Apparently, spending is going out of style.

Watching Bush's speech tonight, I couldn't help but wonder how a candidate presenting himself as a fiscal conservative and ideological heir to Ronald Reagan could kick off and intersperse throughout his acceptance speech with calls for increased government spending. Turns out I'm not the only one, as Howard Kurtz, who is far from a liberal, is wondering the same thing:

As the president delivered an almost Clintonian laundry list of proposals -- after months of offering few second-term specifics -- some questions popped into my mind.

How's he gonna pay for it?

There was, you might have noticed, no mention of the nearly half-trillion-dollar budget deficit. And Bush called for making his tax cuts permanent. So that doesn't leave him a whole lot of money to play with. More job training, more community college funds, more Pell grants, 7 million more affordable homes -- where does he get the cash? How does he then pivot and call Kerry a big spender?

A "simpler, fairer" tax code -- very Reaganesque. The Gipper pulled it off in 1986. But how exactly does Bush plan to do this? Which "special interest" provisions will he get rid of? Surely not the mortgage tax break, or his new, lower capital gains rate for investment income.

The president's regulatory proposals -- on tort reform and Social Security -- were definitely crowd-pleasers. But these went nowhere in the first term.

Bush said Kerry wants to raise taxes -- but omitted the fact that the proposal is limited to the $200,000-plus crowd. Hey, a speech doesn't have room for everything.