The Big Lie

In his column today, Jonah Goldberg confronts the perhaps the biggest lie the Obama campaign has been attempting to peddle:

“After all that we’ve been through, I don’t believe that rolling back regulations on Wall Street will help the small businesswoman expand or the laid-off construction worker keep his home,” [Obama] explained to a enraptured crowd. “We have been there, we’ve tried that, and we’re not going back.” 

This is an appeal to the mythology of the Bush years as some kind of anarcho-capitalist dystopia in which “market fundamentalism” reigned and Republicans tried to shrink government to the point where “we can drown it in the bathtub” (to quote anti-tax activist Grover Norquist). 

This was always a bizarre liberal hallucination. Government grew massively under President Bush. He was a bigger spender than any previous president going back to Lyndon Johnson. He massively expanded entitlements, grew food-stamp enrollment (almost as much as Obama did) and nearly doubled “investments” in education. He created a new Cabinet agency — Homeland Security — and signed into law sweeping new regulations, like No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, and McCain-Feingold.
This, according to Democrats, amounts to telling Americans “you’re on your own.”

I always wonder why Mitt Romney has said next to nothing about confronting this fairy tale (Paul Ryan has implied arguments against it in certain speeches).  Simply knowing you have the better argument doesn't guarantee anything in politics.