We've long observed that George W. Bush and his administration stand for a return to the most discredited of Republican economic and fiscal policies of the 1980s, as opposed to the successful New Democrat policies of the 1990s. But now it's also clear the president wants to return to the discredited Republican campaign tactics of the 1980s. Bush has all but abandoned any effort to defend his own record, much less offer a compelling agenda for the future. Barring any last-minute change in strategy, he is staking his case for re-election on simple and endless repetition of the charge that his opponent is a big-government, tax-and-spend, weak-on-defense Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!

The "big government" charge against Kerry is pretty rich coming from an incumbent whose party, which controls Washington top-to-bottom, is engaging in the worst orgy of runaway spending and deficit financing in the history of the Republic. The size of government, after declining during the Clinton years, is again on the rise. Washington is imposing unfunded mandates on state and local governments as fast as they can be devised. And worse yet, Bush's big-government Republicanism is being accompanied by a signal failure to address many of the great challenges facing the American people, from rising health care costs to global climate change to energy independence to economic globalization to the impending retirement of the baby boom generation.

But hypocrisy aside, the Bush-Cheney attack on Kerry's record and agenda is based largely on four deliberate smears:

• The claim that Kerry intends to raise taxes on middle-class families. That's true only if you think households with adjusted gross incomes over $200,000 are "middle-class." And even in the case of top earners, all Kerry is proposing is to return to the tax rates of the 1990s, when the American economy created more small businesses, and more millionaires -- not to mention the first mass upper-middle class in human history -- while lifting millions of families out of poverty. What's "liberal" about that?
• The claim that Kerry's health care plan involves a "government takeover" of our health care system. This claim, which we and virtually every independent analyst has refuted and mocked, is now being relentlessly repeated in a new batch of campaign ads for the incumbent.
• The claim that Kerry's record in the Senate has been hostile to national security, based on an incredibly selective interpretation of a handful of votes in the 1980s. Again, as we and others have pointed out, Kerry's votes to pare back certain weapons systems in the 1980s and early 1990s were completely in line with the views of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, and has nothing to do with today's national security threats, where Kerry is if anything tougher than the incumbent.
• The claim that Kerry is "the most liberal Senator," based on a deeply flawed one-year rating by the National Journal. We've rebutted that rating, and even National Journal itself concedes it's misleading, but that hasn't kept the president from repeating it four or five times a day.

We have no way of knowing exactly why the president's campaign has chosen the smear-and-label route, lowering the tone of the presidential contest and obliterating the real choice voters face. Perhaps they have become intoxicated with the idea that an "energized" conservative base can carry the president to victory without the messy inconvenience of appealing to persuadable voters. Maybe they believe there's simply no political cost associated with a purely negative campaign. Quite possibly, they think the only way the president can seize the political center that he's so conspicuously abandoned is by convincing voters his challenger is even more extreme. And there's no question this is an incumbent who wants voters to think about everything and anything other than the simple question of whether they are better off than they were the day George W. Bush was inaugurated.

But our guess is that it will take more than constant cries of Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! to distract voters from that question, and the obvious answer is not comforting to this embattled incumbent.