Romney’s team starts to look like Bush’s

[Geee]

Washington Times:

Ed Gillespie served as President George W. Bush’s right-hand man and now is a top political adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

R. Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiwled Mr. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Now they are Mr. Romney’s economic brain trusts.

The same can be said for his foreign policy team, where Mr. Romney boasts a number of faces from the Bush old guard, including former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Today, they are the former Massachusetts governor’s go-to guys on counterterrorism.

Mr. Romney’s corps of advisers, in fact, is heavily salted with figures who surrounded the 43rd president as he watched over massive increases in federal spending, the creation of more government programs and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the nation-building efforts that followed.

These moves helped give life to the tea party movement’s battle cry of limited government that has reshaped the political landscape.

 

The choices threaten to complicate Mr. Romney’s vow on the campaign trail to lead the nation on “a different course, a new course unlike any of our past,” and appear to play into the message that President Obama is touting on the stump: that Mr. Romney wants to drag the nation back to the era of deregulation and trickle-down economic thinking that sparked the financial crises in the first place.

“There are a couple of new faces, but not nearly as many as there should be,” Republican strategist Michael McKenna said. “The terrible thing is that [Mr. Romney] is helping Obama make his case: ‘Hey, we are going back to the Bush administration.’ “