As people piled on Rush Limbaugh for hoping for Obama's failure, I couldn't help feeling a little guilt. Oh yeah, Rush is a sanctimoniuous, disgusting bastard, but I have to honestly admit that I really hoped Bush failed, too. I remember watching the stock market in the early days of the Bush admin., and I didn't own any stock. I just wanted to see it fall, because it meant Bush was failing. Yay! I think I can offer a decent explanation that may or may not exonerate Limbaugh as well.
I don't think that Republican ideology is correct. I think supply side economics is a load of crap. If Milton Friedman were alive, I would love to take his Nobel and smack him on the head with it. My fear was that GWB would luck into some success that would fool people into believing that supply side had merit. Then we'd be stuck with that garbage for a long time.
I think this is what Republicans fear.
And they have reason to fear. Because Keynesian economic approaches actually work. For all of their "free market" bluster, Republicans' laissez-faire approach only allows businesses to consolidate and operate as monopolies and oligopolies. It does not create anything like perfect copmetition or the nice economic outcomes that such competition would bring about. Regulated capitalism approximates competition and turns out to be the best we can do.
They refuse to believe this, and they are angry every single time that Republicans fail and Democrats succeed. And you hear Republicans trying to say that this is just bad luck. Or that Democrats are benefiting from some tax cut they passed 15 years earlier. It's garbage. But they believe it. And they fear that once again, a Democrat will luck into presiding over an economic boom while Republicans once again had the bad luck to preside over a sharp decline.
I have learned not to fear and not to have to wish for Republican failure. Such failure will happen because the policies are bad. Successes will come to us because our policies are good. If there are any other random blips, they will be short-lived.