G-Dub, Born-Again (heh) Deficit Hawk

As the President is finding out on the bloated highway bill, few, if any, are buying it:

Ten days ago, according to White House sources and individuals who attended the meeting, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card called a meeting with interested parties (mostly supporters) on the highway bill, which has been held up for close to two years in negotiations.

President Bush is on record as saying it will veto the larded legislation in its current form, which is reaching upwards of $300 billion in taxpayer-funded pork projects....

Upon hearing from Card that the President remained committed to a veto, members of Americans for Transportation Mobility (ATM), a coalition of more than 50 interest groups and companies, did not take the news well. "They pretty much told Card a veto wasn't going to matter, and dared him to let the President do it," says an attendee at the meeting. "There are other bills the President should have vetoed before this one, and he didn't. If he wants to be embarrassed and have that veto overridden, let him try." [emphasis added]

This would explain the following two comments that hew very close to that defiantly profligate line:

"President Bush doesn't need a veto fight right now," says a Capitol Hill lobbyist. "He's going to have a tough go on the Central American Free Trade Agreement [CAFTA], and Social Security is stalled out. His people need to tell him to swallow hard and sign the highway bill."

"You look at something like the highway bill, and their legislative people should have been all over this months, years ago, working with us," says a lobbyist working for a corporate ATM member. "They can't just pull us in at the last minute and say that it's their way or nothing. In this case, they were doomed to fail, and, frankly, they seemed surprised by what they heard from us, which was surprising to us. They should have known we wouldn't roll over."

I seem to remember an old saying about picking one's spots. With the proximity of so many other, bigger-ticket issues on the same policy buffet, making a big stink over a highway bill that was always going to be an appalling mess doesn't look, from a big-picture standpoint, like a spot worth picking any fight over.

More to the point, if you come into office, like Bush43 did, with no reputation for frugality (like, to cite an obvious example, Ronald Reagan), then you have to earn it once you get there. But the President never even made the pretense of exercising fiscal restraint in his first term, signing every spending bill that came before him, including such appropriations Roman orgies as the reinstatement of farm subsidies and the prescription drug entitlement that he personally muscled through Congress, to no great political benefit to remotely offset the predictable run-away liability burden it's adding to already-tottering Medicare. Now he belatedly seeks to clamp down somewhere, in more or less token/symbolic fashion, and settled on the highway bill. And both lobbiests and legislators on both sides of the aisle, far from being chastened by this sudden attempt at presidential leadership, are having more than a few hearty guffaws at his expense.

Far from being "limited" to "only" $284 billion, this transportation- justified monstrosity should be zeroed out altogether. Since when is a little less waste a monument to fiscal sanity, much less integrity?

But such is George W. Bush's niggardly stret cred where federal spending is concerned that he can't even sell a modest nibbling 'round the edges to members of his own party.

Good thing the tax-cut-fueled economic boom is throwing off its usual blizzard of additional tax revenue to rapidly shrink the federal deficit, just as it did in the late '90s. Because with a decade of entrenchment in the perquisites of Beltway power, and a two-term presidency marked by the biggest spending level in real terms since LBJ's Great Society, it's difficult to see the Republican Party standing for smaller budgets and limited government again any time soon.