Obama has preserved a striking number of his predecessor's policies, Bush Republicans say. Why Obama can't shake Bush

Tuesday’s deal to extend the deep 2001 tax cuts is the latest evidence of the remarkable durability of President George W. Bush’s policy legacy — one that constrains and confounds his successor at home and overseas even after two years in office.

The tax cuts were probably Bush’s single most significant domestic accomplishment, and they became not just a spur for Democratic complaints about growing deficits, but a symbol of — as candidate Barack Obama put it — “that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.” (See: The risky politics of taxing the rich)


Obama’s promise to reverse the tax cuts reflected a broader belief among Democrats that the Bush years were a bizarre and in essential ways illegitimate aberration, a period of panic and greed the errors of which Obama would reverse in a series of swift and decisive strokes.

Yet the tax compromise is just the most spectacular — and to Democrats, infuriating — element of a broader trend under a president who ran as the leader of the counter-revolution. It is the domestic counterpart of Obama’s early decision not to repudiate and investigate reviled Bush national security policies such as indefinite detention and warrantless wiretapping, but to refine and embrace them.

Obama has promised to refight and win the tax debate two years from now. But his compromise this week with Republicans has altered the political and policy balance of power.

By 2012, it will be much harder to argue that a change in rates on the wealthy is simply a matter of reversing an unwise Bush-era decision, rather than imposing a new tax increase. Those rates will have been in place for more than a decade. And they have now been ratified — however reluctantly — by a Democratic president, and a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. (See: Questions for Obama: Why a tax deal?)

Just as Afghanistan is no longer “Bush’s war,” but one on which Obama holds joint title and for which he must bear the political and moral consequences.

Obama is hearing howls from liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill — protests that some in the West Wing do not especially mind, since they advance the president’s aim to be perceived as an independent leader rather than merely the face of his party in Washington. But no Democratic president, even one who might wish to triangulate, wants to hear gloating compliments from the likes of Karl Rove.

“The fact that these have been identified as right policies by an administration that has [had] a knee-jerk response that if Bush promulgated it, we have to be against it — it’s a recognition of how sound these policies are and how necessary they are,” Rove said, in a POLITICO interview. (See: Rove on '12: 'There's no front-runner')

“There is some continuity that must give them indigestion in the West Wing, if they acknowledge it,” Rove said.

These perceptions were one reason Obama took such pains to explain himself at a Tuesday news conference, pleading for patience and understanding of his limited options and revealing his frustration at how he is portrayed. (See: Obama takes on deal's Dem critics)

Obama had to defend his judgment — why he struck the tax deal he did — and also his character — whether, as one questioner taunted, he had “core values” that he is willing to “go to the mat” to defend.

In many respects, the accusations are unfair. Obama is reviled by conservatives for a reason, and it is not because he is merely an extension of the Bush years. At the news conference, he cited his success in passing health care reform, “something Democrats have been fighting for for a hundred years.”

He also pleaded with his supporters to recognize that changing policy is a years-long project.

“At any given juncture, there are going to be times where my preferred option, what I'm absolutely positive is right, I can't get done,” Obama said. “And so then my question is, does it make sense for me to tack a little bit this way or tack a little bit that way? Because I'm keeping my eye on the long term and the long fight; not my day-to-day news cycle but where am I going over the long term?” (See: Obama: 'The right thing to do')

But Bush Republicans said it is striking how much Bush’s policies have been preserved.

“Given the big win that President Obama had in the 2008 and the size of the Democrat majorities, it is very surprising that so many core Bush initiatives have remained in place,” said former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer Tuesday, citing warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, Predator drone strikes and the Guantanamo Bay detention center, as well as the extended tax cuts.

“That’s one of the reasons why so many Democrats are so distraught over this compromise,” he said. “This was President Bush’s singular domestic achievement.” (See: For W.H., upside in fighting Hill Dems)

Obama emphasized that he gave up the fight over tax rates on the rich only to ensure that tax rates did not rise for everyone at the new year — as the Bush tax cuts were set to expire across the board — and in exchange for valuable concessions from Republicans, such as an extension of unemployment benefits.

He said “tax cuts for the wealthy” are the Republican Party’s “Holy Grail.” (Join the debate: Obama: George W. Bush's third term?)

But Obama’s decision vindicated many people on both sides of the 2001 tax cut debate. Conservatives hoped and liberals warned that the lower rates on the rich would be hard to reverse.

Passage of the tax cuts was not just President Bush’s first major domestic policy accomplishment. It marked the end of any hope of a bipartisan beginning to the new Bush administration. The White House and a Republican Congress chose to ram the bill through the Senate via reconciliation, over fierce Democratic opposition. (The bill did ultimately get, though it didn’t need, the support of about a quarter of the Democrats in the Senate.)

“Need I point out that absolutely nobody who supports this tax bill thinks of it as a temporary measure, to be canceled at the end of nine years?” wrote Times columnist Paul Krugman at the time, calling it “white-collar crime, pure and simple” and suggesting that legislators who voted for it be sent “to a minimum-security installation somewhere unpleasant.” (See: Poll: Most urge end of tax cuts for rich)

Krugman is no happier now, lashing Obama’s compromise in recent columns. He wrote this week: "Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction."

“My guess is that that they figured, once they get these cuts in place, it would be very hard for any future Congress to roll them back,” said former Democratic Rep. Martin Frost. “I think this was cynical on their part. They knew that they were doing.”

“I had a certain optimism” about the tax cuts' renewal, Rove confirmed. “The original thinking was that it’s so important to get done, and we have faith that after 10 years it will get extended — because it had merit, and because the politics would give it a boost.”

Rove said Obama had departed most sharply from Bush in health care and environmental policy, and said the broadest continuity has been in the area of national security policy, where Obama has continued Bush policies in high-profile ways, like stepping up the war in Afghanistan, and quieter ones, like maintaining tight and useful relations with the undemocratic Gulf States.

Education policy, another Bush-era lightning rod, has also remained more constant than some expected.

“They may talk about changes but essentially we’ve got the same policy in place,” Rove said.

And when it comes to taxes, what was controversial is now a familiar feature of the American landscape.

“We proposed them, now five successive Congresses have confirmed them,” said another former Bush aide, Tony Fratto, of the tax law. “Any one of those Congresses could have changed the law and they didn’t. It’s just existing tax policy."

Byron Tau contributed to this story.