The Political Power of Truth

The Political Power of Truth
In recent years, failure and incompetence have been trounced by fear at the ballot box. But reality may be making a comeback.

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Feb. 6, 2006 issue - Strangely enough, we may look back on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006, as the day America found its moral compass, long buried at the bottom of the national dirty-linen bag. To win the midterm elections in November, the Democrats, whose motto might as well be "So Lame for So Long," will need to make sure the country focuses on that compass. By "moral" I'm not talking just about the "culture of corruption" in Washington. I'm talking about restoring a reasonable respect for at least minimum standards of truth.

As usual, the iconic moment took place not in the capital but at the heart of the entertainment-industrial complex—in this case, "Oprah." As it happens, I had just been to a screening the night before of "Thank You for Smoking," the forthcoming movie based on the Christopher Buckley book. The story is a hilarious and gloriously politically incorrect sendup of Washington's culture of shameless spin. But the theme depressed me. The satire was all too real—more proof that "truth" and "reality" were not just pretzels to be twisted for commercial purposes but thoroughly devalued coins of the media and political realm. James Frey and Doubleday were just the latest to lie all the way to the bank.

Until Thursday. Something happened in that studio that went beyond "good TV." Such is the power of Oprah that her moment of truth seemed to shame the American public into more respect for the actual facts of a situation. As if to prove the synchronicity, there was even some truth breaking out in the White House press room at the very moment Oprah was airing live in the Midwest. Reporters were pressing President Bush hard. James Gerstenzang of the Los Angeles Times asked Bush if he subscribed to President Nixon's notion that "when the president does it, it's not illegal." This was, indeed, the essence—the truth—of the president's position on the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping, which violates a 1978 law. Instead of the issue being framed in Karl Rove's phony and demagogic terms—where anyone who opposes the president's power grab doesn't want to protect us from Al Qaeda—we were edging our way toward a more accurate depiction of the controversy.

The news conference wasn't a complete truthfest. No reporter managed to ask the president about his statement of April 24, 2004, when Bush told a Buffalo audience: "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." This statement was false, and Bush knew it when he said it. The president lied in Buffalo, just as surely as Bill Clinton lied when he said: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Of course, Bush's Buffalo lie got a tiny fraction of the airplay of Clinton's Lewinsky lie.

The reason goes beyond Clinton's more colorful finger-wagging and sex with an intern. For four and a half years, Bush has politicized 9/11. His political motto has been "The only thing we have to use is fear itself." He was at it again last week, claiming with zero evidence that congressional scrutiny of the illegal NSA wiretapping would "give the enemy a heads-up on what we're doing." The media and the Democrats have both been intimidated by this devastatingly effective political strategy. It won the 2002 and 2004 elections for the Republicans and will continue to be their game plan for this November.

At first glance, making the Democrats seem soft on "terrorist surveillance" looks like another winner for the GOP. For Democrats to explain that they don't oppose all eavesdropping but object to the way it was done is a two-step answer that's too complicated to fly. A better approach would be to argue that Bush's NSA program has been a failure because it has threatened civil liberties and violated the law without doing anything to catch Osama bin Laden. The NSA obviously hasn't been eavesdropping on the right suspects.

This would fit with the Democrats' idea of fighting fear with failure—Bush's failure. New polls show his approval ratings in the dismal low 40s, with strong majorities believing he has failed on every score except keeping the country safe. (A majority of those polled not surprisingly support Bush on eavesdropping on terror suspects domestically. So do I. But when the constitutional questions are raised, his numbers drop.) To confront the security issue, Wesley Clark is chairing a PAC to help the nine Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans running for Congress as Democrats (versus one as a Republican). The idea is to adopt the Rovean strategy of attacking your opponent's strength.

Will it work? In recent years, failure and incompetence have been trounced by fear at the ballot box. The former is based on reason and an examination of the facts; the latter on emotion, with 9/11 as a trump card. But now reality may be making a comeback, as Bush's authority breaks into a million little pieces.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.