'Wacky' charges nothing new to presidential debate.

FORMER Vermont Gov. Howard Dean may not yet be the frontrunner for his party s presidential nomination, but there's no denying that he thrills Democratic audiences with his rhetorical shellacking of the Bush administration.

The White House, he says, is filled with "right-wing wackos." Indeed, he goes on to say, the entire administration is "right-wing wacko" (adjectival form).

The claim is interesting for several reasons. An accusation of extremism, it seems, is a bit extreme itself. After all, "right-wing" is not a synonym for "conservative" any more than "left-wing" is the same as "liberal." The term is less a description than an epithet.

"Right-wing" implies someone not quite fit for polite company, a conservative who has let his political passions drive him out of the mainstream into the fever swamps. A right-winger is a conservative's crazy brother.

Dean isn't alone in making his accusation of right-wingery run amok. Many, if not most, Democratic activists seem to agree with him--Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, for example, and Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, who says unabashedly: "This is the most right-wing administration in modern history."

No kidding?

What would a genuinely right-wing administration look like?

For starters, you'd expect it to be openly hostile to the federal government, right?

"The Bush people adore big government!" says Veronique de Rugy, a fiscal policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, which is openly hostile to the federal government. "They spend taxpayer money like maniacs."

Under Bush, federal spending has increased more than 21 percent, de Rugy notes, citing data from the Congressional Budget Office. And the increases have come not only at the Pentagon, which hairy-chested right-wingers would instinctively lavish with cash. Non-defense discretionary spending has surged too, by 22 percent since 2001.

Among the big beneficiaries: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and especially the Department of Education, which enjoyed a nearly 60 percent boost in its budget, says de Rugy.

Less than a decade ago, you might recall, the Republican Party platform called for abolishing the department altogether. (Now there's a right-wing idea.) Bush by contrast has vastly increased the federal role in education. His education reform bill, cloyingly titled "No Child Left Behind" was co-written with the U.S. Senate's most famous liberal, Ted Kennedy.

It's true that Kennedy and other critics have since complained that Bush is under-funding his own reform. Sometimes a 60 percent increase just isn't enough, apparently. But the more telling point is that No Child Left Behind, the signature domestic initiative of Bush's presidency, explicitly rejects the preferred reforms of conservatives and right-wingers, particularly by disdaining school vouchers that would allow poor families to opt out of the public school system.

Having greatly expanded federal control of local education, Bush is busily doing the same in health care. If approved, his prescription drug Medicare benefit will be the single largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years. And his endorsement of a "mental health parity" mandate for private health insurance, requiring employers to cover mental health costs as they cover costs of physical illness, exceeds the reach even of Hillary Clinton's famously ambitious "Hillarycare."

Add to these Bush's farm bill, which will boost agricultural subsidies by $171 billion over l0 years and reverses the market reforms of the 1990s, and it's hard to see the work of small-government zealots in Bush domestic policy.

Can Bush's foreign policy, particularly the Iraq war, plausibly be called "right-wing" then? Perhaps. But Democrats should remember that fully half the candidates in their own presidential field, including first-rank contenders John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Gephardt and John Edwards, voted to authorize the war (though Dean has been an adamant opponent).

Based on a disinterested reading of the evidence, calling the Bush administration "rightwing" is, if you'll excuse the expression, wacko. Yet we've seen this type of hysteria before--in conservative Republicans.

Two years into the Clinton presidency, former Education Secretary William Bennett and former Rep. Jack Kemp announced that Bill Clinton had installed the "first frankly left-wing administration in history." In reality, Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland, presiding over welfare reform, a capital gains tax cut and the first balanced budget in 30 years.

Conservatives should have liked, or at least tolerated, Clinton the president; instead, Clinton the man drove them to extremes of vituperation and beyond. Bush, arguably the most liberal Republican president since Teddy Roosevelt (with Richard Nixon in the miming), has had the same irrational effect on his opponents. They must pretend the disapproval they feel for him is based on principle and policy rather than unthinking contempt.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.