Bush's second term: our predictions revisited.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Follow-Up - George W. Bush

In February 2005, as President George W. Bush's second term began, reason asked "a variety of pundits, pols, and profs to tell us their biggest hopes and fears for the next four years." During the final days of the Bush administration in January, reason asked the same writers to revisit their predictions.

In 2005 one of the only optimists was American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray. "The task is to come up with a proposition that a large proportion of the electorate will hear and instinctively say, 'Damn right,'" Murray wrote. "To say that the money we spend on Social Security is for our own retirement and that we ought to have ownership over it sounds to me like the Damn Right proposition that could catalyze a political majority." Looking back at this statement, Murray now says: "Complications kill the power of even the best ideas. The Republicans before Bush did it with medical savings accounts, and Bush did it with privatization of Social Security: create a bill so bureaucratic, so studded with subsections and paragraphs and exclusions that it sounds just like every other government program, promising paperwork, bureaucracy, rules to trip you up, and no clear benefit at the end of it all."

Some fears went unrealized as well. Instapundit blogger and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds feared Bush would take the wrong lesson from his...