Hack or Suck-up?

Smart politics or not, I'm giving Sen. Reid a lot of style points for saying what needed to be said: Alan Greenspan is a "partisan hack". But allow me to revise and extend those remarks.

Now, I don't have a problem with Greenspan getting involved in political matters — why shouldn't he? He's a public official, and he's called to testify all the time on political issues. If he says something that Democrats don't want to hear, well, so do a lot of people at government hearings organized by the GOP. And accusing Greenspan of impermissibly getting involved in partisan politics simply reinforces the conventional wisdom that he is an honest broker outside of the political sphere.

But he isn't. Under Bush, he has emerged as an unambiguous cheerleader for the president's "tax cut and spend" economic policies. His few cautions about the rising deficit don't seem to curb his appetite for additional tax cuts, even as his original surplus projections become more laughable.

My problem with Greenspan, however, involves more than his hackery — he's also clearly a big suck-up. There is no doubt he has much closer ideological ties to Bush than to Clinton, but Greenspan did help Clinton on a number of occasions, often pushing for policies he would later condemn under Bush. How he must have struggled during the 1990s trying to resolve these two conflicting impulses, and how comforted he must have been in 2001 when they came into perfect alignment.

So Reid is right — it's time to take the shine off this tarnished and tired politician.