Politics & Power Quote by Wayne Allard

The move here is surgical: Wayne Allard reaches back to the instant of succession and rewrites the starting line. By framing George W. Bush as an inheritor of decline, he’s not arguing policy so much as laundering responsibility. “I think back” signals a performance of fairness and memory, as if the verdict is simply what any reasonable observer would recall. It’s a soft-focus preamble that masks a hard political job: assign blame upstream.

The subtext is defensive triage. If the economy is “going down” at the moment Bush takes office, then whatever follows becomes less an indictment of the new administration and more an unavoidable continuation of a trend. That’s why the phrasing stays blunt and repetitive: “going down… not doing well.” It’s built for soundbite gravity, not empirical precision. Specific numbers would invite counter-numbers; vagueness invites assent.

Context matters because this is a familiar Washington ritual: the outgoing party gets the credit for the peak, the incoming party gets handed the downturn. Allard’s line also trades on the public’s hazy timelines about economic cycles. Recessions don’t obey election calendars, but political narratives pretend they do, because voters often experience “the economy” as mood rather than data.

There’s an implied moral ledger here, too. Clinton-era prosperity is quietly downgraded to a mirage that was already collapsing, which helps neutralize nostalgia and insulate Bush from comparisons. It’s less a statement about macroeconomics than an argument about who deserves to be blamed, and who deserves to be forgiven.