If the “mission accomplished” photo-op was the defining moment of the Bush administration's foreign policy, the president's recent visit to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, defined its energy policy. One week after he embraced alternative energy in his State of the Union address, Bush's budget axed 32 employees at the nation's premier alternative energy lab, a facility that developed key technologies for hybrid cars and photovoltaic cells. His political operatives didn't even know what they had done until a few hours before his visit, triggering a mad scramble to restore the jobs to avoid embarrassing the president.

Corporate America's ideological assault on government regulation has undermined middle America's understanding of why these rules exist in the first place. It is true that some regulations have lived past their prime, protecting monopolies and stifling innovation. But the free-market ideologues of our era were not content to adjust those regulations to accommodate new economic realities. Instead, they preferred wholesale deregulation. The results are predictable.