Out of change: how Bush squandered the money needed to reform government.

• Author: Reed, Bruce
• Position: On Political Books

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Karl Rove must be hard at work coming up with a slogan for Bush's reelection campaign. My current favorites are "Four more wars!" and "No new quagmires!" But there's one Bush slogan from 2000 that we are sure not to hear again in 2004: "Reformer with results"

Back then, the Bush campaign worked overtime to tout Bush's reform credentials. He promised to transform the education system, modernize Social Security and Medicare, and change the way Republicans treat the poor. Bush aides talked admiringly of Bill Clintons "Third Way," and promised a compassionate, conservative "Fourth Way" of their own.

Maybe they meant to say "fourth down," because whenever the future of reform is at stake, the Bush White House has punted. Instead of providing the muscle to make education reform work--more and better teachers, universal after-school programs and summer school in poor districts, and the resources not only to test students but also to help them succeed--all Bush has given the education system is an easy excuse to set the standards movement back decades. His new war on poverty turned out to be an IRS crackdown to make it tougher for the working poor to receive the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

The real tragedy of this Bush presidency, however, is not just that he went soft on reform, but that he squandered the secret ingredient that makes bold reform possible: money. The reason that Third Way reforms have worked in the United States and Britain, and why the Fourth Way never made it out of Austin, is that Clinton and Blair understood from the outset that it costs more to change the system than to maintain the status quo. Without additional resources, bureaucracies always find a way around real reform, and politicians inevitably lose the nerve to support change. Put real money behind reforms that the public supports, and opposition from even the most entrenched bureaucracies and interest groups doesn't stand a chance.

Unfortunately, real money is what Bush has misplaced over the past three years. He turned a $5 trillion projected surplus into a $5 trillion projected deficit. With a trillion dollars in deficits in a single term, Bush has done what baseball owners do best--lose money.

Conservatives who used to rail against much smaller deficits now console themselves with the fantasy that the country will soon run so deep in...