Dole's former press secretary thinks economy may undo Bush.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

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Bush is not Reagan, and the deficit could cost him

George W. Bush also wants his cake and wishes to eat it too: Expenditures in Afghanistan, Iraq and for a myriad of homeland-security programs have not lessened the President's appetite for new programs such as the recently enacted Medicare prescription-drug benefit plan.

How did Ronald Reagan deal with this? The Great Communicator wove a story around economic growth as the ultimate way to shrink the deficit. And he counterpunched effectively by pointing out that the Democrats wanted to spend even more than he did, and that, on the defence side, he was simply making up for woeful underfunding by his Democratic predecessors in a world threatened by an evil empire, in the superpower formerly known as the Soviet Union.

Mr. Bush's problem is not just that he is no match for Mr. Reagan as a communicator. The central point is that the world has fundamentally changed since 1984. Mr. Bush's Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, was able to run budget surpluses -- big ones, over multiple years. In essence, he took the deficit issue, which had been a staple of Republican election rhetoric for decades, and turned it on its head. By co-opting this and other formerly Republican issues (including tax cuts), he stripped Bob Dole of whatever fleeting chance he had of defeating Mr. Clinton in 1996. While Al Gore was unable to exploit this advantage in the 2000 contest, that was in part because the Bush camp promised tax cuts and balanced budgets . . . a promise they clearly failed to keep.

What President Bush has managed to do is alienate a core electoral constituency -- fiscally conservative Republicans and independents. If John Kerry (or whomever ultimately wins the Democratic nomination) can play the deficit issue deftly, it could provide the wedge needed to shave off just enough voters to reverse the results of four years ago. The interesting thing is that no one in the White House -- not even Mr. Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove -- seems to sense the danger of this.