No More Bush-Bashing Please

Alright! I don't think I can stand it anymore. President Obama is now on the campaign trail for the midterm elections and with waning poll numbers is beating the "it's Bush's fault" drum.

Now I do not want to over-simplify the reasons for our current economic problems but let's remember an accurate timeline and compare that to the reigning political ideologies. To do this, I want to go back to the early 1990's.

As the first President Bush was facing a mild recession of sorts in 1991, candidate Bill Clinton's campaign coined the phrase "it's the economy stupid". In addition to his charisma, he gained momentum by telling everyone how bad their plight was and by November 1992, won the election. In the first half of his term we had another mild economic downturn in early 1994 and by the fall Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives for the first time in over 40 years. As part of their Contract with America, they fought for the passage of among other things, a balanced budget amendment which President Clinton originally vetoed. Many positive economic trends occurred during the remainder of the 1990's until the stock market fall of 2000. There was however, a budget surplus due to the balanced budget ammendment that finally passed a few years earlier.

President Bush narrowly wins the 2000 election (many on the left say selected) and now had power with a Republican House and Senate, then 911 occurred. Instead of turmoil and concern, a few weeks later, economic trends such as mortgage applications and housing took off like a rocket and lasted until housing peaked in 2006.

Now I understand that the economy was starting to slow down and clearly issues were already in play. In fact, I remember Treasury Secretery Snow testifying a few years earlier to the Senate Finance Comittee that Fannie Mae was headed for problems but ranking member Barney Frank-D stated he believed Fannie was fundamentally sound.

So as the 2006 midterm election rolled around, the primary politcal environment was to oust the Republicans which they did in Novemeber. Fast forward to now and we can view any economic trend graph and clearly see that worst of this economic collapse has occurred under total Democratic control. Though Bush was president through 2008, he had no real power since 2006. He was powerless to pass any legislation on his agenda. And now for close to two years we have had absolute Democratic control with President Obama.

Plenty has actually been done since the Democrats have assumed power. We had nearly a trillion dollars of debt that President Bush contributed to but now have over three trillion thanks to TARP and the Omnibus bill that were both intended to help us out of this financial fiasco yet we find our economic state worse off. We then passed a Healthcare bill that no one can seem to place a true cost on, probably because we could not fathom the amount of zero's.

It's been nearly four years since President Bush has been able to do much of anything and yet we are to believe he solely caused this? If this were the case, then why can't House democrats and the President even control the bleeding after spending unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money? We were told unemployment would not rise above 8% and yet it has reached 10%. Companies reduced overhead and are still viable but are not growing because of regulatory and tax fears. The housing market still continues to stagnate and foreclosure rates show no real sign of turning around.

Every since late 2008, there seems to be a resurgence of Keynesian economics with a "too big to fail" mentality leading the movement. Historically, factually and logically speaking, this has never worked and the only winner is government.

President Bush certainly supported some anti-conservative economic principles but if we could put politics aside for a minute and were honest with ourselves, the overwhelming majority of Americans would have to admit their financial situation and outlook was much more promising during the Bush years than they are under the current administration.