WASHINGTON Even supporters bash Bush spending

Economic conservatives could turn against the president on election day.
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
WASHINGTON -- President Bush likes to portray himself as a fiscal conservative.
"We passed much-needed budget agreements to maintain spending discipline," he says, referring to his record during three years in the White House.
This is a standard part of Bush's political stump speech, which he now delivers once or twice a week at campaign fund-raisers around the country. Aides say it reflects one of the themes the president will use in his bid for re-election in 2004.
Last week Bush also pledged to cut the projected $500 billion deficit in half over the next five years.
Yet even some of the president's most ardent admirers point out that Bush is campaigning like a conservative Republican but spending taxpayer money as if he were a liberal Democrat.
Under Bush, federal government spending has increased an average of 7.6 percent a year, or about twice the annual rate of growth under President Clinton. Brian M. Riedl, federal budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says federal spending now exceeds $20,000 per American household for the first time since World War II.
Harsh words
"We have been fiscally irresponsible," says Florida's Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., a Bush supporter who is one of the most outspoken critics of the president's spending record. With Republicans attacking Bush on the spending issue, Democrats are sure to do the same.
"Long-term economic growth ... requires fiscal discipline," Democratic front-runner Howard Dean said in an official campaign policy statement. As a former governor of Vermont, Dean earned a reputation as a budget-cutter.
"The federal budget deficit soars out of control, with no relief in sight," the policy statement adds. "The Bush Administration philosophy has become 'borrow and spend' and let our children and grandchildren pick up the pieces."
Officially, Bush's re-election campaign has not yet started. But his fund-raising efforts so far have yielded more than $100 million, or more than half of the $170 million he plans to spend to get re-elected.
Bush is expected to formally lay out his argument for a second term during his State of the Union speech in January.
Cause for worry
Feeney said Bush's success in Iraq and the stimulative impact of his tax cuts on the economy will "give him some cover" against those who accuse him of a lack of fiscal discipline, but he fears some voters disappointed by his lack of fiscal responsibility will stay home Election Day.
"Bush and his aides should be worried about the possibility that libertarians, economic conservatives and fed-up taxpayers won't be in his corner in 2004 in the same numbers as 2000," says David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute.
Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says many GOP fiscal conservatives in Congress supported Bush's early tax cuts, but now are beginning to revolt because Bush has not trimmed government spending, even though he has cut revenue.
Ornstein said GOP critics of Bush's spending "came within an eyelash" of defeating the $400-billion Medicare bill that Bush signed into law earlier this week. Education spending surged by 78 percent, largely as a result of Bush's No-Child-Left-Behind Act.
Spending for health programs other than Medicare and Medicaid rose 81 percent. The biggest contributor to that jump was an expansion of the National Institutes of Health's annual budget from $14-billion to $23-billion.
Agriculture spending increased by 76 percent to $23 billion, in large part because of the budget-busting 2002 farm bill, which Bush signed into law.
Pending bills
Congressional critics of Bush's spending also have been fighting two pending bills: the fiscal 2004 omnibus spending bill and the energy legislation.
Meanwhile, the president says he has not abandoned the goal of restraining federal spending. Last May, he said his duty was to "send clear priorities to say to the Congress, here are the guidelines, here's what we expect you to honor and that is, in this case, no more than 4 percent increase in discretionary spending."
Yet Bush has never vetoed any spending legislation, nor is he expected to. "President Bush has yet to meet a spending bill he doesn't like," a Wall Street Journal editorial recently observed.
Analysts say one reason Bush has strayed from his fiscal conservatism is obvious: programs such as the $400-billion Medicare prescription drug benefit can help him win re-election.