Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley bemoans the intellectual dishonesty that plagues our political system, citing the Bush campaign’s forgotten plan to undermine a Gore victory in the Electoral College combined with a popular vote loss — precisely what ended up happening to Bush:

The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.

A few days before the 2000 election, the Bush team started assembling people to deal with a possible problem: what if Bush won the popular vote but Gore carried the Electoral College. They decided on, and were prepared to begin, a big campaign to convince the citizenry that it would be wrong for Gore to take office under those circumstances. And they intended to create a tidal wave of pressure on Gore’s electors to vote for Bush, which arguably the electors as free agents have the authority to do. In the event, of course, the result was precisely the opposite, and immediately the Bushies launched into precisely the opposite argument: the Electoral College is a vital part of our Constitution, electors are not free agents, threatening the Electoral College result would be thumbing your nose at the founding fathers, and so on. Gore, by the way, never did challenge the Electoral College, although some advisers urged him to do so.

Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000 election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt. It was reported before the election and is uncontested, but no one seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that. And no electoral reform can fix this problem. Intellectual dishonesty can’t be banned or regulated or “capped” like money. The only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That’s democracy.

It’s amazing that almost no one brings up that Bush plan, which directly contradicts everything they did in Florida.

As far as Kinsley’s larger argument, dishonesty can also be brought under control if the media doesn’t sanction it. In particular, as he writes, we need to take on the kinds of dishonesty that fall short of outright lying. As we argued in All the President’s Spin, the press is terrible at fact-checking that sort of spin, and the Bush administration has ruthlessly exploited its weakness.