President Bush's Sticktoitiveness

The hallmarks of President Bush's $3.1 trillion budget announcement this morning are freezes and cuts in many domestic programs including Medicare and Medicaid, extending tax cuts now set to expire after 2010, and a 7.5 percent increase in military-related activities.

The anti-Bush crowd will focus on the fact that inflation-adjusted military spending will rise to levels not seen since World War II, but in terms of the share of the entire economy it's actually nowhere near that -- in fact, it's below Cold War levels.

Thanks to the fiscal stimulus plan going through Congress, the budget deficit will soar to $410 this fiscal year, but the proposal also sees budget surpluses by 2012. That forecast, however, relies heavily on optimistic assumptions about economic growth. Assumptions that are not shared by the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office.

With Democrats in control of Congress in an election year, the proposal faces an uphill battle. Still, the Bush budget shows that even as the national mood is changing (just look at the record number of voters turning out in early primaries), Bush has opted to stick to his guns. Which may not be a path that Republican presidential candidates should follow.

Take a look at Rudolph Giuliani's campaign for example. Many pundits blamed Giuliani's poor showing this primary season on his strategy to ignore smaller states in favor of big ticket contests like Florida. The problem, it appeared to be, was that Giuliani had not built up any momentum heading into Florida.

But maybe another reason Giuliani's presidential campaign failed was his insistence on making himself a one-issue candidate -- that issue being terrorism of course. But it only takes one look at the latest polls to see that terrorism solutions are not the first things voters want to hear about -- it's the economy and healthcare. (Iraq is also on people's minds, but not as a terrorism issue.)

Hammering home the importance of anti-terrorism tactics might be fine for a lame duck president, but the remaining Republican presidential hopefuls need only look at this to see that a Bush-Giuliani strategy appears to be a losing one this time around.

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