Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?
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HE SAID, HE SAID
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
The Week In Review
The New York Times
June 22, 2003
nytimes.com
WASHINGTON — The hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq has been fruitless. The tax cut turns out to give no break whatsoever to millions of low-income taxpayers. In the view of some Democrats, President Bush has been lying about these and other matters, the way Lyndon B. Johnson lied about Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon about Watergate and Bill Clinton about his sex life.
For instance, Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Mr. Bush of "a pattern of deception and deceit" on Iraq.
An antiwar organization, MoveOn.org, ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times last week suggesting that "young men and women were sent to die for a lie."
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, said of Mr. Bush's statement that all income tax payers would benefit from his tax cut, "Such claims are not accurate."
In fact, a review of the president's public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied on either subject. But more pertinent than whether the president told the literal truth is what factors he stressed and which ones he played down.
Certainly, a strong argument can be made that he exaggerated the danger posed by banned Iraqi weapons when he was trying to convince the country and Congress of the need for a pre-emptive strike and that he overemphasized the benefits to people of modest means when he was trying to sell his tax cut.
Mr. Bush is not alone in selective emphasis. Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, recalled that in the 1940 election campaign, President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted he would not take America into war unless this country was attacked by a foreign power. Toward the end of the campaign, when his Republican opponent, Wendell L. Willkie, seemed to be gaining, Roosevelt simply dropped the "unless" line.
When presidents are trying to make fundamental changes in national policy as Mr. Bush is, said Donald F. Kettl, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, "they've got to find a way that's powerful and persuasive and politically attractive and tap into what the public can grab."
Look at what the president said about weapons of mass destruction in two prime-time television speeches — one on Oct. 7, his first big address on Iraq, and the other on March 17, when he declared that Saddam Hussein had to leave Iraq in 48 hours or face an attack.
The October speech was devoted largely to the threat of banned weapons. Iraq, Mr. Bush said, had "a massive stockpile of biological weapons" and "thousands of tons of chemical agents" and was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." The president asked, "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
In the speech in March, on the eve of war, Mr. Bush declared, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
There is no evidence the president did not believe what he was saying. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and other Democrats said last week that intelligence briefings they received justified Mr. Bush's statements.
Administration officials insist that Iraqi weapons will still be found. But in hindsight, the threat of banned weapons, genuine or not, does not seem to have been, as the president was suggesting, the decisive motivation for going to war. More central reasons — his desire to dominate the Middle East and remove a dictator whose defiance made the United States seem weak — would have been harder to sell politically. Last week, in a speech in New Jersey, Mr. Bush did not even mention Iraqi weapons. Instead, he cited Mr. Hussein's refusal to abide by the demands of "the free world" and said, "This is for certain: Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States and our friends and allies."
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On the question of taxes, Mr. Bush made a claim in his State of the Union address that was not true, and he repeated it often afterward. "This tax relief," he declared, "is for everyone who pays income taxes."
In fact, as the Tax Policy Center, a research arm of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, discovered, 8.1 million people who owe taxes would have received no tax cut from the Bush proposal and will get no break from the legislation that was enacted last month. Almost all of them are either single people with no children and no dividends or capital gains who were already in the 10 percent tax bracket, or else those with "head of household" filing status whose dependent is not a child under 17.
But there are more than 100 million income tax payers in the country. So well over 90 percent will get some tax cut. If he had said "almost all," it would have been accurate.
What is more important is that the tax relief most people will receive is quite meager, hardly the impression the president sought to leave when he campaigned around the country for the plan.
Mr. Bush kept emphasizing the tax benefits for people with modest incomes, not the more extensive tax relief he wanted for the well heeled. He often had onstage with him a couple with two children and an income of $40,000 or $50,000 whose taxes would be cut by more than $1,000, mostly because of the increase in the child tax credit.
But the indisputable fact is that the bulk of the tax cut will go to the wealthy. A study by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research institute whose calculations have gone unchallenged, found that half of all taxpayers would get a cut of less than $100 a year this year and that by 2005, three-quarters would get less than $100.
On the other hand, almost two-thirds of all the tax savings will go to the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers, and the richest 1 percent will get an average tax reduction of nearly $100,000 a year.
The question on Iraq and taxes is whether Mr. Bush stepped across the line dividing acceptable politicking from manipulation. Some critics hold that Mr. Bush twisted intelligence to conform with his policy goals. This can probably be answered conclusively only by historians when all the evidence and consequences are known.
Mr. Bush seemed "typical of somebody trying to sell somebody something," Mr. Dallek said.
"You look for what people are going to find most believable and persuasive," he continued. "In a sense you talk yourself into those ideas, and I have no doubt Bush himself was convinced they had weapons of mass destruction."
When he signed the tax bill into law last month at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, the president introduced Jenny Tyson of Omaha, the wife of an Air Force sergeant serving in the Pacific. With two children, the Tysons "will keep an extra $1,300 a year of their own money," the president declared.
That was true. It just was not the main point of the new tax law. |
