Senior White House aide Dan Bartlett has been making the rounds on the TV talk shows this week, as part of the White House’s new offensive. On CNN yesterday morning, Bartlett repeated many of the predictable talking points, but one of his remarks deserves special attention.
Soledad O’Brien: Let’s talk a little bit about how all of this is coming or filtering down to the American public. Fifty-three percent of the people polled believe that the Bush administration deliberately tried to mislead the public on weapons of mass destruction. How big of a problem is this for you?
Bartlett: Well, this is the very point why President Bush spoke out on Friday. The Democratic Party and their liberal interest groups, outside interest groups, have spent millions upon millions of dollars advancing this false attack. (emphasis added)
On the substance, this is silly. White House critics have been making charges, but they’re anything but false.
But Bartlett’s point wasn’t just that we’re wrong, it’s that we’ve fooled the public with our multi-million-dollar attack campaign, which apparently has convinced a majority of the country that the president intentionally misled the electorate.
I don’t mean to sound coy, but when was the multi-million-dollar attack campaign? Did I miss the memo?
Putting aside for a moment that if the Dems and affiliated interest groups were spending “millions upon millions” I might have wanted a piece of the action, Bartlett appears to have imagined an expensive operation that never actually happened. I know one senior Bush advisor told Ron Suskind, “We create our own reality,” but this is just silly.
In Bartlett’s mind, where did these millions of dollars go? Has anyone seen a television ad arguing that Bush lied us into war? Ever?
It’s inconceivable to Bartlett and his WH colleagues that a majority of Americans believe that the president deliberately misled the nation. As the Bush gang sees it, Americans would never come to this conclusion all on their own, so when confronted with an inconvenient fact on CNN, it’s easier to point to an expensive (albeit imaginary) liberal attack campaign.
In one sense, this not only makes the White House out of touch, it makes them delusional. Americans didn’t need a coordinated movement to tell them Bush deceived; they just needed the facts.
That’s the funny thing about the truth — it’s free.