George W. Hoover? -William Kristol

NY Times ^ | 11-17-08 | Bill Kristol

[Wegotsarah.com]

Last week, assembled at Miami’s InterContinental Hotel for a meeting of the Republican Governors Association, the governors seemed cheerful. The G.O.P. had lost only one statehouse on Election Day. The prospects for a Republican pickup in Virginia in 2009 were decent, and good candidates were plotting runs in states like California, Pennsylvania and Ohio in 2010.

There was even a sense of liberation in the air. For the last 14 years, there has been either a Republican Congress or a Republican White House, or sometimes both. Now the Republican governors are free of those heavy taps on the shoulder from their “betters” in Washington. So for these governors, this seems a moment of opportunity, in which their policies, their examples and their successes can help shape the future of the G.O.P.

The governors will be important. But there was an almost-never-mentioned elephant in the Versailles Ballroom (yes, that’s its name) full of Republicans: George W. Bush. For the hard fact is this: The worst financial crisis in almost 80 years has happened on his watch. The Bush administration will leave behind probably the most severe recession in at least a quarter-century. Fairly or unfairly, this will be viewed as George Bush’s economic meltdown.

[21twelve]

Unfairly. Just like FDR deepened the Depression, the coming Dark Years will be caused by Obama’s upcoming policies. Perhaps even traceable to his years as a community activist with lawsuits against Citibank to give loans to folks that couldn’t pay them.

Not to say President Bush doesn’t have a role to play in all of this, but Obama will make it MUCH worse.

[jessduntno]

That article really ended with the line “Paul Krugman is off today.”

For some reason, I found that reassuring...

[outlawjake]

bush basically had same financial policies as clinton and poppy b4 him.. I think this will go down as the Greenspan bubble.. the greenspan economic crisis..

[RobbyS]

Nope. That’s why Greenspan was in the other day making apologies. He knows he screwed up but he knows the Democrats will blame the President and the general public has no clue how powerful the Chairman of the Fed really is. Bush deserves blame for choosing the wrong secretary(ies) of the Treasury. If things continue to go down hill for the next year, Obama will start catching the blame because they will give him until early 2010 to set things right.

[Reagan Man]

Someone needs to tell Bill Kristol and these other yahoos in the world of political punditry, this economic crisis is not akin to the Great Depression. Its not even as bad as the 1979-1983 economic downturn and recession. OTOH, if folks keep calling it the worst financial crisis in 80 years, it just might become that in the long run.

Lets have the federal government stop bailing out every entity that is failing. Let them go bankrupt, let them reorganize and then see if they can make a comeback. Otherwise, inflation will take off and the dollar will be made worthless.

[Fee]

My friend had a quote, “who ever wins in 2008, his supporters did not do him any favors”. The US screwed themselves with borrow and buy. We first started with credit cards, max out on them and refinanced with equity loans and maxed out on them. The government did no better, they borrowed and spend. Our massive GDP increases did not happen based on manufacturing goods and services, it was letting foreign nations buy our debt so we can borrow and spend till the series of bubbles burst, with the subprime and network of leveraged funds bring down the whole country. Now the consumer has no capital or equity left to consume with, even if the government cuts our taxes. Simple stats, 401(k) and stock portfolios lost 2 trillion in one month, and add to that 1 trillion in negative home equity or 3 trillion dollars worth of money not available for the consumer to borrow against out of a US GDP of 14 trillion. There is simply no money or credit left in the US to finance BO programs. Prepare for a lost decade like Japan suffered when they acted equally foolish in bank loans and real estate aquisitions.

[nathanbedford]

And I don’t see why conservatives ought to defend a system that permits securitizing mortgages (or car loans) in a way that seems to make the lenders almost unaccountable for the risk while spreading it, toxically, everywhere else. I don’t see why a commitment to free markets requires permitting banks or bank-like institutions to leverage their assets at 30 to 1. There’s nothing conservative about letting free markets degenerate into something close to Karl Marx’s vision of an atomizing, irresponsible and self-devouring capitalism.

I'm not sure I know what our favorite neocon means by this. I assume he is trying to stake out some sort of neocon position respecting the degree to which conservatives should countenance regulation of the free market.

He questions why conservatives ought to defend the system of securitizing mortgages and columns which leaves the lenders safe and exposes everyone else to risk. That sounds to me like what happened as a result of flagrant Democrat monkeying with the capitalist system in order to rearrange the social order. Is this not the whole issue of the subprime loans?

This issue, in turn, raises the distinction between perception and reality. Kristol mentions this in his article at least by implication when he asked if George Bush will be the next Herbert Hoover. One can hardly think of the administration that has more grossly failed at the public-relations part of governing. One need only mention the name Scott McClellan to prove the point. As the financial debacle started, Bush bungled the public-relations job and failed to put the blame on the Democrats for the subprime mess. McCain compounded the sin. Who will do it now? Contemporary journalists? Hardly. The President-elect of the United States? Not a chance. Determined Democrats in Congress who will conduct hearings? Never. The aching frustration of this situation is that the bully pulpit has been utterly squandered for the last eight years. It serves the conservative cause no good to take schadenfreude in the knowledge that George Bush will be blamed more than anyone for his own inability to fight his corner because he takes us all down with him.

I take no comfort in the knowledge that George Bush was right on this issue and the Democrats were wrong. It does us no good to know that George Bush tried to regulate subprime mess and the Democrats frustrated him. All that matters is that the folks in Massachusetts reelected Barney Frank. We lost the public-relations battle up and down the line. George Bush goes back to Crawford, we go into the wilderness.

Earlier in the article Kristol mentions the conservative theory which provided a new paradigm to overcome the stigma which Republicans had caught as a result of the Great Depression: "Supply-side economics gave Ronald Reagan’s G.O.P. a new and different economic agenda in 1980, and Republicans were able to become a governing party." The problem was that Republicans, George Bush foremost among them, seized supply-side economics with the right-hand but let go of fiscal responsibility with the left hand. The result, excessive spending wrecked Republican budgets and made a mockery of Republican economic theory. Here again, we lost the public-relations war for perception. We lost the whole moral ground under our feet.

While I am always suspicious of William Kristol when he tells the Republican Party what to do, I take very seriously his warning that the perception over this economic debacle can cast conservatives into the wilderness from which they might never emerge, at least not in my lifetime. We need a spokesman, and right now, since the bully pulpit might as well not exist for us, that means either the chairman of the Republican National Committee or someone who emerges on the strength of his own character. We need a spokesman damn quick. We need a man who can make a speech and throw bombs. We need a man who can fight the wars of perception which we have abandoned for eight years.

That is why needs someone like Newt Gingrich and not Michael Steele. We do not need a conciliator or someone who appears inoffensive but someone who has the lungs to break through and make a case. If not Gingrich, who? Who can seize an issue by the throat and squeeze it until the people understand it and see it our way?

In this context, is not meaningful that Gingrich pushed through real spending reforms and drove Slick to a balanced budget? Sadly, it is equally meaningful and therefore all some more painful that we let Clinton get the credit.

[Kent C]

Kristol and the other idiots at Weakknee Standard are a bunch of RINO big gov’t/welfare state Republicans. I’m surprised he was so enamored with Palin, whose policies contradict most of his. He’s the Alexander Hamilton of our generation, when we need more Jeffersons. His buddy Fred Barnes can’t complete a sentence and reminds me of Medivoy of NYPD blue, except less endearing :-) That whole Fox panel (with the exception of Krauthammer) is a joke.

[SoConPubbie]

His buddy Fred Barnes can’t complete a sentence and reminds me of Medivoy of NYPD blue, except less endearing :-) That whole Fox panel (with the exception of Krauthammer) is a joke.

Au contraire!

Krauthammer is just as much a joke with his lack of social conservatism.

Remember, Krauthammer, with a lot of the rest of the NeoCons endorsed and were the loudest cheerleaders for Rudy the biggest RINO of them all.

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[qwertypie]

The housing debacle and the GM collapse are only parts of the overall problem, yet each helps to illustrate the root cause of the overall American economic mess: discarding tried/true economic rules.

In each case, smartypants business people threw aside established lending ratios or pension budgeting, and thought that they had found a way around conservative practices. How very liberal of them.

But the overall government pension and healthcare spending will eventually dwarf both of those problems. The attitude that they are “rights” and not luxuries to be paid with an economically sensible portion of earned revenues will be the ultimate undoing of the nation. No amount of jiggering will avoid the inevitable. Housing/GM are harbingers. Chump change for what is to come.

[Cincinatus]

I find him “off” pretty much every day. Way off.

[Cincinatus]

Rudy would have been a better candidate than McCain.

[Kent C]

“Au contraire!”

We disagree. While none of the Repub candidates were perfect, McCain out-RINO’s Rudy. Rudy wouldn’t have given an inch on the financial stuff and would have (and did) attack Obama as a socialist. I admit I was disappointed in Charles K.’s assessment of one of the debates, but in general, he has more to say and can say it better than the rest of that group - but, again, that isn’t saying much. I doubt if you’d find many conservatives that would call him a ‘joke’ but I bet you’d find a lot that would call Kristol and Barnes (and Mort) “jokes”.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Rudy would have been a better candidate than McCain.

Talk about damning with faint praise!

[billhilly]

“That whole Fox panel (with the exception of Krauthammer) is a joke.”

A former president, while hosting a group of imminent scholars, quipped, ‘There hasn’t been this much brain power in the State Dining Room since Jefferson dined here alone.”

I’m repeating this from memory, so don’t hold me on the room or the direct quote, however my point is this; for sheer brilliance, no one else in media is a match for Krauthammer. It is not limited to Fox.

[Cincinatus]

For one thing, Rudy would not have held back on Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayres, and other assorted Obama slime.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Well that is certainly true. Rudy is used to fighting Dems, not ‘reaching across the aisle’ to them.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

And I don’t see why conservatives ought to defend a system that permits securitizing mortgages (or car loans) in a way that seems to make the lenders almost unaccountable for the risk while spreading it, toxically, everywhere else.

Talk a deep breath, Bill and repeat after me: "It wasn't free markets that lead to the market melt down, it was government intervention in the market."