Overall, "read my lips" was the first feckless President Bush's biggest mistake because of its unintended consequences on the culture, foreign policy and the national discourse. Among other things, it opened the door to the politics of personal destruction of Bill Clinton and all that entailed, which begat the Republican Revolution of 1994. The second feckless President Bush and moderate congressional Republicans ended up hijacking the revolution, and their borrow-and-spend policies breathed new life into long-ago-discredited liberalism. That led the Democrats back to the White House and gave them solid liberal majorities on Capitol Hill, including very soon a filibuster-proof...