http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18972-snip-
But with apologies to both sides,
the case for Bush as an egghead is overwhelming. One of the central characteristics of the Bush presidency is a profound commitment to theoretical notions, nurtured in think tanks and ideological magazines, and a relentless -- yes, even principled -- commitment to pushing them regardless of the facts or the consequences. The president's proposal for private accounts in Social Security is Exhibit A for eggheadism. There was little popular demand for these accounts. Most Americans like Social Security as it is. The private accounts idea was nurtured primarily in libertarian and conservative research organizations such as the Cato Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Heritage Foundation.
To build support for privatization, backers of the idea could not rely on their popularity and they even had to abandon their treasured word "privatization." Instead, they spent years trying to persuade Americans that Social Security faced some sort of crisis and that "personal" accounts were the answer.
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So it is with Bush's foreign policy. It is now clear that Bush always had a grand notion of what the invasion of Iraq would achieve, even if he honestly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He also knew that most Americans would not buy a war in the name of some large theory -- for example, that a new Iraq would achieve a breakthrough for democracy throughout the Middle East. So the weapons threat, a very practical danger, became the primary rationale for war.
Now that Americans know that the weapons were not there, support for the war has waned. Yes, most Americans would like Bush's grand democratic construct to be true. The Iraqi elections, a concrete sign of progress, temporarily increased support for the invasion. But new attacks in Iraq have led to a drop in support for the war. Again, Americans are, on the whole, pragmatists and not eggheads.
In so many other areas, Bush has allowed theory to triumph over practice. The boring, old-fashioned view is that if you cut taxes and increase spending, you get deficits. No, no, the president and the supply-side true believers say, eventually those tax cuts will produce robust economic growth and wipe the deficits away. You just have to keep faith with the theory.
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