9/15/00 10:40 a.m.
Al Gore Is Not Bill Clinton
Bush's campaign team is pounding the wrong message.

By Stephen Moore, NR contributing editor

ho have been the greatest U.S. presidents? Ask an historian and you'll find that whichever presidents grew the government the most (Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, for example), tend to be the most highly rated.

But we economists have a different measure of success. We look at which presidents had the best track record at generating prosperity, jobs, and income growth. An NR reader recently sent me an index devised by Harvard University and Hoover Institute economist Robert Barro, which uses an objective measurement, "The Barro Misery Index," to rank post World War II presidents on the economy. He examines the change in four economic statistics from the start to the end of a president's term. The statistics are the inflation rate, the unemployment rate, the GDP growth rate, and interest rates.

Barro's findings are worth exploring. Conservatives will be cheered to learn that Reagan ranks first on the list. But here's what's likely to make my Republican friends groan: Clinton ranks a strong second. Barro explains this apparent paradox by noting: "When it comes to growth, Clinton's good policies — such as free trade, welfare reform, spending restraint, and stable monetary policy — outweighed his bad policies. Some of them are: the income-tax-rate increase, minimum-wage hike, family-leave regulation, and overzealous antitrust enforcement." NR's Larry Kudlow has made this point repeatedly over the last four years as well.

Barro's index underscore the folly of the GOP strategy of running against Clinton in this year's election. The key to winning for George W. Bush is to separate Clinton's policies from those of Gore. Gore is more liberal across the board. Clinton is genuinely a new Democrat. Gore is not. Gore is economically risky. Look at all of Clinton's policy successes. First, free trade. Gore says that he wants a union dictated "fair trade" policy, not a free-trade policy. Second, welfare reform. Gore's nanny-state proposals for free health care, child care, preschool, etc., would resurrect the old morally decrepit welfare state under a different name. His goal is much the same as the Great Society: to place the state in the role of surrogate father breadwinner. We have 25 years of evidence that that's a prescription for socio-economic disaster. Third, on spending restraint, Gore has proposed about $1.6 trillion in new spending over the next decade. He's a big spender par-excellence.

Gore would also perpetuate Clinton's economically debilitating policies. He's for a higher minimum wage; he's against tax cuts and would veto death-tax elimination; he wants paid family leave, and he wants to hike the budget for the Justice Department trustbusters.

So if the Austin powers are listening, my message is this: Start pounding Gore-Lieberman for lurching the party back to the loony Left. Bush should debate Al Gore dozens of times before the elections. Every time the veep opens his mouth he utters some new scheme to grow the government and undermine individual liberties. That's an act that wears thin over time.

I'm a fan of Dick Cheney's but he said something at the Republican convention that explains why the GOP ticket has lost 15 points in the polls in the last 3 and ½ weeks. He said: "Does anyone really think that the next 4 years under Gore would be any different from the last 8 years [under Clinton]?" If Americans conclude on Election Day that Gore would govern just like Clinton, the election is lost — for the Republicans. The message of the Barro index is that the only way for Bush-Cheney to win is to convince voters that four years of Al Gore would be nothing at all like the last eight years.