A credibility gap

February 3, 2006

Gallup released a poll today showing that 53% of Americans believe the Bush administration “deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” with 46% disagreeing. A year ago, these numbers were reversed. Similarly, the latest WaPo/ABC poll found the same percentage (53%) said they do not consider the president trustworthy.

It’s taken a while, but it seems questions about the president’s honesty, or lack thereof, have reached majority status. For all the president’s policy troubles, if the electorate just doesn’t trust Bush, his chances of regaining lost political support are slim.

On a related note, Dan Froomkin thinks this entire issue — Bush’s credibility — should be a far bigger deal.

[W]hen Bush faces the press corps — either en masse, in a news conference, or in the occasional sit-down interview — the central issue of credibility typically goes unexplored. […]

It seems to me the trick would be for the next news outlet that gets a sit-down with the president to devote an entire interview — a la Oprah v. Frey — to the issue of credibility. And to be prepared with quotes and clips — a la Stewart — to force Bush to directly address the various inconsistent, misleading, or outright false statements that have peppered his presidency.

Such an interview could still be wide ranging, of course. It could cover the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; his descriptions of the run-up to war; his views of progress in Iraq; his statements — and then silence — about the CIA leak investigation; his concealment of — and then questionable assertions about — domestic spying; his promises for New Orleans; his stonewalling on the Abramoff lobbying scandal. I could go on.

Indeed, he could. Froomkin is soliciting readers to submit some ideas for interview questions for Bush on the subject of his credibility. What would you ask?

your hot link is to the wrong article – it’s to the editor + publisher piece, not froomkin.

that said, i’d throw in some questions about why he keeps saying that social security is going “bankrupt.” How, i would ask him, can a pay-as-you-go program with its own specific tax to support it, ever go “bankrupt?”

  • your hot link is to the wrong article

    Fixed.

    that said, i’d throw in some questions about why he keeps saying that social security is going “bankrupt.”

    Good one. I’d like to hear the answer to that one, too.

  • his changing standards on “getting rid of” anyone in his administration involved in the outing of Valerie Plame? (a slightly more detailed version of Froomkin’s CIA leak question)

    comparing his “I’m a uniter not a divider” speech with clips of him throwing the reddest of red meat to his base, and bashing Ds – or declining to distance himself from “swiftboating” of any and all who disagree?

    your examples from today and yesterday about his SOTU energy comments versus what his staff says or his budget does?

    his first campaign theme of “restoring honor and dignity to the White House” with all of the ethical lapses, indictments, investigations, ties to dirty money, evasion of open records laws, etc.?

    geez, there are so many i could go all day. . .

  • He is too ignorant and unintelligent to speak anywhere without a script. He’s a mindless puppet serving corporate interests.
    He is too much of a coward to show himself and too inarticulate to answer any questions not already given him in advance. Remember, his IQ is somewhere in the low 90’s. I doubt he could read the US Constitution with any comprehension, let alone answer any real questions.

  • I would love to ask him if he still thinks it’s funny that no WMDs were found in Iraq, as he did during his comedy routine at the 2004 White House Correspondents dinner.

  • I’d ask why he hasn’t commissioned a group of
    the finest, most respected scientists to report
    on the global warming and peak oil theories.
    I’d ask how he can ignore these issues for eight
    years when the consequences of either or both
    would be catastrophic for the nation and the
    world.

  • SOMEBODY should be asking what prescription drugs – antidepressants, pain killers antipsychotics, etc. – he is currently taking. Really . . .

  • Why does he intially oppose and stonewall independent commissions and Congressional hearings — then embrace them as if he was the one to call for them?

  • What did he do with his “bin Laden, Dead or Alive,” posters once he concluded that capturing bin Laden didn’t matter?

  • Here’s one: Why won’t Bush eveer agree to be asked anything other than fawning Gannon/Guckert questions in front of a preselected audience? In other words, he’ll never submit to any real interview and he’ll never be asked any probing questions, so why think them up? Even Nixon appreciated the fact that everything blows over and George has thrived so far on that premise. By the time the poll numbers get anywhere near impeachment levels, this abomination’s term will be over and the country will never recover, I fear. The real question I have is, how can ANYONE think Bush has any credibility by now, after all the lies, the incompetence, the corruption and the disasters. And yet, still a hefty percentage do.

  • why does bush get a pass on his drug usage? clinton took a toke and gets reamed, bush was allegedly a coke whore so again why the free pass?

  • Oh my God!
    Impossible!
    Do you have any idea what the terrorists will do if the US President is revealed to be a vain, strutting, ignorant, petty spokesmodel for an agenda actually driven by less presentable, and far scarier men?

    (Nothing they’re not already doing, is my guess.)

  • When is he going to do a Teddy Roosevelt and go Rough Rider on the hybrids with the Minutemen? I’ve got my cricket bat ready.

  • At a 2004 campaign appearance, why did he volunteer the “fact” that the government gets a warrant whenever it engages in domestic wiretapping?

    How does he justify his repeated statements that congressional Democrats saw the same pre-war intelligence he did?

    If the economy is doing as well as he insists, and there’s no longer any risk that we’ll pay down the federal debt too fast (LOL), what is the justification for more tax cuts?

    How are we ever going to get the deficit under control? If tax increases are off the table, what, specifically, should we cut?

    Precisely which Democrats is he accusing of being “isolationist”? Name names.

    How many family farms have been lost due to the “death tax”?

  • Linkmeister,

    W thought that Blair would be able to get Bono to pilot the U-2 aircraft painted in UN colors and flown over Iraq. In W’s mind, this would have had the multi-favorable result of getting rid of 1)an outspoken opponent, 2) an outdated organization and 3) a tyrant that tried to kill his daddy.

    As for my question:

    Does Cheney use strings to control you or does he have to actually put his hand up your ass?

  • Maybe a question along the lines of “have you done anything during your presidency that troubled your conscience?” Maybe this would help people see the substance, or lack thereof, of the man.

  • how about a question about his supposed support for the troops contrasted with the recent pentagon report that the lack of body armor caused more marine fatalites than necessary? complete with video clips of course, ala The Daily Show.

  • In his first televised address to the nation on August 9, 2001, Bush looked us in the eye and said that, “more than sixty genetically diverse” embryonic stem cell lines would be eligible for federal research funding.

    I am the father of a now eight year old daughter who has suffered with type 1 diabetes since she was thirteen months old and therefore I have been very active in the politics of stem cell since 1999. On August 9, 2001, no one I knew who was knowledgeable about the science or politics of stem cell thought that there were any more then a dozen or so embryonic stem cell lines which would be eligible under Bush’s new rule.

    But that night I believed that there was no way the President would have spent months studying this issue, as was reported in the media and as WH officials, including the Vice President, informed people lobbying on our behalf and then blatantly lied about an objective fact that could be proved or disproved by a mathematical count. On that night I was overjoyed to believe that much scientific investigation must have been going on in secret and the government was now collecting and organizing that research under the auspices of the NIH. Now we all know that only about a dozen eligible lines ever existed.

    That man lied to the parents of children with chronic and life threatening conditions. To the best of my knowledge he has never been held to account.

  • Bush would never sit still for such an interview. Any even moderately robust questioning on this subject and he would do a Novak and walk out. Do you remember how ticked he got over a polite-but-persistent interview on irish tv last year? He couldn’t possibly handle it.

    However, since this is about hypotheticals, what I’d like to see is have the interviewer go through a quickie “greatest hits” of major W lies, and then ask “Given that you have been repeatedly dishonest on all of these subjects, why should the american people believe anything you say in the future?”

  • “In your single minded devotion to strengthening the Office of the President, as well as preserving Republican power, do you ever worry that the reaction to all the apparent mis-steps of your administration, tied to the budding corruption scandal currently engulfing the Republican Congress, will have the opposite effect?”

    “Or was it your intention to be such a disaster, that the political pendulum swings so far in the other direction that it swings back with even greater force, as in the Nixon to Carter to Reagan continuum?”

  • How do you sleep at night, knowing what you are soon to be remembered as the most disasterous president of all time?

    silly question….
    Actually after you take over country with rigged elections, martial law and state media control, then you will be able to write your own glowing version of history for the universal ” no child left behind” mind control schools, we will read you glorious biography in mandatory study groups, and we will all turn out for torch light parades in our partiotic uniforms on your birthday.

  • In a January 2001interview, Laura Bush said that she supported a woman’s right to choose. I’d ask George if he has been able to convince the First Lady that killing unborn babies is wrong.

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