A matter of trust Apr 1st 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC >From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2553350 Excerpt: When justifying policies on both Iraq and tax cuts, the administration's case has been riddled with errors. Obviously, the most egregious concern Iraq's WMD. Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman, has gathered no fewer than 237 exaggerated or dubious claims by senior administration members.an impressive litany of mistakes. One priceless example: Donald Rumsfeld in September 2002, asserting that .there's no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons...We all know that. A trained ape knows that. All you have to do is read the newspapers.. (Had the ape been trained to read?) .... In the case of the deficit, the budget mis-statements cannot even be excused on the grounds of simple error. Mr Bush's budget statements have routinely assumed future spending restraints that few in Congress or the administration believe will happen. In forecasting future deficits, he has assumed revenue increases from taxes he is seeking to repeal (such as the so-called Alternative Minimum Tax). And as Mr O'Neill argued, the White House was wrong when it claimed, in 2001, that it could not use the budget surplus to pay off the federal debt beyond a certain point. All these are cases where the administration should surely have known better. There have been a few specific instances of stepping near.perhaps even over.the line that divides error from irresponsibility. For example, the president claimed in October 2002 that Iraq had a .massive stockpile of biological weapons.. The CIA's director, George Tenet, has said he had no specific information on such stockpiles even at the time. In the state-of-the-union message in 2003 Mr Bush, citing British intelligence, claimed Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa.a claim that had to be retracted. In March, Mr Cheney said there was no doubt that Saddam was trying to build a nuclear device. In fact, the intelligence services had expressed doubts. But the most damning example comes from the budget process, and from lower levels of the administration. During the debate in Congress on a new Medicare prescription-drug bill, the cost of the programme proposed by the administration was put at $400 billion over ten years.even though analysts at the Department of Health and Social Security reckoned the real cost would be about $550 billion and, it is widely believed, had passed that estimate on to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. But they did not pass it to Congress because, says a whistle-blower, the then Medicare administrator threatened to fire the chief analyst if he told legislators the higher estimate. There was legal justification for this, and the administrator denies making threats of dismissal. But the episode still looks disturbingly like a case of the administration manipulating federal accounting standards for political ends. Lies, or principle? On both Iraq and the budget, the administration has unloaded its heaviest ammunition against critics who formerly worked for it. John DiIulio, who was brought into the White House to implement Mr Bush's .faith-based initiative., was told to retract his criticism that the administration lacked a proper policy shop for evaluating facts and arguments impartially. Paul O'Neill, who repeated that criticism in a book, found himself on the receiving end of a barrage of personal abuse. And when Joe Wilson, who had investigated the claims about yellowcake uranium, contradicted Mr Bush's assertion that there had been a deal, someone.it is not clear who.telephoned journalists in Washington to blow the cover of Mrs Wilson (Valerie Plame), who had worked for the CIA. Richard Clarke was not the first such target. This pattern of behaviour is strikingly consistent. But what does it reveal? And how much will it really matter in the election? Critics of the administration have asserted that it means the whole crew is a bunch of liars.as John Kerry recently blurted out when he thought the microphone was switched off. The president always intended to go to war with Iraq; terrorism was just an excuse. All he cares about is tax cuts; fiscal discipline and spending programmes can go hang. But there is another set of explanations, less damning of the administration. Most of the .lies..almost all of which are actually mistakes or misrepresentations, not deliberate falsehoods.are products of the endless spin and interpretation of America's .permanent campaign.. Message control and winning each 24-hour news cycle have usurped the place of substantive debate. The Clinton administration was accused of similar lies and half-truths. It is as much the product of a political culture as of any one president, and Mr Bush's ambition to buck the trend has failed. The administration came into office convinced that, under Mr Clinton, too much accountability to Congress had hampered effective government. Its members have therefore tried to re-assert executive privilege. Some of their attempts to keep Congress in the dark are rooted in this view, rather than in perfidy and secrecy. Lastly, many of these .lies. have a curious quality: they tend to confirm the popular view of the president's temperament and beliefs. Usually, distortions suggest that the person responsible is putting on an act or is somehow different from what he pretends to be. Yet, at least in foreign policy, the administration's errors and misrepresentations all tend to confirm the president's image as a man uncompromising in his determination to fight the war on terror as he conceives it (at least after September 2001), and willing to ride roughshod over critics and nuanced intelligence alike to get his way. And that in turn may explain one of the most surprising features of the past two weeks: that despite all the controversy over Mr Bush's honesty, credibility and competence, his position in the opinion polls has remained resilient. In several polls he has regained a narrow lead over Mr Kerry, and 50% of voters say they are more likely to vote for him because of his actions in the war on terror compared with just 28% for his rival. Admittedly, the margin on the latter question was even greater two months ago, and more people now think the war in Iraq has increased the likelihood of another terrorist attack than think it has reduced it. Still, worries about Mr Bush do not yet seem to be translating into potential votes for Mr Kerry. It is as if voters, faced with the president's lack of straight dealing, are concluding that truth may indeed be the first casualty of the war they want to win. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
