I wrote
about TAS alumni Phil Klein’s new
Mitt Romney ebook on the main site. One point I didn’t get to
bring up was Phil’s rebuttal to a popular big-government
conservative argument: that the Medicare prescription drug benefit
and No Child Left Behind got George W. Bush reelected, and
therefore we have those expansions of government to thank for John
Roberts and Sam Alito. (Of course, without conservative pressure we
might have ended up with Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers, but be
that as it may.)
Phil writes:
Despite the passage of No Child Left Behind and the Medicare
prescription drug bill, Bush actually did worse among voters who
considered education and health care their most important issues in
his 2004 reelection campaign than he did in his 2000 run. According
to CNN exit polls, those voters who identified education as the
issue that “mattered most,” favored Al Gore over Bush by a spread
of 52 percent to 44 percent. Yet four years later, John Kerry
trounced President Bush among voters who thought education was most
important, by a margin of 73 percent to 26 percent. Similarly, in
2000, Gore had a 64 percent to 33 percent advantage among health
care voters; in 2004 Kerry was favored by a margin of 77 percent to
23 percent. Keep in mind, this was even though Bush’s overall
percentage of the popular vote increased in 2004.
It’s not even clear that Medicare Part D was the chief reason
for Bush’s gains among senior citizens. As Phil points out in his
ebook, 21 percent of seniors cited moral values as their top issue
and another 19 percent picked terrorism. Only 12 percent named
controlling health care costs.
