A Sweeping Rejection of President Bush

From the Cato Institute...

Left-liberal groups are quick to declare Barack Obama’s win a broad endorsement of the “progressive” agenda, their highly inaccurate name for more taxes, more spending, more entitlements, and more regulation. After a trillion-dollar increase in federal spending during the Bush administration and the biggest expansion of entitlements since Lyndon Johnson, it hardly seems likely that what’s troubling the American economy or the American people is an insufficieny of government.

The big problem for John McCain and the rest of the Republicans last night was George W. Bush and his big-government conservatism. Bush had a 25 percent approval rating, and Congress’s was even lower. Republicans hoped up until election day that voters would notice that the unpopular Congress was run by Democrats. But after 8 years of Bush and 12 years of a Republican Congress, just recently ended, voters saw the Republicans as the incumbents who were responsible for the mess in Washington. Concerns about Obama were sufficient to allow McCain to run 20 points ahead of Bush’s approval rating in a time of economic crisis. But the hole was too deep.

Bush and the Republicans promised choice, freedom, reform, and a restrained federal government. They delivered massive overspending, the biggest expansion of entitlements in 40 years, centralization of education, a floundering war, an imperial presidency, civil liberties abuses, the intrusion of the federal government into social issues and personal freedoms, and finally a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street that just kept on growing in the last month of the campaign. Voters who believed in limited government had every reason to reject that record.