Let's get this straight: President Bush, speaking Tuesday in New Albany, Ind., denounced "free-spending" Democrats in Congress who are going to push the nation toward tax increases?
Would this be the same president who in six years, from 2001 through 2006, signed more than 50 spending bills passed by the "free-spending" Republican majority in Congress that exceeded his budget requests and did not veto a single one?
Would this be the same president who led the United States into a pointless war in Iraq -- without the war tax that American presidents traditionally have demanded in order to pay for military conflicts -- that is rapidly (at the rate of about $200 million a day) approaching a price tag of $500 billion and is likely to reach $1 trillion?
And, is this the same president whose ill-advised tax cuts, skewed heavily to the wealthiest Americans, helped turn a promising federal surplus into an alarmingly high deficit?
The political calculations are obvious. Mr. Bush, whose speech coincided with his veto of a $606 billion bill to fund federal education, health and labor programs, wants voters to focus on the GOP characterization of Democrats as a "tax and spend" party, rather than on Republicans' better established "spend and borrow" record.
But there is a deeper issue: the frustration of many in the White House and in his party over the consistently sour mood of the American public about what the Republican national leadership views as a thriving economy.
The answer, as bipartisan studies by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts suggest, is that even in an economy growing in technical terms, only about a third of Americans now are upwardly mobile -- positioned to improve their overall economic standing relative to their parents'. The others are stuck where they are or even falling backward.
A consequence is a growing divide between an administration that frets about capital gains and the estate tax and a public that feels the burdens of job dislocations, spiraling health and tuition costs and oil prices nearing $100 a barrel.
Michael Gerson, author of Heroic Conservatism, wrote yesterday in The Washington Post about the Pew studies that "conservatism accepts inequality as an economic fact of life -- but it cannot accept the existence of a class-ridden society where inequality is hereditary and permanent."
But some contemporary conservatives do accept such inequality. The audience in New Albany heard from one.
What do you expect from today's GOP Conservatives? They just don't care about the lower and middle class Americans. They only care for their paymasters.
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