President Bush has been rightly lambasted by pundits left and right for his recent decision to slap tariffs on imported steel. I have just one small point to add before we all move on.

It seems clear from all the reporting that this decision came straight out of Karl Rove's political operation, and was made against the advice of the president's entire economic team. The interesting thing here, as we continue to marvel these days at the remarkable resilience of an American economy that seems to have produced the world's first recessionless recession, is that this kind of thing just never happened when Bill Clinton was in the White House. For all his faults (and they were legion), President Clinton made a firm decision to tie his entire political future to the long-term health of the economy, and even when his actions in this area were unpopular (jettisoning the middle class tax cut, bailing out Mexico), he stuck by that commitment. The current administration, on the other hand, made no such pledge, and has now shown itself willing to make bad economic decisions for short-term political gain.

I wonder if, after four or eight years of this sort of thinking, we'll still be marveling at the remarkable resilience of the American economy.
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