Brendan Nyhan

Yesterday, President Bush held a joint conference with Vladimir Putin in which he made a widely mocked statement touting Iraqi democracy. But a revealing line was missing from early accounts.

Here is the correct transcript of the exchange:

PRESIDENT BUSH: It’s not the first time that Vladimir and I discussed our governing philosophies. I have shared with him my desires for our country, and he shared with me his desires for his. And I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there’s a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing.

I fully understand, however, that there will be a Russian-style democracy. I don’t expect Russia to look like the United States. As Vladimir pointedly reminded me last night, we have a different history, different traditions. And I will let him describe to you his way forward, but he shared with me some very interesting thoughts that I think would surprise some of our citizens…

[Bush continues to speak for several more paragraphs.]

PRESIDENT PUTIN: We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly. (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT BUSH: Just wait.

The key line that was missing — and it’s an astonishing one — is “Just wait.” Cox Newspapers reporter Ken Herman reports that the initial White House transcript omitted this line:

It took the White House two-and-a-half hours to make the correction, but the official transcript of President Bush’s Saturday news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin finally includes Bush’s attempt to rebut a Putin one-liner that highlighted the event.

The key moment came when Putin, after Bush touted freedom in Iraq, said, “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly.”

At the news conference, Bush shot back with a light-hearted “Just wait,” an indication that he believes Iraq will become a full-fledged, functional democracy.

But the original transcript released by the White House left out the line.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Bush “spoke so quietly [when he said “Just wait”] that his comment could barely be heard in the front row and it was not clear whether Putin heard him.”

As a result of Bush’s quiet statement and the omission of it from the official transcript, a number of news reports on the exchange failed to cover it. In fact, Google News currently lists only five news reports that include the quote.

Doesn’t Bush’s statement deserve some attention? Under Michael Kinsley’s classic definition, a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. In this case, Bush has said what he thinks is the truth — Iraq is progressing toward full-blown democracy — at a time when the reality-based community sees the country as rapidly sliding toward civil war.

Given this comment and others like it, I think it’s increasingly clear that Ron Suskind is the most important journalist in America. He’s consistently done the best work on the Bush administration’s faith-based approach to public policy:
–The One Percent Doctrine (2006) — the story of the CIA’s interaction with the Bush administration after 9/11;
–“Without a doubt” (2004) — an exploration of the Bush administration’s black-and-white view of the world;
–The Price of Loyalty (2004) — the story of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s bafflement at how the Bush White House was run;
–“Why are these men laughing?” (2003) — a chronicle of former White House official John DiIlulio’s disillusionment with the way the Bush administration prioritized politics over substance in domestic policy.

The Washington Times touts the phony claims of the supply-siders about the latest budget figures:

This week’s lower deficit figure has been a shot in the arm for tax cutters in Congress and has reignited the debate over supply-side economics and whether President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts helped or hurt the federal budget.

“Supply-side economics are alive and well,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Texas Republican and the budget point man for House conservatives, who added that tax cuts are the only explanation for the declining deficit. “Spending’s not down; spending has increased every single budget. What happened is we’re awash in tax revenue because supply-side economics is alive and well.”

There’s just no serious debate about this within the reality-based community. Today’s New York Times includes a graphic that illustrates the point perfectly:

Here’s the key portion of the accompanying article:

At first blush, the recent jump in tax revenue would seem to validate Mr. Bush and those who believe that tax cuts ultimately generate higher tax revenues because they prompt people to work harder, invest more and take more entrepreneurial risk.

The White House, in a news release last week, boasted that tax revenues have climbed 34 percent since Congress passed Mr. Bush’s second big tax cut — which included a major reduction in taxes on stock dividends and capital gains.

But revenues are only up in comparison with how low they had plunged in recent years. Individual income taxes, the biggest component of federal revenue, are barely back to the level that was reached in 2000, $1 trillion. Adjusting for inflation, income tax revenue is still lower than six years ago.

Jay Rosen, a well-known professor of journalism at NYU and blogger, comments on my post about the contradiction between President Bush’s statements and the conclusions of his economists:

Brendan: I certainly agree that to “make a claim about a new report
that your experts contradict in the report is chutzpah indeed,” but I
think you have to see it as “strategy indeed.” You’re studying
politics– study this!

It’s a [n]ew kind of political strategy based on the insight that if you
do make a claim like that, and you don’t have to back off because the
forces do not exist to make you, then you have, in a way, demonstrated
your Administration’s power “over” reality, and you can roll over other
realities, other people, that way.

What if this method Bush has is a basic tool of governing? I think it
is. Not a bug, a feature.

This is combined with another strange fact about the Bush White House.
It is organized to make sure that a lot of “contrary” information never
reaches Bush, which is the way he wants it. You have to re-draw the
whole notion of “White House deliberations” for this group.

I don’t think political scientists have any “rational actor” theories
that truly explain Bush 43. Do you?

I agree that President Bush has made systematic misinformation and spin about policy a “basic tool of governing” — indeed, that is precisely the argument of All the President’s Spin. However, I disagree that political scientists lack “rational actor” theories that explain the administration’s behavior. While the discipline lacks useful models of presidential communication strategy, we can certainly conclude that the administration’s behavior is rational in a strategic sense. Given the media’s fear of bias accusations, insistence on writing news stories in a “he said”/”she said” framework, and lack of interest in policy detail, it makes perfect sense for the administration to promote disinformation about policy, particularly after 9/11 when presidential approval was high and reporters were fearful. The book explores these ugly incentives in greater detail and explains how we think they can be changed.

In the post-9/11 period and during the war in Iraq, Andrew Sullivan viciously attacked dissenters. But as my former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz points out, Sullivan has reversed his position and has now offered a confession of sorts:

In the last few years, I have gone from lionizing this president’s courage and fortitude to being dismayed at his incompetence and now to being resigned to mistrusting every word he speaks. I have never hated him. But now I can see, at least, that he is a liar on some of the gravest issues before the country. He doesn’t trust us with the truth. Some lies, to be sure, are inevitable – even necessary – in wartime. But when you’re lying not to keep the enemy off-balance, but to maximize your own political fortunes at home, you forfeit the respect of people who would otherwise support you – and the important battle you have been tasked to wage.

Now he can see the president is misleading us to maximize his political fortunes? As Ben writes, better late than never. But let me refresh Sullivan’s memory about what a New Republic article that he wrote back in 2001. As I wrote for Spinsanity, Sullivan lauded President Bush for misleading the public about his economic policies:

Some commentators–at this magazine and elsewhere–get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure [15.6%, the percentage of GDP the government will consume in 2011 under the Bush budget] or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond. Many of these arguments have merit–but they miss the deeper point. The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of “compassionate conservatism” shows how uphill the struggle is.

Yes, some of the time he is full of it on his economic policies. But a certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state. Conservatives learned that lesson twice. They learned it when Ronald Reagan’s deficits proved to be an effective drag on federal spending (Stockman was right!)–in fact the only effective drag human beings have ever found. And they learned it when they tried to be honest about taking on the federal leviathan in 1994 and got creamed by Democrats striking the fear of God into every senior, child, and parent in America. Bush and Karl Rove are no dummies. They have rightly judged that, in a culture of ineluctable government expansion, where every new plateau of public spending is simply the baseline for the next expansion, a rhetorical smoke screen is sometimes necessary. I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

The message is that it’s ok to mislead the public in the service of goals that Sullivan agrees with. I hope he will repudiate this statement next.

How to make a political scientist cringe:

A bipartisan group of prominent political strategists on Tuesday announced an Internet information venture designed to interact with America’s opinion leaders and serve as an antidote to the right-left clash that typifies political discourse on the Web.

The site, called Hotsoup.com, will debut in October and will be edited by Ron Fournier, former chief political writer for The Associated Press.

Hotsoup is the brainchild of some of the best-known practitioners of partisan politics in Washington, including Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, and Joe Lockhart, former White House press secretary under President Clinton and a senior adviser to Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign…

“We all share the belief that partisanship is largely driven by a debate that lacks information and lacks context, and we think this community can provide both of those things,” Lockhart said.

From a marketing perspective, it’s unclear why anyone would go to this site. There are many others like it out there already, and they uniformly suck. And from a behavioral perspective, the idea that partisanship is “largely driven by a debate that lacks information and lacks context” is stunningly ill-informed. There’s plenty of information and context out there. Most people just choose not to get it.

I would write more, but Matthew Yglesias hit the important points yesterday:

[I]t always strikes me as remarkable that nobody ever seems to wonder if there might be actual structural reasons for the rise in political polarization that can’t be overcome through a website. When you think about it, after all, polarization is the default state of a political system organized around zero-sum competition between two parties. America used to be less polarized because it used to have the functional equivalent of a multiparty system, thanks to the existence of racial segregation in the South. So should we bring back segregation in order to open up more possibilities for cross-cutting coalition politics? That seems like a bad idea. Should we amend the Constitution to create a parliamentary system with proportional representation? I actually think that would be a good idea in many ways, but obviously it’s wildly impractical. So what are you going to do? Nothing, it seems.

Via Josh Marshall, Rep. Pete Hoekstra suggested that leaks of classified anti-terrorist programs are the work of al Qaeda or countries that are sympathetic to its cause:

“More frequently than what we would like, we find out that the intelligence community has been penetrated, not necessarily by al Qaeda, but by other nations or organizations. I don’t have any evidence. But from my perspective, when you have information that is leaked that is clearly helpful to our enemy, you cannot discount that possibility.”

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Rep. Mike Oxley is the latest Republican to accuse the New York Times of betraying our country: “Representative Michael G. Oxley of Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the news accounts amounted to ‘treason.’”

Just another day in Washington!

Update 7/14 7:56 AM: For more on Hoekstra, see Spencer Ackerman’s piece in The New Republic.

President Bush claimed yesterday that recent revenue growth proves that cutting taxes reduces the deficit:

Some in Washington say we had to choose between cutting taxes and cutting the deficit. You might remember those debates. You endured that rhetoric hour after hour on the floor of the Senate and the House. Today’s numbers show that that was a false choice. The economic growth fueled by tax relief has helped send our tax revenues soaring. That’s what’s happened.

But as CBPP points out, this claim, which has been repeated over and over by the administration since 2001, is false — indeed, it is disproven by the administration’s own analysis in the Mid-Session Review released yesterday:

The Treasury analysis concludes that making the President’s tax cuts permanent — and paying for the tax cuts with future reductions in spending — may ultimately increase the level of economic output (national income) in the long run by as much as 0.7 percent… [T]he effect of this assumed additional economic growth would be to offset only a tiny fraction of the cost of the President’s tax cuts. For instance, a 0.7 percent increase in the economic output that the Congressional Budget Office has projected for 2016 would represent an additional $146 billion. If new revenues equaled as much as 20 percent of the additional output, the increase in revenues resulting from making the tax cuts permanent (assuming Treasury’s best-case assumptions) would be $29 billion. That amount represents less than 10 percent of the $314 billion that the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates extending the tax cuts will reduce revenues in 2016…

In short, even Bush’s own economists don’t believe this nonsense.

Does that sound familiar? It should — I wrote the same thing twice at Spinsanity. First, in February 2003, I showed that the 2003 Economic Report of the President “directly contradicts a number of public statements by the President and other administration officials on two key economic issues: the effects of tax cuts on revenue and the relationship between budget deficits and interest rates.” Then, in May 2003, I described how “President Bush is again being contradicted by [his Council of Economic Advisers] and his nominee for chairman of the council, N. Gregory Mankiw, on the date a recession began in 2001, the revenue effects of tax cuts and the number of jobs that would be created by his tax cut package.”

We know the White House dislikes experts and shuns membership in the reality-based community. But to make a claim about a new report that your experts contradict in the report is chutzpah indeed.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial page trumpets the “the gusher of revenues flowing into the Treasury in the wake of the 2003 tax cuts” and claims that “millions of Americans [are] moving into higher tax brackets”:

This would all seem to be good news, but some folks are never happy. The same crowd that said the tax cuts wouldn’t work, and predicted fiscal doom, are now harrumphing that the revenues reflect a windfall for “the rich.” We suppose that’s right if by rich they mean the millions of Americans moving into higher tax brackets because their paychecks are increasing.

However, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that “the average incomes of the top one percent of households experienced a jump of almost 17 percent” after inflation between 2003 and 2004 while “real median income fell.” Similarly, The Economist notes that, “[a]fter you adjust for inflation, the wages of the typical American worker—the one at the very middle of the income distribution—have risen less than 1% since 2000. In the previous five years, they rose over 6%.” So who are these millions of Americans?

And what happened to the 2001 tax cut anyway? According to the Treasury Department and the Wall Street Journal, Bush’s economic policy history apparently begins with the May 2003 tax cut. The previous two years of declining employment and revenue have been disappeared. Maybe they’re in one of those secret CIA prisons?

Finally, the alleged “gusher” of tax revenue is largely illusory. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities states, “[r]evenue growth over the current business cycle has been lower than in comparable past periods; in fact, revenue growth over the current business cycle is near zero after adjusting for inflation and population growth.”

I’ll say it over and over again: never trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Never.

Reading an academic article yesterday, I came across an interesting statistic that I hadn’t thought about before: 4 of our 43 presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), a rate of almost ten percent. And it turns out that fifteen presidents have been the subject of assassination attempts.

So just how dangerous is being president relative to other jobs in the US? According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data (PDF), the occupations with the highest death rates in 2004 were logging
workers and aircraft pilots/flight engineers, with a death rate of 92.4 per
100,000. That means that their risk of death is approximately .1% per year.

If we set aside all presidential deaths due to natural causes, four presidents have been killed in 217 years of US history, which is an assassination rate of approximately 2% per year. That means being president is twenty times more dangerous than the most dangerous occupations in 2004.

Maybe it’s time we give the president a raise.

(Note: Some may say that presidents are safer in the post-Kennedy era, but Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush all survived close calls during the last 35 years, so it’s hard to know whether things have really improved.)

Update 7/11 11:30 AM: The error pointed out by Ben in comments has been corrected.

Washington Times national reporter Eric Pfeiffer has written a piece for The New Republic Online that describes President Bush as “a failed oilman before becoming governor of Texas,” says the President “has accumulated a disastrous environmental record,” states that Bush “has aligned himself closely with big business,” and claims that the White House “tolerates little public dissent and privileges loyalty to the president above all else,” among other things.

Pfeiffer was an unorthodox choice to begin with given his guest-blogging at Wonkette (he used to blog for National Review as well). How long will he last at a newspaper owned by Sun Myung Moon and edited by Wesley Pruden?

(Well, maybe longer than I thought – it turns out Pfeiffer has already lifted some quotes from a Chicago Sun-Times article about Barack Obama. He could fit right in over there…)