It Worked

Last fall, I argued that fiscal conservatives should vote Democrat to jolt this fiscally uber-liberal president toward balancing the budget. It worked! Without Democratic pressure, the president would never have signed on to a balanced budget by 2012, or a pushback against pork. Money quote from the WaPo:

Bush has never proposed a balanced budget since it went into deficit, never vetoed a spending bill when Republicans controlled Congress and offered little sustained objection to earmarks until the issue gained political traction last year.

But now for the first time since he took office, both parties have set a mutual target for eliminating the deficit — an implicit agreement that raises the profile of the issue and may create a political imperative that prods the two sides to find ways to meet the goal or be held accountable for failing.

Congrats to those of you who switched from Republican to Democrat in 2006. Of course, ignoring the entitlement crisis is still the Beltway consensus. And the entitlement crisis – which Bush and the Republicans profoundly exacerbated with their Medicare expansion – is 90 percent of the problem. But tackling ten percent of the fiscal problem is better than nothing. And in order to get a semblance of fiscal sanity in Washington, you now have to vote Democrat. That tells you something about what has happened to conservatism.