Record this one for history: Bush Team Theme -- 'We Were All Wrong'
by Nathaniel Frank
When Fed chief Alan Greenspan acknowledged last week that he'd been wrong to expect tax cuts to produce budget surpluses, he cast his mistake as part of a collective, unavoidable error. "It turns out that we were all wrong, " he told the Senate Special Committee on Aging. It was not just the belief of the Fed and the tax-hating Republicans, but "an almost universal expectation amongst experts" that cutting taxes for the wealthy would generate more government revenue.
His remarks were an extraordinary echo of the famous mea culpa of President Bush's former top weapons inspector, David Kay. Announcing his conclusion that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Kay had emphasized that it wasn't just American inspectors and the White House, but the entire Western intelligence community that had misread Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. "It turns out, we were almost all wrong," he declared.
The parroting doesn't stop there. Responding to Kay's revelations of mass error, Bush was unrepentant. "Knowing what I know today," he said, "I would have made the same decision." Greenspan, taking his compunction lessons from the White House, followed suit with his remarks on tax cuts: "If confronted with the same evidence we had back then, I would recommend exactly what I recommended then."
The implication is that, each time, there was only one rational course of action and the Bush administration has always taken it. But in both cases, of course, others looked at the same evidence and proposed a different action -- including Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who shot back to Greenspan's astonishing evasion of blame with: "We were not all wrong, but many people were wrong."
Indeed, Democrats have been saying for years that there is too little evidence to justify trickle-down economics -- the theory that cutting taxes for those who earn the most would encourage business investment, thereby increasing both jobs and tax revenue. Bush's unprecedented tax cuts have produced the notorious "jobless recovery" and historic budget deficits. Yet Greenspan says he'd do it all again.
The same was true in assessing whether to invade Iraq. Many who saw the same evidence as the Bush administration opposed going to war on that information because they were not convinced that what they saw justified the potential cost of starting a war. Not so for Bush. In his world, if you simply believe in what you're doing, that's enough to make it right. It's a faith that inspires many, and one that has worked to great political advantage.
But the logic that Team Bush has used to justify its decisions and dodge responsibility for their consequences is deeply troubling. It goes essentially like this: I believed something and I acted on it. Turns out I was wrong to believe it. But because I truly believed it, it was right to act on it, notwithstanding the damage it caused.
Examples of this logic abound. Consider, for instance, the rhetoric of belief in building the case for war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off critics of the invasion of Iraq by saying that "the president has to decide what precisely he believes is the best approach" -- as though reality mattered less than belief. Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed warnings about a "long, costly and bloody battle" in Iraq with a glib expression of his confidence in Iraqi support for the invasion. In a now- infamous misjudgment, he said, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
After the invasion, the belief parade did not subside. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to admit he had no evidence linking al Qaeda to Iraq, he defended going to war anyway, saying, "The president decided he had to act because he believed that" the region was in danger. And when American weapons inspectors finally reported that the "best evidence" indicated that no WMDs were to be found in Iraq, what was the White House's first response? That this administration doesn't care about evidence. "We believe [the weapons] will be found," said the White House spokesman. "We believe the truth will come out."
It did. And team Bush was wrong again. Unless, that is, you hold belief above results.
In the world of business, the world that made Greenspan and Bush, belief is not enough. Certainly, faith in the venture is important -- investors like a visionary -- but it's the outcome that makes or breaks a player. As Bush himself said in a 1999 interview reported by the New York Times, "The business world is a world of results and performance." Those who repeatedly act on bad information eventually lose support from their investors.
As a businessman, Bush understood this. But as president, he has turned to faith as a substitute for results. In this faith-based presidency, he has reversed course, announcing in his 2004 State of Union Address that it's a mistake to believe that "performance is more important than character." It's a distraction from what he once acknowledged was the true measure of the man: results and performance.
Team Bush was wrong on WMDs, and it was wrong on trickle-down economics. Now, it has expressed great faith in privatizing Social Security. But savvy investors shouldn't take the sales pitch. They should demand accountability from their chief executive. To do otherwise will yield nothing but an old slogan: "It turns out we were all wrong."
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