Bush and the Tea Parties

There is a push to vilify the Tea Parties, to show that they are not really about stopping the increase in government and the deficit; that they are really nothing but racism. This is understandable for a couple of reasons. Racism is a hot-button issue. Any group that is labeled as racist is automatically discredited. There are other reasons that the Left is sure that the Tea Parties should not be taken at face value which I will get to later.

In the meantime, a question asked of the Tea Partiers is "where were you during the Bush administration?" This is a valid question since we had a budget surplus at the beginning of the Bush administration which quickly turned into a deficit.

So, where were the protesters?

Some of them were there the whole time. Bush rejected financial conservatism from the start and the financial conservatives hated him for it. Prominent conservatives like George Will frequently complained about Bush. Reason Magazine, the leading Libertarian voice, hated Bush.

Granted, people were not marching in the street against Bush's spending but who would have noticed if they had been? The anti-war left was so vocal in denouncing Bush that they drowned out any other criticism.

Allowances must also be made for the type of spending that Bush did. His biggest-ticket item was the War on Terror. While this was expensive, wars are not the same as new entitlements. Wars end and their spending winds down. Entitlements grow, requiring more and more money. Fiscal conservatives may have rolled their eyes at the amounts Bush was spending but they could see an eventual end to it.

Besides, when the rubble of the World Trade Center was still smoking, it did not seem proper for conservatives to start questioning costs. The left took care of that.

Bush's biggest spending did not take place until his last six months. That is when his administration bailed out major financial institutions and passed the TARP (with the help of the Democrats including Barack Obama). There was a lot of anger then. A case can be made that the Tea Parties would have started under Bush if he had been in office any longer. The first Tea Party protests did not distinguish between the TARP funds and bailouts under Bush and the ones under Obama. No one held up sign saying "Bush TARP=good, Obama TARP=bad."

When the left asks why the Tea Partiers were not protesting during the Bush years, a good rejoinder is, "Why aren't you protesting alongside the Tea Parties?" MoveOn ran an ad during the 2004 Superbowl showing children with huge sums floating over their heads symbolizing the debt that the Bush administration was leaving them. Not they run ads telling us how great the health care bill was.
Democrats promised a balanced budget in 2006 and 2008.

For four years the left campaigned against the Bush deficit. Now that Obama is in office, the deficit is forgotten as an issue and anyone who is against it must be a secret racist.

It is obvious that the left never really cared about the deficit. Clinton did and counted the surplus as one of his major accomplishments but he went against his party in this. According to Bob Woodward's The Agenda, actual tears were shed in the White House when Clinton made deficit reduction an early goal of his administration.

The Democrats never really cared about deficit reduction. They talked about it during the Bush administration because they knew that it would help them with swing voters but their real goal was expansion of the government first. If deficit reduction is eventually needed then they are willing to raise taxes but not make any cuts.

I think that this is one reason that many on the left think that the Tea Parties must have an ulterior motive. The Democrats used it hypocritically so they expect that the Republicans are doing the same. The Democrats real motive for bringing up the deficit was to pressure Bush to abandon Iraq. They assume that the Republicans are doing the same thing and are looking for hidden motives. After exploiting the deficit for so many years, they cannot believe that anyone actually cares about it.

When the Tea Parties first began, the most common thread among them was that they had never done anything like that before. Unlike many on the left who plan their vacations around protests, the people in the Tea Parties wee the sort who normally complain quietly to each other but never act. Getting them to take to the streets took more than a few weeks of Obama. They were already upset with government under Bush and the Republicans and many of them are still angry at Bush and distrustful of the Republicans.