David Frum's Weird Attack on Larry Kudlow
October 15, 2008 10:28 AM ET
This following quote will surely make David "Axis of Evil" Frum shake his head in disbelief. "When it comes to the conservative base and economics," a White House political adviser told me recently, "the only two things that matter are the [Wall Street] Journal's editorial page and Larry Kudlow."
Frum, a conservative pundit and former Bush speechwriter, has leveled some pretty biting criticism at Kudlow (and like-thinking economic conservatives), without mentioning him by name. In a recent piece of commentary that basically adopts Barack Obama's stagnant-wages-and-rising-income-inequality critique of Bushonomics, Frum writes the following: "Even before the Wall Street crisis, the American economy had underperformed from the point of view of the average worker. While national output rose strongly, most of the gains went to the top five percent of households. Most Republicans have been unprepared to even acknowledge these facts, much less explain them. They insisted that the Bush economy was 'the greatest story never told.'"
"The greatest story never told." It's a fun catchphrase that I've heard Kudlow repeat on his CNBC show time and time again during 2006 and 2007. (Full disclosure: I am a frequent guest on Kudlow & Co. and a CNBC contributor.) Indeed, if you do a Google search on "greatest story never told" and "Bush economy," the first thing that comes up is an article written by Kudlow for National Review Online. If you attack that idea, it's clearly an attack on the expertise of America's leading conservative economic commentator.
It's also an attack on supply-side economics and the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003....
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