Moving Right Along
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By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Columnist
The Washington Post
Friday, July 18, 2003
What has finally caught up with the Bush administration is its habit of tossing out politically convenient arguments and then walking away from them after they have done their work. That's what President Bush's questionable statements on Iraq and the new estimates putting this year's federal deficit at $455 billion have in common.
The Iraq story is spinning at such a furious pace that it's hard to keep track of what the administration wants the public to believe. Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer came right out last week and said the president should never have cited that British government claim that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." CIA Director George Tenet said he should have kept the words out of the president's State of the Union address but told a Senate committee on Wednesday that his staff didn't even tell him that the questionable claim was in the speech until after it was given.
And the administration has opened a second, contradictory front. Led by Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, the president's defenders are also insisting that what Bush said was technically true because he was reporting only on what the British government had "learned." Besides, Rice has noted, the British still insist their uranium report was, as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it yesterday, "genuine."
Which means exactly what for Bush? That he was right all along? That Fleischer's statement is now inoperative? That the president believes British intelligence more than he believes his own CIA director?
The real story here is that the administration knew perfectly well that the two arguments most likely to persuade Americans who had doubts about going to war were (1) that Saddam Hussein had some link to 9/11 and (2) that this mad dictator had nukes. The administration pushed the 9/11 connection as hard as it could, despite highly questionable evidence, and used the nuclear claim as an effective closing punch. Whatever works.
The administration's past is also catching up with it on the deficit. A year ago the administration said the 2003 deficit would be $109 billion and the 2004 deficit would be $48 billion. Oops. This week, the president's Office of Management and Budget said the deficit for 2003 would be $455 billion and for 2004 would be $475 billion. And this second estimate doesn't even include the full costs of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The administration argues that it is unfair to say that Bush blew the $5.6 trillion, 10-year surplus he inherited. These "good faith estimates" of the size of the surplus, says the OMB's mid-session review, took into account "no subsequent spending or tax changes, no recession, no collapse of the stock market, no September 11th terrorist attacks, no revelation of corporate scandals, no additional homeland security spending, and no war on terror."
But all those factors were known a year ago, when the administration offered its rosy picture of the fiscal future. Yes, budget projections are difficult, and Josh Bolten, the new head of the OMB, is an honest soul. But Rep. Jack Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, notes that the administration has substantially underestimated the deficit every year.
He also notes that the administration was warning of an economic downturn even before it took office. Bush thus offered two arguments for his 2001 tax cut that effectively contradicted each other: that the big surplus, guaranteed by good times, meant the tax cut wouldn't cause deficits; and that the good times were in danger of ending, so his tax cut was essential to spur the economy. Whatever works.
The other big contradiction is the Bush administration's claim that its tax cuts were designed to stimulate the economy now, when many of the reductions don't even kick in until much later in the decade. But while the administration was certain enough about the future to offer a 10-year tax cut plan, its Office of Management and Budget offers only five-year deficit projections, neatly burying debate about the long term.
Deficits lack the drama of wars, and economic arguments are easy to muddy up. But the accountability that's being imposed on the administration over Iraq will eventually extend to other spheres. Our victory in Iraq against a genuinely evil dictator was supposed to create a euphoria that would sweep aside inconvenient questions. If the aftermath of the war had gone better, the strategy might have worked. But the Bush spin machine now has sand in its gears because one question inevitably leads to another, and another.
Once it's lost, credibility is very hard to earn back.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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