““Obama was far more conservative than Richard Nixon, for example, and this has been the Democratic story since Boomers started voting en masse. The initial deregulatory impulse began under Carter, not Reagan; it was Clinton, not Bush I, who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and declared that the “era of big government is over”; it was Obama who made most of the Bush tax cuts permanent, and so on. But there have also been some odd spectacles on the Right: the provision of prescription drug benefits to seniors under Bush II (Medicare Part D; apparently the era of big government was not quite over), and substantial increases to Medicare and Social Security taxes under Reagan and that president’s decidedly statist salvation of the savings and loan industry. What accounts for these odd paradoxes? Shouldn’t Bush II have been the one taking an ax to welfare and Clinton been pushing Medicare Part D?””
