David Axelrod Fires Back at Karl Rove on Deficits

In an op-ed in Friday's Washington Post, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod slammed Karl Rove for a brief Post item last Sunday in which Rove said the Obama administration will "run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years." Responding to the back-handed "advice" Rove was giving Democrats for the 2010 election, Axelrod wrote that "given the shape in which the last administration left this country, I'm not sure I would solicit [Rove's] advice."
Axelrod specifically took issue with Rove's charge that the Obama administration's deficit spending will vastly outpace that of his predecessor in short order. "The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion," Axelrod wrote. "When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade."

Axelrod also blames the Bush White House for the conditions that required Obama to come out of the box with massive spending projects, adding that the current administration's moves have made the country's economic situation less severe. "Despite Rove's assertion, it is widely accepted that the difficult but necessary steps Obama took have helped save our economy from an even deeper disaster. And while Rove conveniently ignores that it was President Bush -- not Obama -- who signed into law the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout for banks, the Obama administration's rigorous stewardship added transparency and accountability that have cut the expected cost of that program by two-thirds."

"There's an old saying that everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts," Axelrod concludes. "The next time Karl Rove would like to offer us some advice, I'd urge him to take that to heart."