Greenspan skewers Bush, lavishes praise on Clinton
By Bob Woodward

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve's chairman for 18 years and the leading Republican economist for the past three decades, levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush and the Republican Party in his new book, saying Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint.

While condemning Democrats, too, for rampant federal spending, he offers former President Clinton an exemption. Clinton emerges as the political hero of "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," Greenspan's memoir, out Monday.

Greenspan, who calls himself a "libertarian Republican" but had an eight-year alliance with Clinton and Democratic Treasury secretaries in the 1990s, praises Clinton's mind and his tough anti-deficit policies, calling the former president's 1993 economic plan "an act of political courage."

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