Last Thursday Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the chairman of the budget committee, went out of his way to emphasize that he is all in favor of short-term stimulus. He used the occasion of a hearing to draw attention to the $60 billion tax cut that he advocated for this year -- a stimulus larger than the $38 billion that the administration is actually sending out in rebate checks. But Conrad also preached the importance of restraint in the long term, pointing out that the total tax cut he advocated between now and 2011 was only half the size of the one [Bush] eventually rammed through Congress. It was this long-term profligacy more than the immediate prospect of Social Security being "raided" that Conrad primarily attacked.

Conrad's focus on the long-run weakness of Bush's fiscal policy echoed an earlier news conference given by [Dick Gephardt], the Democratic leader in the House. Gephardt was careful to call this year's budget "properly stimulative," and he reserved his criticisms for the impact of future Bush tax cuts on long-term interest rates. In the 1990s, he said, Democrats resolved that "we would stop crowding out private borrowing, and we would get interest rates and capital markets where they needed to be." It was a riff of which Robert Rubin, [Bill Clinton]'s Mr. Wall Street, might have felt proud.