National Journal’s Carl Cannon has written a useful piece on presidential lies for The Atlantic. The distinction he makes between personal falsehoods and “governing lies” is especially important (it echoes a point we made in All the President’s Spin):

Some falsehoods — like many campaign lies — are relatively harmless; they may soil an opponent’s résumé or polish one’s own, but their consequences are slight. Deceptions to promote or protect a policy or presidential action — call them governing lies — are more consequential, and it is by their consequences that [presidents] should be judged

Still, I would argue that Cannon’s focus is too narrow; we frequently cannot prove that a president is intentionally deceiving the public, but misleading statements matter regardless of whether they are intentional or not. In addition, the administration specializes in half-truths that leave an incorrect impression rather than statements that are completely false, as we noted. (For both reasons, we set aside the debate over what is and is not a lie in ATPS, as we explained in the introduction.)

Cannon also hypothesizes that “although statements made by Bush as president have proven to be untrue, Bush generally believed they were true when he made them” in a query to the author David Corn. But he fails to consider the most important case — the “trifecta” anecdote justifying the return to budget deficits which we recount at length in the book. Here is our summary from the introduction:

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 no — Bush continued to repeat the “trifecta” story for months after it had been debunked.

It’s worth noting that Bush variously described the questioner as “somebody,” “a fellow,” “a reporter,” “the guy,” “they,” “one of the reporters,” and “a male reporter” (see Appendix C). He also repeatedly asserted that the discussion took place in Chicago (though no proof has ever surfaced to justify that claim) and claimed that he “told the American people” about his pledge. Could Bush possibly believe that his anecdote was accurate as he repeated it almost twenty times?

Finally, Cannon offers an accusation of dishonesty that appears to be incorrect, writing that “Al Gore told a labor crowd that his mother used to lull him to sleep when he was a baby with ‘Look for the Union Label’ (a ditty written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven years old).” But as Bob Somerby pointed out, Gore said afterward that he’d been joking about the song — a claim that was corroborated by (a) the fact that his audience laughed at his statement and (b) the fact that a longtime family friend was quoted six weeks earlier saying that “Al jokes that when he was a little boy, I used to sing him the ‘Union Label’ song.’”