Spurning facts can be a dangerous game when played by the president of the United States. It starts when he rejects hard evidence because it conflicts with a policy he wants to pursue. Flaunting of reality likely dooms that policy to failure.
The next dangerous step is refusing to abandon the policy when the facts warrant it in that his main option is to deceive the public by claiming success whatever the facts. Continuing to use deception over time can produce a national disaster.
Nowhere is this process clearer than in the case of George W. Bush's tax policies based on the ideological belief that tax cuts are always good and tax increases bad. Bush's deceptive practices used to defend his tax dogma moved from misleading statements to misinformation, suppression, and lies as the harm increased. The wrongheaded notion of the wonders of tax cuts continues to bedevil the nation.
John McCain started his presidential campaign where Bush left off as he employed blatant lies to defend Bush's tax cut ideology. Thus, the disconnect between policies and facts continues with McCain as does the debasement of American politics. We return now to 2001 in considering how the Bush years shaped McCain.
Bush is the first American president to use deception in its various forms as the main means of communication in selling and defending his policies. Only Bush has repeatedly duped the public by denying it the needed information required for informed judgment about major policy choices.
Other presidents have employed deception. Lyndon Johnson used it to push the United States more deeply into Vietnam. Richard Nixon tried to cover up breaking into the national headquarters of the Democratic Party. As Elliot Richardson wrote: "In a sense, all the abuses of Watergate have been abuses of information: its theft, distortion, fabrication, misuse, misrepresentation, concealment, and suppression."
Propaganda has long been accepted as a legitimate means of deceiving an enemy in wartime including the Cold War. When used as a weapon on this country's citizens, however, presidential abuses of information undermine the fundamental principle of a free people--informed consent. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, wrote in 1822: "A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is a Prologue to a Farce or Tragedy."
Efforts by the federal government to mislead the nation's citizens are especially dangerous because this deception can go beyond particular information to debase all information. Government deception makes it more difficult to determine what information is sound and what is fictitious, and hence harder to be an informed citizen.
Bush employed deception in a massive propaganda operation from the start of his presidency. It needs noting that the deception cannot be excused or rationalized as a product of anger over 9/11. Bush's nationally televised speech before Congress on February 27, 2001 to introduce his 2001 income tax cut legislation employed deception over six months before the horrendous attacks.
That the administration had purposely misled the American people quickly became clear. One of the authors (Williams) observed in a March 16, 2001 Seattle Times column that what stood out in the speech can be labeled the "Big Lie," a statement that is technically true but is intended to deceive people.
A critical example is Bush's statement that, "People with the smallest incomes will get the highest percentage reductions." Those with the smallest incomes generally would receive a higher percentage reduction because they paid little in income taxes. However, low-income taxpayers in Bush's plan would have their taxes reduced by a few hundred dollars, while tens of thousands of dollars would be loped off the taxes of the highest earners.
Bush's Big Lie trumped the fact that the highest earners got the cake; other taxpayers the crumbs. Former New York Times tax expert David Cay Johnston has pointed out that Bush's income tax cuts, "now levy the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich."
The benefits to the rich were astoundingly large. A May 2008 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report indicated that the average value in 2007 of tax cuts enacted since 2001 was $20 (not a misprint) for the lowest 20 percent of households, $740 for the middle 20 percent, $45,000 for the top 1 percent, and $120,000 for those earning a million dollars or more a year. On average the latter received over 162 times as much as the average benefit of the middle group.
The administration's adroit use of deception to defend its flawed policies succeeded in covering over the destructive impact. Yet plenty of sound evidence showed that Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts produced large yearly budget deficits and below average growth in GDP and capital investment compared to the average for earlier postwar presidencies.
Bush's failed fiscal policies became major factors over time in taking the federal government to the brink of insolvency, reducing the middle class to its direst straits since the Great Depression, and pushing the world into the worst financial market crisis in the postwar era.
Bad as the economic damage from the administration's pervasive deception has been, it may not have caused the greatest harm. The deception that became a way of life in the Bush administration masked how much the nation's capacity to govern had diminished and undermined American constitutional democracy.
President Bush immediately established a small, insulated inner circle of top advisors who ignored the modern decision-making practices developed and used after the end of World War II. Bush's primitive decision-making structure lacked the capacity to develop sound policy information and analyses to support reasoned deliberations about policy choices.
The Bush administration operated with the lethal combination of the most powerful propaganda operation and the poorest quality of governance in the postwar era. Its inability to govern has much reduced institutional capacity throughout the federal government. Seldom is the direct link so clear between the administration's gross mismanagement that included increasingly destructive deception and the horrendous policy debacles that followed.
One of the great ironies of the Bush administration is that its goal of turning other countries into democracies like the United States inflicted more damage to the nation's democratic structure than any other post-World War II administration and likely any presidency in American history.
Bush's inner circle praised American democracy and condemned dictators in countries like North Korea and Iran. Yet its members' interpretations of what democracy meant were in direct conflict with basic concepts in the American Constitution such as separation of powers, co-equal branches, and the informed consent of the people.
The Preamble of the Constitution starts: "We the people of the United States... ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The government had been created expressly to serve its citizens.
Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed this notion at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863 when he said, "That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Yet constitutional democracy can perish if the government in power uses deceit to thwart the American people's informed consent.
Bush's use of deception as one of his primary tools of governance has robbed citizens of the needed popular information. His presidency has greatly diminished American constitutional governance through his deception that helped sell and sustain his wrongheaded economic ideology.
Belief in the great power of tax cuts still lives and has plagued the 2008 presidential election. John McCain uses deception as his weapon of choice on the campaign trail to defend Bush's tax cuts and challenge those of Barack Obama that focus on aiding citizens that lost out under Bush. In the process, McCain has morphed into George W. Bush to become a serial liar.
During his two terms as president, Bush's fiscal policies that he sold and defended by deception have put the United States on a fast track toward economic disaster. All of the evidence leads the authors to fear that a third term of such policies in McCain's hands will finish the job.
Walter Williams is Distinguished Fellow, Center for American Politics and Public Policy and Professor Emeritus, University of Washington at Seattle. Bryan D. Jones is the JJ Pickle Chair of Congressional Studies, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. They are coauthors of The Politics of Bad Ideas (Pearson Longman, 2008).