Campaign 2000 now seems like a galaxy away if you recall the Presidential campaign debates where Republican George W. Bush talked with Democrat Al Gore about the government surplus: the White House yesterday announced that Bush will leave a $482 billion deficit to his successor — and that’s a low count because it doesn’t factor in a few other things…such as the Iraq war.
The news immediately provided a hot, front-burner issue and an underscored context in Presidential Campaign 2008 for what many pundits predict will be a growing focus on the United States’ growing economic ills under the present administration. And if Bush expected a ringing defense from Republican Senator John McCain, he didn’t get it as McCain and Obama each blasted each other’s economic plans amid this report:
The White House predicted Monday that President Bush would leave a record $482 billion deficit to his successor, a sobering turnabout in the nation’s fiscal condition from 2001, when Mr. Bush took office after three consecutive years of budget surpluses.
And the bad news gets worse:
The worst may be yet to come. The deficit announced by Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, does not reflect the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential $50 billion cost of another economic stimulus package, or the possibility of steeper losses in tax revenues if individual income or corporate profits decline.
The new deficit numbers also do not account for any drains on the national treasury that might result from further declines in the housing market.
And WORSE:
The White House forecast was prepared before passage of the huge housing assistance package that Mr. Bush has promised to sign. That legislation would put taxpayer money at risk in numerous ways, especially if housing prices continue to decline.
Mr. Nussle predicted Monday that the deficit would more than double in the current 2008 fiscal year — to $389 billion, from $162 billion in 2007 — before shooting up to $482 billion in the 2009 fiscal year, which begins in about two months.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, where Democratic Senator Barack Obama battles Republican Senator John McCain in a Presidential race surprisingly tight given the country’s economic ills, both candidates essentially said they would not become financial clones of Bush while blasting each other.
The Obama campaign said the White House announcement is “an urgent reminder that our fiscal policies must change.”
“These have been years of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility. That’s an important issue in this election because Sen. McCain is proposing to continue the same Bush economic policies that put our economy on this dangerous path and that will drive America even deeper into debt,” said Jason Furman, Obama’s economic policy director.
Furman said Obama will “restore balance and fairness to our economy by cutting wasteful spending, shutting corporate loopholes and tax havens, and rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, while making health care affordable and putting a middle class tax cut in the pocket of 95 percent of workers and their families.”
But McCain clearly was trying to put some distance between himself and the Bush administration:
McCain called the Bush administration’s announcement “another reminder of the dire fiscal condition of the federal government.”
“There is no more striking reminder of the need to reverse the profligate spending that has characterized this administration’s fiscal policy,” he said.
That’s not a ringing defense. But McCain is making the argument that Obama isn’t the person to straighten the mess out:
McCain called the Bush administration’s announcement “another reminder of the dire fiscal condition of the federal government.”
“There is no more striking reminder of the need to reverse the profligate spending that has characterized this administration’s fiscal policy,” he said.
The bottom line: you can see by the outlines of this debate part of George Bush’s legacy that will be noted not just in the campaign season, but by future historians.
And, as political scientist Larry Sabato has noted (we regularly run his columns on TMV and Sabato has one of the best track records in predicting elections) McCain’s big problem is going to be that, no matter what he says, he has the same party affiliation as Bush:
Professor Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, says McCain’s economic Achilles’ heel is his same-party affiliation with Bush. “People always blame the incumbent for bad economic times,” he says. For Obama, a possible weakness is his tax policy–but only “if McCain plays it right.” The Republican candidate not only has to show how Obama would raise taxes; he must also show voters how it would affect them, Sabato says.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.