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A matter of trust
Apr 1st 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
Evidence is growing that the Bush administration has misled the public. But most voters, so far, are inclined to forgive
GEORGE BUSH ran for president in 2000 promising to raise the tone of debate in Washington. He was not saying merely that he wouldn't have sex with interns. He was talking about basic honesty, promising to look facts in the face, not to spin (too much), not to make policy by opinion polls, and to give an honest accounting of his actions. He reiterated that position last month in an interview: “The American people [will] assess whether or not I made good calls...And the American people need to know they've got a president who sees the world the way it is.”
Yet the administration's reaction to accusations by Richard Clarke, its former counter-terrorism co-ordinator, raises doubts not only over its judgments but, still more, over whether and how the administration accounts for its decisions. When set in the context of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the ballooning budget deficit, this reaction raises profound questions about the administration's credibility, honesty and competence.
Mr Clarke argued, in testimony to the special commission investigating the terrorist attacks of 2001, that terrorism was not a top priority before September 11th. The administration, he claimed, had failed to do as much as it could and should have done to disrupt the threat of global Islamic terrorism in its first eight months. In his book, he argued that the reason for the neglect was that the administration was distracted by its obsession with Iraq—symbolised by the president's repeated insistence, in the days after the attacks, that Mr Clarke should look into possible connections with Saddam.
These are serious charges politically for Mr Bush, who is running on his handling of national security. They are also serious charges substantively, because they challenge the performance of America's intelligence services and raise questions about whether war in Iraq was justified. And, on the substance, the administration's case in its own defence should and could have been better than it appeared.
It could, for example, have stressed that it was seeking a more ambitious strategy against terrorists than the one inherited from the Clinton administration, which Mr Bush called “swatting flies”. In fact, a new, slightly more aggressive strategy emerged a week before the attacks, but too late. It could have pointed out, as Mr Clarke conceded, that even had it done everything Mr Clarke wanted, it probably could not have stopped the September attacks. Mr Bush could have acknowledged (as he had done earlier) that he had underestimated the threat from al-Qaeda before September 11th, but that afterwards he pursued the war on terror to the utmost extent. And he could have reminded everyone that, in 2001, Iraqi terrorism was a legitimate concern, if not a large one.
But to have done all this would have required acknowledging at least part of Mr Clarke's complaints. And that the administration was unwilling to do. It was still insisting that it had done everything it could have done before the attacks. So instead of treating the criticisms seriously, and replying to them seriously, the administration, with one or two honourable exceptions, began a campaign to discredit Mr Clarke.
Dick Cheney, the vice-president, suggested that he was doing it in revenge for not getting a promotion. He claimed Mr Clarke was out of the loop, a charge almost instantly contradicted by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. The White House's press spokesman claimed Mr Clarke was doing it for both commercial and partisan reasons. (He is a friend of John Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser, Rand Beers, who succeeded Mr Clarke in his counter-terrorism job before leaving for the Kerry campaign.) The nadir came when the leader of the Senate, Bill Frist of Tennessee, all but accused Mr Clarke of perjury before the Senate. Mr Frist even criticised Mr Clarke's apology to the victims of terrorism, saying he had neither the privilege nor the responsibility to make such a statement. But no one else from the administration has risen to that responsibility at all.
It has to be conceded that the administration's attacks are not made up from scratch. Mr Clarke had previously lauded the Bush administration's anti-terror policies before the attacks in off-the-record briefings, something he now dismisses as “a question of politics”. His accounts of the episode in which Mr Bush urged him, the day after the al-Qaeda attacks, to look into possible Iraqi connections vary a little: sometimes he describes Mr Bush's manner as intimidating, sometimes not. The White House has claimed that, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mr Clarke met Ms Rice but did not raise his worries that such an action would harm the war on terror.
Wilful inattention?
It might also be argued that the administration, in attacking Mr Clarke, was merely responding in kind to the personal criticisms that Mr Clarke himself had levelled at its members. For instance, he implied that Ms Rice had never heard of al-Qaeda before he briefed her in her early days in office, whereas in fact she had given speeches about the threat of al-Qaeda long before.
Yet when all is said and done, Mr Clarke was the administration's first crisis manager on September 11th, directing emergency responses from the White House itself that day. He had presented Ms Rice with a memo urging the administration “to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier.” This came one week before September 11th. And even if he had not been a prescient participant in much of the debate on terrorism within the White House, his arguments would still have merited better answers than they received—if only because they were also raised by others.
The special commission's reports corroborate his charge that proposals to resume unmanned Predator drone flights in Afghanistan were discussed only in desultory fashion at a lower level of the administration throughout 2001, while the “principals” (cabinet-level officers) were discussing other matters, such as Russia, Iraq and the Middle East. The Army War College argued that by attacking Iraq, “the administration unnecessarily expanded the global war on terror” and that this was done “at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the United States from a terrorist organisation with which the United States was at war.”
That does not necessarily make the arguments against Mr Bush true. But as a philosopher, Sidney Hook, once said, “before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.” The administration did not do this. Instead, by seeking to demean Mr Clarke, it neglected the questions he raised. Even to those who agree with the policies in the war on terror, this should be worrying.
More worrying still, the Clarke affair has a pattern: “never apologise, never explain.” With the notable exception of Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, the administration has refused to acknowledge even obvious shortcomings, such as its slowness in formulating a new counter-terrorism policy. It has not shifted its basic claim—to have done everything possible—in the light of conflicting arguments. It refused to allow Ms Rice to testify in public to the commission—White House officials do not usually do such things—until pressure to do so became irresistible, implying a certain reluctance to account for its actions before Congress (see article). It deployed ruthless character assassination against critics within its own ranks. The reason this pattern is disturbing is that all these features can be seen in the policy debates over both the war in Iraq and tax cuts—the policies on which Mr Bush deserves, above all else, to be judged.
In both cases, the administration stuck relentlessly to an unchanging line in radically changed circumstances. It argued that the tax cut of 2001 was justified because there was a large surplus. It argued that the tax cut of 2003 was justified even though there was a large deficit. It argued that war in Iraq was justified because Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States. It argued that war was justified even when it failed to find those weapons.
This is not to assert that the policies were conclusively wrong, though many have argued as much. In both cases, the administration could still defend and justify its actions in different ways. It has claimed, for example, that tax cuts were right because they encouraged economic growth. It has justified war in Iraq variously as an integral part of the global war on terror, on humanitarian grounds, and as a first step towards the democratisation of the Middle East. And, of course, tax cuts and the Iraq war could also be disputed, as well as defended, on any or all of these grounds.
But some of these arguments are undeniably internally inconsistent. For example, if temporary tax cuts have spurred economic growth, why should they be made permanent, as the administration wants? Or if forecasts of vast budget deficits are bogus now (as the administration says), why did Mr Bush justify the 2001 cut on predictions of large surpluses?
Digging in
More important, in both cases, the administration has not engaged in any serious debate about the implications for its original arguments of changed circumstances. Rather, it has simply waved objections aside and restated its position. Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's first treasury secretary, memorably quoted Mr Cheney as writing off the significance of budget deficits altogether: “Reagan proved deficits don't matter.” In similar vein, Mr Bush dismissed the idea that the absence of WMD had any implications for perceptions of the Iraqi security threat. “So what's the difference?”, he asked a television interviewer rhetorically last December, between Saddam actually possessing WMD and his moving to acquire them? The idea that the absence of WMD is insignificant sits oddly with the administration's earlier claims that the existence of the weapons was vital.
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?)
These mis-statements could be excused as hype, or errors based on faulty intelligence. But the administration can hardly pin all the blame on a gung-ho Central Intelligence Agency when it itself was even more convinced that Saddam had WMD, and was sceptical of the few words of caution that the CIA and others managed to interject. On March 30th, the new chief American weapons inspector for Iraq talked of “new information” about WMD but gave little idea what it was, beyond evidence of a general Iraqi capability to produce such weapons.
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.
Apr 1st 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
Evidence is growing that the Bush administration has misled the public. But most voters, so far, are inclined to forgive
GEORGE BUSH ran for president in 2000 promising to raise the tone of debate in Washington. He was not saying merely that he wouldn't have sex with interns. He was talking about basic honesty, promising to look facts in the face, not to spin (too much), not to make policy by opinion polls, and to give an honest accounting of his actions. He reiterated that position last month in an interview: “The American people [will] assess whether or not I made good calls...And the American people need to know they've got a president who sees the world the way it is.”
Yet the administration's reaction to accusations by Richard Clarke, its former counter-terrorism co-ordinator, raises doubts not only over its judgments but, still more, over whether and how the administration accounts for its decisions. When set in the context of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the ballooning budget deficit, this reaction raises profound questions about the administration's credibility, honesty and competence.
Mr Clarke argued, in testimony to the special commission investigating the terrorist attacks of 2001, that terrorism was not a top priority before September 11th. The administration, he claimed, had failed to do as much as it could and should have done to disrupt the threat of global Islamic terrorism in its first eight months. In his book, he argued that the reason for the neglect was that the administration was distracted by its obsession with Iraq—symbolised by the president's repeated insistence, in the days after the attacks, that Mr Clarke should look into possible connections with Saddam.
These are serious charges politically for Mr Bush, who is running on his handling of national security. They are also serious charges substantively, because they challenge the performance of America's intelligence services and raise questions about whether war in Iraq was justified. And, on the substance, the administration's case in its own defence should and could have been better than it appeared.
It could, for example, have stressed that it was seeking a more ambitious strategy against terrorists than the one inherited from the Clinton administration, which Mr Bush called “swatting flies”. In fact, a new, slightly more aggressive strategy emerged a week before the attacks, but too late. It could have pointed out, as Mr Clarke conceded, that even had it done everything Mr Clarke wanted, it probably could not have stopped the September attacks. Mr Bush could have acknowledged (as he had done earlier) that he had underestimated the threat from al-Qaeda before September 11th, but that afterwards he pursued the war on terror to the utmost extent. And he could have reminded everyone that, in 2001, Iraqi terrorism was a legitimate concern, if not a large one.
But to have done all this would have required acknowledging at least part of Mr Clarke's complaints. And that the administration was unwilling to do. It was still insisting that it had done everything it could have done before the attacks. So instead of treating the criticisms seriously, and replying to them seriously, the administration, with one or two honourable exceptions, began a campaign to discredit Mr Clarke.
Dick Cheney, the vice-president, suggested that he was doing it in revenge for not getting a promotion. He claimed Mr Clarke was out of the loop, a charge almost instantly contradicted by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. The White House's press spokesman claimed Mr Clarke was doing it for both commercial and partisan reasons. (He is a friend of John Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser, Rand Beers, who succeeded Mr Clarke in his counter-terrorism job before leaving for the Kerry campaign.) The nadir came when the leader of the Senate, Bill Frist of Tennessee, all but accused Mr Clarke of perjury before the Senate. Mr Frist even criticised Mr Clarke's apology to the victims of terrorism, saying he had neither the privilege nor the responsibility to make such a statement. But no one else from the administration has risen to that responsibility at all.
It has to be conceded that the administration's attacks are not made up from scratch. Mr Clarke had previously lauded the Bush administration's anti-terror policies before the attacks in off-the-record briefings, something he now dismisses as “a question of politics”. His accounts of the episode in which Mr Bush urged him, the day after the al-Qaeda attacks, to look into possible Iraqi connections vary a little: sometimes he describes Mr Bush's manner as intimidating, sometimes not. The White House has claimed that, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mr Clarke met Ms Rice but did not raise his worries that such an action would harm the war on terror.
Wilful inattention?
It might also be argued that the administration, in attacking Mr Clarke, was merely responding in kind to the personal criticisms that Mr Clarke himself had levelled at its members. For instance, he implied that Ms Rice had never heard of al-Qaeda before he briefed her in her early days in office, whereas in fact she had given speeches about the threat of al-Qaeda long before.
Yet when all is said and done, Mr Clarke was the administration's first crisis manager on September 11th, directing emergency responses from the White House itself that day. He had presented Ms Rice with a memo urging the administration “to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier.” This came one week before September 11th. And even if he had not been a prescient participant in much of the debate on terrorism within the White House, his arguments would still have merited better answers than they received—if only because they were also raised by others.
The special commission's reports corroborate his charge that proposals to resume unmanned Predator drone flights in Afghanistan were discussed only in desultory fashion at a lower level of the administration throughout 2001, while the “principals” (cabinet-level officers) were discussing other matters, such as Russia, Iraq and the Middle East. The Army War College argued that by attacking Iraq, “the administration unnecessarily expanded the global war on terror” and that this was done “at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the United States from a terrorist organisation with which the United States was at war.”
That does not necessarily make the arguments against Mr Bush true. But as a philosopher, Sidney Hook, once said, “before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.” The administration did not do this. Instead, by seeking to demean Mr Clarke, it neglected the questions he raised. Even to those who agree with the policies in the war on terror, this should be worrying.
More worrying still, the Clarke affair has a pattern: “never apologise, never explain.” With the notable exception of Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, the administration has refused to acknowledge even obvious shortcomings, such as its slowness in formulating a new counter-terrorism policy. It has not shifted its basic claim—to have done everything possible—in the light of conflicting arguments. It refused to allow Ms Rice to testify in public to the commission—White House officials do not usually do such things—until pressure to do so became irresistible, implying a certain reluctance to account for its actions before Congress (see article). It deployed ruthless character assassination against critics within its own ranks. The reason this pattern is disturbing is that all these features can be seen in the policy debates over both the war in Iraq and tax cuts—the policies on which Mr Bush deserves, above all else, to be judged.
In both cases, the administration stuck relentlessly to an unchanging line in radically changed circumstances. It argued that the tax cut of 2001 was justified because there was a large surplus. It argued that the tax cut of 2003 was justified even though there was a large deficit. It argued that war in Iraq was justified because Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States. It argued that war was justified even when it failed to find those weapons.
This is not to assert that the policies were conclusively wrong, though many have argued as much. In both cases, the administration could still defend and justify its actions in different ways. It has claimed, for example, that tax cuts were right because they encouraged economic growth. It has justified war in Iraq variously as an integral part of the global war on terror, on humanitarian grounds, and as a first step towards the democratisation of the Middle East. And, of course, tax cuts and the Iraq war could also be disputed, as well as defended, on any or all of these grounds.
But some of these arguments are undeniably internally inconsistent. For example, if temporary tax cuts have spurred economic growth, why should they be made permanent, as the administration wants? Or if forecasts of vast budget deficits are bogus now (as the administration says), why did Mr Bush justify the 2001 cut on predictions of large surpluses?
Digging in
More important, in both cases, the administration has not engaged in any serious debate about the implications for its original arguments of changed circumstances. Rather, it has simply waved objections aside and restated its position. Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's first treasury secretary, memorably quoted Mr Cheney as writing off the significance of budget deficits altogether: “Reagan proved deficits don't matter.” In similar vein, Mr Bush dismissed the idea that the absence of WMD had any implications for perceptions of the Iraqi security threat. “So what's the difference?”, he asked a television interviewer rhetorically last December, between Saddam actually possessing WMD and his moving to acquire them? The idea that the absence of WMD is insignificant sits oddly with the administration's earlier claims that the existence of the weapons was vital.
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?)
These mis-statements could be excused as hype, or errors based on faulty intelligence. But the administration can hardly pin all the blame on a gung-ho Central Intelligence Agency when it itself was even more convinced that Saddam had WMD, and was sceptical of the few words of caution that the CIA and others managed to interject. On March 30th, the new chief American weapons inspector for Iraq talked of “new information” about WMD but gave little idea what it was, beyond evidence of a general Iraqi capability to produce such weapons.
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.
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