Keith Hennessey

My first instinct is to treat this as what it is: a ridiculously transparent political piece that has no business on hacker news.

However, since I see these things coming up all the time, and there doesn't seem to be any great movement against them, I'm going to attempt an intelligent response.

First, as said already below, this graph compares eight years of the Bush administration to three years of the Obama administration "projected" into 2017. To anyone familiar with Washington projections, not only are they usually embarrassingly inaccurate, but they are also based on rosy assumptions. See the recent healthcare projections as an example: I don't have enough time to go into detail, but because of the way the CBO operates, their forecasts are constrained by what is actually in the bill versus what they think will happen. Simply put, if the bill says that it will reduce the deficit, then they have to put those assumptions into their forecast even if they don't think that it will come to pass.

Second, the graph seems to ignore the fact that Obama is not powerless in the face of Bush spending priorities.

A couple of examples: True, Bush started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the "surge" in Afghanistan was all Obama's idea, and it was also his idea to keep troops in Iraq for several years into his first term.

Also, the "Bush" tax cuts are essentially now the "Bush-Obama" tax cuts, because as of recently, the bill has Obama's ink all over it. He certainly…

I also discuss how many feel that George W. Bush was dysrationalic.

No, he outright makes that "diagnosis" of the former president, going so far as to title the chapter 1 "teaser" of his book "Inside George W. Bush's Mind". It's available here:

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf

Maybe he's being cagey about it because his "evidence" is incredibly weak sauce. He expects most of the audience for his book to nod along when he describes a guy who managed to achieve the highest political office in an incredibly competitive environment as unable to make rational decisions. He cites for his analysis of GWB's cognitive function a whole two people.

First, there's David Frum[1], who served as a speechwriter for 13 months from early 2001 to early 2002. Before that he had "no connection to the campaign or the Bush family". He's used that stint to great career effect, but seriously, there are a lot of folks who worked more closely with Bush for a longer period of time and have written about his thought and leadership style. Surely if Stanovich wasn't just looking for a good "hook" to snare his liberal readership, he could have found better sources, critical and otherwise[2]. Oh, and Frum was a huge initial supporter of the Iraq invasion, and obviously Stanovich or his imagined readership wouldn't dream of calling that a clearly irrational decision.

Second, there's a bit from a George Will column. The section in italics was strangely omitted by…

I am not sure about Boris, but I am 100% certain that the narrative about Trump playing 4D chess is bullshit.

I believe that George Bush may have had a persona to some degree (https://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/) because it pays off to speak like a man of the people. But everyone who's worked with Donald Trump and spoken out afterwards tell the same story about how utterly stupid he is.

In Denmark, we once elected a comedian into parliament. He won on promises like "more sunshine" and "bigger christmas presents". People loved it because it was fun and a bit of a finger to the boring, smooth politicians that they usually saw. I guess you could argue that he is smart in that he was able to win the crowd, but what I take away from that is more that the crowd is fickle and will go with (and push) a trend or a fad if it looks fun or supports their anger.

It's 2700 pages long, prior to maybe been amended by the Senate in reconciliation.

There will be plain English explanations forthcoming now that there's final stuff that's been voted on (what happens with reconciliation is TBD), but they'll necessarily be long. And it'll take a while to come up with them.

But don't worry, this issue will now suck most of the nation's political oxygen for this year and probably through 2013 and perhaps beyond. You'll be hearing all about it.

For now, I'd recommend checking out Keith Hennessey's blog, he's pretty good at this sort of thing: http://keithhennessey.com/

E.g. here's a good item on the reconciliation bill as of the 18th: http://keithhennessey.com/2010/03/18/understanding-health-bill-two/

> They already do, of course. Heard of the WTO?

It's unclear that the WTO hasn't passed its peak of "good". There hasn't been much progress since 2006 and the recent G-20 meeting abandoned the term "free markets" as a goal.

Note the backslide from paragraph 12 from http://keithhennessey.com/wp-content/uploads/files/Summit%20-%20Leaders%20Declaration.pdf to paragraph 3 from http://www.g20.org/Documents/g20_communique_020409.pdf .

I'm perfectly willing to blame the US for that change (even though it's not the only one pushing that direction) - my point is that the smashing success is likely a thing of the past.

<some counted him (GWB) as one of the least-talented (intellectually) Presidents the U.S. has ever seated>

That's the popular media and pop-culture narrative, but it just wasn't true. Read firsthand accounts from non-media policy experts who were there, for example...
http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

Similarly, Eisenhower and Reagan were portrayed as a dottering grandfatherly types disinterested in policy during their tenure, but honest historians later gave them their due.