Phil Gramm: Republicans didn't live up to what they promised to do. Power corrupted them. They spent lots of money and tried to buy votes.

Some excerpts from an article in The Wall Street Journal about John McCain's would-be Treasury secretary who is on a small-goverment mission:

"They didn't live up to what they promised to do. Power corrupted them. They spent lots of money and tried to buy votes. Republicans concluded that they could make voters love them by governing the way Democrats did."

So says former Texas senator and current John McCain economics adviser Phil Gramm.

When he rode off into the political sunset in 2002 for a high-rolling investment banking job at UBS, there was joy among many of his liberal colleagues on Capitol Hill. For two decades the man who came to be called "Dr. No" had earned a reputation as a one-man wrecking crew of big-government legislative priorities. "I consider defeating Hillary health care as one of my greatest accomplishments," he says.

A look at the record confirms that Mr. Gramm played a decisive role in nearly every fiscal conservative victory in the 1980s and '90s – from the Reagan budget and tax cuts to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley banking reforms of the late 1990s.