Daniel Drezner points us to a clever Foreign Policy article by Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist and professor of economics and Thomas D. Cabot professor of public policy at Harvard University in which Professor Rogoff compares the pre-election macroeconomic policies of President Bush against those of former President Richard Nixon and other world leaders. The entire article is a must read, but here is an excerpt to give you a flavor of the article:

Does all this election-year economic engineering pay? In the short run, yes, because voters sure like a booming economy and a free-spending government at election time. They don?t seem to question why anyone should reward a politician for artificially boosting an economy before elections, even if doing so produces serious long-term problems. Perhaps, like moviegoers who expect to be emotionally manipulated, voters just enjoy an election-year high.
Of course, U.S. presidents are hardly the only or the best practitioners of electoral economics. Mexico, for example, boasts a history of political business cycles that make the United States look fiscally Puritan. Mexican Presidents JosÈ LÛpez Portillo in 1982 and Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1994 set benchmarks that few have surpassed. Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave away the country?s natural resource base (under the guise of ?privatization?) to ensure his reelection in 1996, a problem the country is still painfully sorting through today. In Italy, every prime minister seems to produce a fiscal splurge come election time?and Italy has a lot of elections. But then, a country does not achieve one of the world?s highest debt-to-GDP ratios (more than 100 percent) without effort.