Senior White House Adviser David Axelrod struck back at Karl Rove for his criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the deficit, slamming him for his “sheer audacity and shamelessness.”
Last week, The Washington Post invited several political operatives to offer their advice to the Democratic Party for 2010. Rove was asked to contribute, and offered this criticism: “They raised discretionary spending by 24 percent from President George W. Bush’s last full-year budget and will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years. ”
In an op-ed for the Post today, Axelrod responded, first getting personal:
Rove has some impressive campaign victories to his credit. But given the shape in which the last administration left this country, I’m not sure I would solicit his advice. And given the backhanded advice he offered, I’m not sure he was all that eager to help.
Axelrod continued that “of all the claims Rove made,” his comments about the deficit “in particular caught my eye for its sheer audacity and shamelessness.”
He then described how “the day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus — with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit — and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. ”
To put the “breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective,” said Axelrod, “the Bush administration’s swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined.”
He also pointed out that Rove “conveniently ignores” that it was President Bush who first signed the bank bailout into law, and that Obama is expected to cut the cost of that program by two-thirds.
Axelrod concludes: “There’s an old saying that everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts. The next time Karl Rove would like to offer us some advice, I’d urge him to take that to heart.”
