It seems almost quaint, in retrospect.
President Bill Clinton, 1996: "The era of big government is over."
With this dramatic pronouncement, Clinton anchored his presidency to former President Ronald Reagan's legacy of small government economic conservatism. It was an emblem of his desire to be a "new Democrat" - not a liberal but a moderate who saw wisdom in the fiscal conservative's creed of low taxes, low government spending and financial deregulation.
Clinton was shrewd enough to recognize that Reagan had cast the political climate during his tenure a decade previously, and he would not have permitted a more leftist economic agenda of government spending and financial oversight.
As the only president in modern history to balance the budget, Clinton deserves enormous credit for beating the Republicans at their own game.
Unfortunately for Sen. John McCain, it's a game nobody seems to be playing anymore.
In the wake of the recent bipartisan bailout package, a federal buyout of the world's largest insurance company and a huge chunk of the U.S. financial sector, the argument against big government has never seemed more impotent.
When a government turns private assets into public assets, America calls it a bailout. The rest of the world calls it socialism.
This extraordinary government intrusion into the free market was engineered by a Republican administration because there simply was no other option. Wall Street was poised on the brink of collapse. To let the market proceed unfettered and uninsured was to invite financial Armageddon.
My one consolation, morbid as it may be, is that the Bush administration has lived to reap the tragedies sown by its own party's preference for dogma over practicality. The chickens are coming home to roost, and it couldn't have happened to a more appropriate group of ideologues.
I cannot heap enough disgrace on these folly disciples of capitalism-run-amok. They told us the market would regulate itself. They told us government was the problem, not the solution. They told us oversight was an impediment to profit, not a safeguard against disaster.
They convinced us to remove the bumpers, and they threw the ball right into the gutter.
The repudiation of conservative economics could not be clearer: a problem caused by a lack of financial regulation was solved with a "big government" nationalization of private assets. It amounts to a perfect storm that robs Republicans of their most valuable economic mantras in an election year focused on the economy.
This identity crisis is painfully evident in McCain's bumbling response to the recent upheaval: from "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" to "the fundamentals of our economy are at risk;" from conservative scourge of spending to big government bailout supporter.
His answers are inconsistent because he doesn't know how to react when the solution contradicts everything he has ever practiced or preached about economics.
For his part, Sen. Barack Obama has not fully stepped in to fill the vacuum of ideas left by McCain and Republicans. He can and should say more about solutions and a plan for economic recovery, but his sense of political caution prevents him from being too strident before the election.
Reagan's spectre still clings to American politics.
Despite his low profile through much of the crisis, Obama is not tainted by decades of devotion to the ideology that dropped us in the pit to begin with.
We know exactly which party's fault this is. John McCain is toast.
Jake Miller is a political science and anthropology senior. His column appears on Fridays.
