I thought that George W. Bush served as president for eight years. Apparently not. If you count the red bars in the chart that Michele Bachmann displayed in her SOTU response, you will learn that Bush only served for seven years.
I guess Michele assumes that Tea Baggers can't count.
I can imagine a meeting where Michele says, "Let's put in an extra bar for the deficit during the last Clinton year and color it red so that it looks like a Bush budget year." The response is, "OK. We can do that, but the bar will have to go down, not up, because there was a surplus that year." Then Michele says, "That will screw up the whole bar chart!"
The reason, of course, that Michele Bachman wants people to believe that Bush was only in office for seven years is so that she can lie about Bush's last budget by claiming that it is an Obama budget.
BACHMANN: But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country. Deficits were unacceptably high under President Bush, but they exploded under President Obama's direction, growing the national debt by an astounding $3.1 trillion-dollars.
In order for the lie to be plausible, Michele has to leave out the 2011 budget, which is easy since the Republicans blocked the Senate vote on it. So people see the two blue bars for Obama and conclude that the chart must be right because Obama has been in office for two years.
Michele did not invent this lie. It is an old lie often repeated by conservatives in the form of "Obama tripled the deficit." If you just go to this government website, it is easy to see that George W. Bush proposed and signed the fiscal year 2009 budget:
Table of US budgets