{"id":6528,"date":"2006-02-03T14:06:23","date_gmt":"2006-02-03T19:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6528"},"modified":"2006-02-03T14:06:23","modified_gmt":"2006-02-03T19:06:23","slug":"a-credibility-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-credibility-gap\/","title":{"rendered":"A credibility gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gallup released a poll today showing that 53% of Americans believe the Bush administration “deliberately misled<\/a> 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<\/a> found the same percentage (53%) said they do not consider the president trustworthy.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On a related note, Dan Froomkin thinks this entire issue — Bush’s credibility — should be a far bigger deal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[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. […]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, he could. Froomkin is soliciting readers<\/a> to submit some ideas for interview questions for Bush on the subject of his credibility. What would you ask?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}