The Hoover Democrats?

Well, some on the far left are starting to call George W. Bush the next Herbert Hoover, but it's actually the Democrats who are looking more like the failed the thirty-first president, according to Lawrence Kudlow:

What exactly is wrong with an optimistic president who has confidence in the long-run future of the American economy?

President Bush took this stance in a recent interview with me and at the Economic Club of New York. He told me, "Like any free market, there's also downturns, and we're in one. But I am confident in the long-term strength of our economy."

Optimism, after all, is one of the few levers our chief executive can use every day. By remaining optimistic, Bush is borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan, and rejecting a whole book of malaise from Jimmy Carter.

Kudlow argues that Bush "will avoid anything that will doom future economic growth," and wants to let markets, not governments, sort things out:

And yet he's attacked for his free-market moorings. Liberal columnist Maureen Dowd says he's "plum loco." She and Sen. Charles Schumer call him the new Herbert Hoover.
But let's take a closer look.

It was Hoover who signed the Smoot-Hawley trade-protectionism act and overturned the Coolidge-Mellon tax cuts. These disastrous measures -- along with monetary contraction from a fledgling Federal Reserve -- turned a recession into a depression. FDR didn't help matters, either. His misbegotten tax hikes on successful earners and businesses, and his alphabet agencies to control the industrial and farming sectors, extended the depression and held unemployment near 20 percent.

Today, it's the Hill-Bama Democrats who want to raise taxes on successful producers. And they want to turn protectionist by reopening NAFTA and stopping any new open-trade treaties. Schumer himself has spent years bashing China, threatening the nation with huge tariffs if its currency policies don't conform to demands.

If anyone has resurrected the party of Hoover, it's today's Democrats. They've adopted pessimism as their national pastime, and want us to believe we're already in a long and deep recession.

Read the whole thing.

Kudlow lays out a bevy of upbeat economic statistics that the doom-and-gloom (Hoover) Democrats and their radical allies are ignoring, and he also shows how competitive GOP nominee is against either of Democratic contenders.

The implications: Once again, "Democrats Have No Slam Dunk in '08."