I am going to argue slightly on your wording although I fully acknowledge the numbers do line up with your timeline.
RE the budget surplus, the dotcom boom led to a large increase in taxes collected which collapsed from 2000 to 2003. Similarly countries naturally spend more when their population is either skewing old or skewing young. The US hit peak working-age demographics during the period you are describing. The outcome doesn't seem to be "engineered" so much as accidental. In fact taxes on balance were cut during this timeframe while significant contributors to the long term debt / future crisis were unleashed (glass steagall repeal which arguably led to the great financial crisis & federal loans for eduction were dramatically expanded without oversight to ensure the money was being well spent).
Similarly, the covid response caused an explosion in the budget deficit which I wouldn't blame squarely on "a candidate's economic policy". The 2023 deficit in real dollars and as a % of GDP the largest (by a fair amount!) outside of a war, economic crisis, or the covid response. This doesn't even count the ~400? billion in student loan forgiveness that was attempted and failed.
"Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much" <- 100% agree.
My bias is that I don't give mulligans or asterisks to presidents[1]. Every administration faces a unique set of challenges, and some of those will be financial. Most of the others will involve large-scale finances. So I don't grant escapes to administrations that are hit by recession, war, or plague. That's literally part of the job.
How that relates to the (relevant!) factors you raise is that firstly, most of them were knowable at the time. Bush knew that tax revenue was falling when he proposed his tax cuts. He also planned two foreign wars without planning to pay for them. These were choices that were quite obviously, without the benefit of hindsight, going to lead to increased deficits.
Covid was unpredictable, but the administration had choices on how to handle the deficit spending. Notably, they did not choose to increase revenue in any meaningful way. And the administration was not blocked by Congress in this, raising revenue was simply not a concern mooted by the Executive. (They did not even add spring-loaded revenue increase that would trigger when the economy recovered.)
These choices to increase the deficit were made will roughly all the information we have now. Both choices were contemporaneously derided by deficit hawks; it is not a surprise that they raised the deficit.
But again, Dick Cheney was correct that deficits do not matter (to voters).
RE the budget surplus, the dotcom boom led to a large increase in taxes collected which collapsed from 2000 to 2003. Similarly countries naturally spend more when their population is either skewing old or skewing young. The US hit peak working-age demographics during the period you are describing. The outcome doesn't seem to be "engineered" so much as accidental. In fact taxes on balance were cut during this timeframe while significant contributors to the long term debt / future crisis were unleashed (glass steagall repeal which arguably led to the great financial crisis & federal loans for eduction were dramatically expanded without oversight to ensure the money was being well spent).
Similarly, the covid response caused an explosion in the budget deficit which I wouldn't blame squarely on "a candidate's economic policy". The 2023 deficit in real dollars and as a % of GDP the largest (by a fair amount!) outside of a war, economic crisis, or the covid response. This doesn't even count the ~400? billion in student loan forgiveness that was attempted and failed.
"Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much" <- 100% agree.