Froomkin: "Will the real George W. Bush please stand up?" [View All]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/09/16/BL2005091601005.html



Mr. Big Government

By Dan Froomkin

Will the real George W. Bush please stand up?

Several of the key points in President Bush's nationally televised speech last night are being widely welcomed this morning: His vow to rebuild the Gulf Coast, his increasingly direct acknowledgment that there were serious government lapses after Hurricane Katrina, his admission that Americans can and should expect a more effective response to catastrophes in the post 9/11 era.


But the guts of the speech -- in which Bush unfurled his administration's grand plans for the biggest government-funded reconstruction effort in history -- has led to considerable skepticism, if not outright puzzlement, on both sides of the political divide.

Consider two of the more extreme possibilities:

* Either Bush is being entirely forthright, in which case he's talking about something reminiscent of the biggest liberal government programs of the 20th century. That scares some conservatives, certainly fiscal conservatives, to death.

* Or maybe it's just a plan to transform the Gulf Coast into a big test bed for conservative social policy, where tax breaks flow to big business and tax money flows to Halliburton, churches and private schools. That utterly terrifies liberals.