Over at the Washington Monthly blog, Kevin Drum discusses my previous post about not believing what Bush said in 2000. In a comment, Al Gore’s college roommate Bob Somerby asks what I said about George W. Bush contemporaneously. This is a reasonable question, so I went back and looked at every column I wrote in 2000.
I see that I very seldom mentioned the campaign one way or another. The vast bulk of my writings dealt with current policy issues–the Federal Reserve, estate taxes, the state of the economy and so on. I wrote a couple of columns critical of Gore, but I could only find one largely devoted to Bush. I see in that column I was hopeful that the high quality of Bush’s advisers indicated good judgment on his part. I knew most of his economic advisers personally and had a high opinion of all of them. On foreign policy, I mentioned Colin Powell’s likely appointment as secretary of state as indicating a steady, moderate approach by Bush in this area.
I found a column I wrote for the Los Angeles Times on September 20 about Bush’s tax plan that was decidedly lukewarm. I held out hope that once in office he would take the opportunity to fine-tune his campaign tax plan, about which I was unenthusiastic.
What comes across to me in rereading what I wrote is that Bush was simply the lesser of two evils. He might not have been very good, but at the time I thought he was better than Gore. I still don’t think Gore would have been a good president. But I sure wish the Republicans had nominated someone else.
The Dish 