“This deal was too mischievously done. It is oozing problems, as reporters daily uncover its details. We do not gainsay the fact that the U.S. economic situation is not healthy. And we really do sympathize with the desire to support a President who may soon face a war. But the President, his economic advisers and his congressional counterparts have painted themselves into a dangerous corner, raising taxes on the brink of recession and stoking the public’s already growing cynicism about whether their votes count for anything in the political process. Two hundred years after the Founders met in Mr. Franklin’s Philadelphia, there is no excuse for concocting such a deal in secret sessions, and presenting it to voters as a ‘bipartisan’ agreement in which they have no effective say. Americans repudiated that method of levying taxes many years ago.”

* * *

Those were the concluding sentences of one of the most famous editorials of the past generation. It ran in the Wall Street Journal on October 4, 1990, as Congress was preparing to vote on the budget deal in which President George H.W. Bush broke his promise — “read my lips” — that he would agree to no new taxes. The editors of the Journal ran the editorial out under the headline “‘Political Reality.’” The majority leader in the upper chamber, Senator Mitchell, tried to palm off the deal with Mr. Bush by saying, “when the President asked us to join in rewriting his budget, we agreed because the nation is more important than partisan differences.” The Journal issued its retort, “Nobody here but us Remocrats and Depublicans.”

We thought of “Political Reality” this week as the editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, made a sally against the Wall Street Journal for sticking to its principles in respect of taxes, rather than agree to a political deal. It happens that the Sun is a great admirer of Mr. Kristol, and over the years we’ve been out on some limbs with him, including the one on which Sarah Palin was perched. He may be right in his prediction that the Republicans will cut a deal that includes tax increases. For us, though, this is a time to recall that there have been those on the right who were prepared to say in respect of a Republican president and Democratic congress the same thing that needs to be said now in respect of a Democratic president and a Republican House.

There is no virtue in a political compromise that does the wrong thing. For our part, whenever we hear a lecture from within the Washington D.C. Beltway about the importance of political reality, our instinct is to grab for our wallet, lest some public sector pickpocket get to it first. We see no political adulthood in the secrecy of the sit down between the President and Speaker Boehner. We like the way Ira Stoll of FutureOfCapitalism.com puts it in his column this week. Mr. Boehner, Mr. Stoll writes, says he is for “sunlight” and against “backroom deals,” and Mr. Obama says he’s for “an unprecedented level of openness.” Yet, Mr. Stoll notes, “neither one of them will tell the American people what they said at the meeting they just had about the federal budget.”

It’s amazing how eerily this backroom dealing parallels the showdown between President Bush ’41 and the Democrats. One can speculate that Mr. Bush thought his compromising would put him a better position in 1992. It turned out that it cost him the election, and we were given two years of Clinton-ism until the voters stepped in again and, in a historic shift, revoked Democratic Party control of the House and Senate and handed control of the Congress to the Republicans. That was the election that set the course that eventually moved Mr. Clinton to declare that the era of big government was over. The Reagan boom was extended into the 1990s and the first seven years of the 21st century, until the Nancy Pelosi Democrats won control of the House and Atlas shrugged. It’s a time for those who think the Democrats can posture as tax-cutters to remember the sagacity of another Republican president, the one who had his own point about political reality: You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.