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Former President George H.W. Bush was elected into office on his famous promise of “read my lips: no new taxes”. It was a promise he would come to break and many attribute it to why he became a one-term president. As Sunday’s Meet the Press was nearing the end of its hour, NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell praised the former President for breaking his promise to the public and raising taxes.
“He broke the pledge in 1990. Four years later, Newt Gingrich is speaker of the House … It is the seminal moment, you could argue, in the shift of the Republican Party from where it was then to where it is today,” declared moderator Chuck Todd after playing the soundbite of the President making the promise in August of 1988.
Mitchell, a longtime Clinton fangirl, agreed wholeheartedly on the importance of that moment and suggested that “breaking that pledge showed the character and resolve of a man to do what he was persuaded was the right thing to do economically, even though he knew at the time that it might guarantee that he would be a one-term president.”
She followed that up by touting how Bush breaking that promise helped Bill Clinton politically by allowing him to get the credit for a booming economy:
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