E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Michele Bachmann Makes Dubya Look Good

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/michele_bachmann_makes_george_w_bush_look_good_20110616/

Michele Bachmann Makes Dubya Look Good

Posted on Jun 16, 2011

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

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The 2012 GOP presidential field on display Monday offered not one idea about how to solve a problem facing our country that didn’t boil down to cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government.

The big winner of the debate was Rep. Michele Bachmann, partly because she went in with a strategy and executed it, partly because she had a stage presence honed by hundreds of television appearances, and partly because she didn’t seem crazily extreme, which is what you would conclude from her many outrageous statements in the past.

But she looked almost conventional only because the rest of the Republican Party has veered so far right that it has caught up with her. In the current GOP, she is the mainstream—and that ought to petrify more reasonable Republicans. Even Bachmann’s astonishing call to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency (created under the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon) passed without a challenge from her rivals.

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In particular, the war in Iraq was undertaken before we had settled the war in Afghanistan. Bush and his advisers did not think through the costs or the consequences of running two wars simultaneously. We are living with the terrible aftermath of these choices now, and Americans of all political stripes are understandably exhausted.

That’s why Bush nostalgia only takes you so far. The 43rd president, who might have given life to a constructive sort of moderate conservatism, instead unleashed the tea party furies that now engulf the Republican Party and threaten to turn Michele Bachmann, of all people, into a political giant.