EDITORIAL
Medicare cost: Does nothing stick to Bush?
They used to call Ronald Reagan the Teflon president because rarely did anything he said, no matter how badly it backfired, ever come back to haunt him.
Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush had no such luck, the former finding himself impeached for lying about personal matters having virtually no effect on the nation's well-being, and the latter unceremoniously turned out of office for three little words — "read my lips" — uttered before changing conditions required him to raise taxes.
But even Reagan seems to take a back seat to the current President Bush.
As a candidate, Bush promised fiscal conservatism, a "humble" and unadventurous foreign policy, and a great aversion to "nation building."
Voters in 2000 might have anticipated increased military spending, but hardly an open-ended occupation in Iraq.
Nowhere did Bush hint at wiping out, almost overnight, budget surpluses that took a decade to achieve. We wonder if Bush's internationally minded father cringes as the World Trade Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the World Trade Organization and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, all the product of many years of determined diplomacy, are undermined or abandoned.
What serious objection has thus far been raised to the White House penchant for secrecy, as evidenced by Vice President Dick Cheney's closed energy task force, civil liberty questions raised by the war on terror or Halliburton's role in rebuilding Iraq?
It's just possible, however, that the straw that breaks this president's immunity from accountability will prove to be the new Medicare law offering prescription drug benefits and private health plans to the elderly. No one was more startled than conservative Republicans when, in another departure from his campaign platform, Bush endorsed this huge expansion of spending.
And it is those conservatives who are most shocked and outraged to learn that the same White House that promised them that the cost of this program would not exceed $400 billion over the next decade is now saying the cost will be one-third higher — $530 billion, confirming their worst fears.
The projected cost overrun now will cause the overall budget deficit for the current fiscal year to exceed $500 billion, the largest deficit ever.
Bush now is hearing outrage from both sides of the aisle in Congress. We'd bet that if any of it is to stick, it will have come from the right side.
