Dick Cheney:
[Obama's] overall approach to expanding the size of government, expanding the deficit, and giving more and more authority and power to the government over the private sector those are all weaknesses, as I look at Barack Obama. And I think he’ll be a one term President.
I recall the Bush-Cheney administration also came under criticism for “expanding the size of government, expanding the deficit, and giving more and more authority and power to the government,” and it didn’t prevent him from being reelected.
What simply staggers me is that this cannot be amnesia, merely denial. Cheney famously believed deficits don't matter. Under his watch, federal spending boomed, two wars were put off-budget, a massive new Medicare entitlement was passed with no funding, taxes were slashed regardless of the fiscal impact, and the president declared himself able to capture, detain and torture any individual on the planet. Under Cheney, the sheer power of government - both in size and, more specifically in its authoritarian reach - grew exponentially.