As Fred Barnes points out elsewhere in this issue, when George W. Bush accused his fellow Republicans in Congress of "balancing their budget on the backs of the poor," what stung wasn't the jab but the rhetoric: "These are liberal buzz words." And how.
The backs-of-the-poor coinage no doubt predates the Lexis-Nexis era -- which contains cites as far back as a New York Times editorial denouncing that state's Republican lawmakers on May 27, 1971. It seems to have been over the years a favorite not just of liberals attacking conservatives, but of left-wing Democrats attacking other members of their party for being insufficiently pure.
For example, at a confab celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Americans for Democratic Action on May 7, 1977, Sen. George McGovern (ADA, McGovern . . . how's that for an intellectual pedigree!) excoriated the newly elected President Jimmy Carter for trying, yes, to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the hungry and the jobless."
It gets better. A Nov. 7, 1977, Newsweek article with the prescient title "Is America Turning Right?" recounts how an ex-aide to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis (who embodied a movement called the New Pragmatism, according to Newsweek) had assailed Dukakis for "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor." The ex-aide's name? Barney Frank. Dukakis must have taken the future congressman's criticism to heart; in 1988, he claimed that voters should choose him and not George Bush for president, because a Dukakis administration would never "balance the budget on the backs of the poor."
But THE SCRAPBOOK shouldn't be too hard on George W. Bush. Way back on Feb. 21, 1980, during the second set of debates before the Republican primary in New Hampshire (the ones sponsored by the League of Women Voters, not the famous "I paid for this microphone" evening in Nashua dominated by Ronald Reagan) the unforgettable congressman from Rockford, Ill., John Anderson, thoughtfully intoned: "I certainly will not balance the budget on the backs of the poor."
So say what you will about George W. Bush. He may have been rhetorically tone deaf on this occasion, but it's not like he's the only Republican who's ever uttered the words.