James Pinkerton, previously seen being a hack here, does it again:

Long before Dean became a short-lived presidential phenom, the Cato Institute had him pegged. The libertarian think tank released its “report card” on the nation’s 50 governors, giving the Vermont governor a “D”:

We’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. It wasn’t until Dean became a presidential phenom that Cato started flunking him. In 2000, Cato had written:

In some ways he is. [Vermont?s most fiscally conservative governor in decades.] In his first three terms as governor (Vermont still has two year terms), state spending rose by less than personal income growth. In 1999 he sought and won support for an across-the-board income tax cut to make the state more economically competitive.

By the same token, when Bush was busy “just being a governor” he didn’t earn much praise from the Cato folks:

He is a politician who seems to always want to keep everyone happy. His last budget climbed to growth rates not seen since Ann Richards: his last budget grew by close to 10 percent, among the largest increases in the nation in 1999. He shoveled a record $2.1 billion of new money into the Texas schools and then declared himself “the education governor.” In 1993 Bush crafted a convoluted tax-restructuring scheme that proved to be hugely unpopular with small businesspeople who would have seen their tax bills rise. The plan blew up, Bush was politically wounded, and finally he strategically retreated and signed a $1 billion property tax cut instead.

What else would you expect from a man (Pinkerton) who spent a column worrying about the reelection of Jean Chretien as Canadian PM months after Chretien had announced his retirement?