Historians will make this generation of Americans answer for George W. Bush. You let us down, they will say. You afflicted posterity with Bush's blunders and damaged the morale of democracy by letting him into office. Caligula appointed his horse as consul. You elected George W. Bush!
I hope the historians slam the journalists who ignored our Watergate, the scandal revealed in every press conference: that a man unfit "to run a hardware store," in Philip Roth's words, should be President. In a recent column searching the Bush wreckage for clues about its origin, Paul Krugman singled out political journalists for their sins during the 2000 campaign. The chief sin— pride. The reporters covering Al Gore could not endure his low opinion of them, and in their copy justified it. The press read character flaws into Gore's shifting wardrobe, Krugman says, while neglecting "facts" about the Bush economic program—for example, that he was double-counting portions of the "surplus" and playing blind man's bluff with Social Security; in other words, that the whole program did not add up.
True. But neither did Gore's, as Krugman, to his credit, wrote during the campaign. Moreover, Bush's trillion-dollar tax cut was only a few hundred billion more reckless than the one proposed at the same time by John Kerry and other Democratic senators. And compared to leaders in his own party, Bush sounded sensible. As National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out in a Times op-ed piece, candidate Bush "pointedly denounced" the Reaganite faith that (in Bush's words) "if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved." The Gingrich Republicans wanted to abolish the Department of Education, Bush to expand it—indeed, through No Child Left Behind, to move toward federalizing education. (In practice No Child Left Behind turned into a bureaucratic nightmare; still, a competent President might have made it work.) Compassionate conservativism? A "humble" foreign policy? A new relationship with Mexico? The policy "facts" were by no means uniformly deplorable. Certainly they didn't predict the disasters of the Bush presidency.