All The President's Spin
The Spinsanity.org boys deconstruct the Bush administration's tactics of media manipulation. Read the excerpt here at Mediabistro:
During the 2000 presidential campaign, then-Governor Bush liked to tell the story of a hypothetical waitress who would benefit from his tax cut plan. "Under current tax law," he said, "a single waitress supporting two children on an income of $22,000 faces a higher marginal tax rate than a lawyer making $220,000," adding, "Under my plan, she will pay no income tax at all."This wasn't much of a feat. What Bush failed to mention was that his hypothetical waitress probably already paid no federal income tax.
In August 2001, President Bush announced a new policy on the use of stem cells in federally funded medical research. "More than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist," he told the nation in a televised address, concluding, "We should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines."
Researchers eager to obtain access to these "existing" lines were quickly disappointed, however, when Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, admitted that only 24 or 25 lines were actually "fully developed." Although 60 lines did exist, it was uncertain whether many of them would ever become available to researchers.
In late 2001, Bush began pointing back to a statement he claimed to have made during the 2000 campaign. As he put it in May 2002, "when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta."
It was a good story, but there's no evidence that the President ever made such a statement in Chicago or elsewhere. In fact, Vice President Al Gore was the candidate who had listed the exceptions in 1998 (though Bush advisor Lawrence Lindsey said at the time that they would apply to the Texas governor as well). Was this an innocent mistake? The answer is almost certainly noóBush continued to repeat the "trifecta" story for months after it had been debunked.
Then, in a televised address to the nation in October 2002, Bush declared, "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemyóthe United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America."
Each of these statements was true, but Bush's words were carefully constructed to leave a false impression. Without ever stating that there was a direct connection between Iraq, al Qaeda, and September 11, the President artfully linked them together with a series of carefully chosen phrases. After the war, Bush told an interviewer from Polish television that "We found the weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. But he was not reporting the discovery of drums of chemical weapons or artillery shells filled with anthrax. Rather, Bush was referring to a pair of trailers that some analysts thought might have been used to produce biological weapons. While experts debated the purpose of the trailers, the President of the United States was falsely claiming that WMD had been found.
These examples might not be so troubling if the press had consistently called attention to them. But on most issues, with the possible exception of stem cells and the aftermath of the war in Iraq, he got away with little more than a slap on the wrist. Journalists deserve much of the blame for this, but one of the chief reasons these examples received so little attention is that many were based on a partial truth about a complex policy issue; after all, the waitress did end up with no federal income tax, there were 60 "existing" stem cell lines, and Iraq had some fragmentary connections to Al Qaeda . . . sort of.
Bush's record raises a number of questions. Just how often did the President deceive us? How did he do it? And why didn't anyone put a stop to it?
The answers are disturbing. George W. Bush has done serious damage to our political system. His deceptions span nearly all of his major policies, were achieved using some of the most advanced tactics from public relations, and were designed to exploit the failings of the modern media. In the process, Bush has made it even more difficult for citizens to understand and take part in democratic debate.
These deceptions are worthy of close attention for more than the insight they give us into the President himself. He is simply the highest profile carrier of a virus infecting our political system. Its symptoms are misleading public statements, a disregard for the value of honest discussion, and treating policy debates as little more than marketing challengesóa devastating combination for democracy.
Buy their book here. And, for consistently solid, non-partisan exposure and deconstructions of lies and distortions in politics, point your browser to Spinsanity.org. These guys -- Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan -- do great and very important work, and I don't link to them enough.
Love you, can live with the "I hate George Bush" rant.
Outside of Hollywood and New York we love him!
Mike Strickland at August 16, 2004 8:02 AM
"Outside of Hollywood and New York we love him!"
Hence the saying, "New York and LA are the ears. Everything in between is just wax."
Lena at August 16, 2004 8:25 AM
Mike, if you'll read the article, you'll see it's a bit more complicated than an "I hate George Bush rant." You do read, don't you?
Amy Alkon, literate at August 16, 2004 12:27 PM