan would have blanched at? This is what she has always accused Democrats of doing! Now she has to decide "How do we conservatives defend this after we elected Bush - twice?"

Then it hits her. Accuse him of being a secret "Liberal," blame him for Liberal spending, then next election blame the Democrats for being just like Bush and loving to spend profligately!

But how does she pull this switch? She can't just accuse him of being a closet liberal. No one would buy that.

"Aha! Don't accuse him. Just ask the question as if we all knew it all along!"

Sure. Why not? and the Wall Street Journal will publish any piece of crap No. any piece of propaganda Not that either any piece of swill anything Peggy Noonan wants the hard core conservatives to believe.

Josh Marshall has the appropriate response.

...what President Bush has done over the last five years -- with the unfailing support of pretty much every Republican elected official and pundit -- isn't 'big spending.' It's intentionally reckless fiscal policy which is going to create havoc for the country's finances for years to come.

This is what the conservatives have to defend, and what Peggy Noonan must spin. This effort won't do it because:

President Bush has trashed the country's finances with three things -- big tax cuts, big defense hikes and whatever pork is necessary to win the next election.

Mr. Bush's mammoth deficit spending isn't some weird sort of ideological inversion. It's a character problem -- like spending money you don't have always is. And it's one Noonan and her ideological fellow-travellers are utterly on the line for.

We Democrats will have to remember this, and repeat it over and over. Don't let the Conservatives off the hook for their failures for the next generation.