By a margin of 57%-35%, registered voters blame George W. Bush and the Republican Party for the poor condition of the economy, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.
In his address at the Democratic National Convention President Clinton said, "In Tampa, [at the Republican National Convention] the Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple — pretty snappy. It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in." The CNN/ORC poll shows that registered voters are not buying that Republican message.
When George W. Bush took office, the federal government was running an annual surplus of $86 billion. The Bush tax cuts have cost nearly $1.3 trillion in federal debt over 10 years. The legacy of President Bush's eight years in office, with much of that time supported by a Republican controlled congress, should be remembered as a grand and failed experiment of what happens when conservatives are in control of the government.
The failures of Bush's eight year administration cannot be chalked up to Bush alone. The $4 trillion IOU war in Iraq, the home mortgage market bubble, the collapsing economy, the Hurricane Katrina tragedy that befell New Orleans and trickle-down tax cuts (that never trickled down) were all failures of conservative ideology. Those failures are owned by every conservative in Congress who championed and happily rubber-stamped conservative legislation and the conservative philosophy of financial and banking system deregulation and tax cuts for billionaires.
The truly compelling story of the Bush decade is one that conservatives do not want you to remember – the rapid and dramatic failure of conservative government. America learned what life is like under a true conservative government. With near absolute power, conservatives pursued their fiscal and social agenda without compromise.
In a position of virtually unchecked power conservatives failed quickly and utterly at the most basic responsibilities of governing, leaving our nation weaker and deeply in debt, and our people less prosperous, less safe and less free. The Bush years may have been years of political and legislative victories for conservatives, but those years of political and legislative victories had disastrous and long lasting consequences for the nation.
And the American people do remember all those conservative failures.