It’s a logical fallacy to include McCain in there simply because he calls himself a fiscal conservative, to make the implicit suggestion that his presidency would beget a higher budget deficit. He has a 20-some year record of ACTUAL fiscal conservatism.

That said, onto the over-analysis of what is clearly satire:

Firstly, while I agree Clinton was fiscally quite conservative, I wonder if we can attribute the budget surplus entirely to his administration? I wonder what a graph of raw spending increase/rate of increase for the past 30 years would look like compared to a plotting of the size of the tax base. When Clinton was in office, we were kinda in the beginning stages of an economic boom, so it’s entirely conceivable that a large share of the credit goes to increased revenue resulting from increased real GDP simply outstripping the spending increases. I know you can argue that part of the reason for the increased revenue was the Clinton tax increases, but there are studies out there suggesting that the tax hikes represented a net loss both in terms of government tax revenue and later economic growth. It is also worth noting that the president does not in fact have the power to directly set budgeting policy. A president can’t really be given full blame/credit for the budgeting policies his concurrent congresscritters institute.

Bush Sr.’s economic policy actions I don’t know all that much about, so I can’t say whether he was truly a fiscal conservative or if that was only rhetoric. That said, like Clinton inherited a strong, recovering economy, Bush Sr. got a recession. Again, I’d be interested to compare spending to change in the tax base.

In closing, Clinton is A-OK in my book. He brought us spending reduction, NAFTA, the WTO, and bipartisan economic policy endorsement. And why the McCain hate? If Greenburg must take potshots at the man, at least make more honest ones than guilt-by-word-association implications.