Faith, Power & Bush's American Way

CBS' Meyer On Two Kinds Of Critics Focused On Bush

(CBS)  Power Critics have no foundational text. But a fine example of the genre ran on the op-ed page of The Washington Post this week. Written by David Ignatius, its title, conveniently, was "Arrogance of Power."

Ignatius took the lack of prompt disclosure that the vice president accidentally shot a guy as the latest example of this regime’s contempt for the press, the public and open government. He boosts his case by citing the recent disclosures from Paul Pillar, who coordinated intelligence on the Middle East at the CIA form 2000 to 2005.

Pillar is the first high-up spy guy to really blow the whistle on the Bush White House, arguing it had decided to topple Saddam long before it saw any real intelligence, coerced the intel agencies to provide supporting material and systematically misled the public.

The administration acted as if was above the rules, laws and customs of government, just as it did when it ordered secret, warrantless wiretaps or interrogation techniques that were, in all but name, torture. "Let's say it plainly," he wrote, "This is the arrogance of power, and it has gone too far in the Bush White House."

My main problem here is that if this administration is arrogant, it came into office arrogant. As Pillar demonstrates (his article is a must-read), the administration was unshakably committed to war long before it had time to get power crazed. Team Bush has behaved consistently from the 2000 campaign, through the contested Battle of Florida, 9/11, war, the 2004 elections, and Katrina.

The creepy hubris of the Bush administration doesn’t seem especially unique to me.

At least since political consultants and fundraisers replaced political parties as the main engineers of elections, campaigns are a mix of conviction, substantive debate, marketing, polling, mergers and acquisitions and dirty tricks. As we know, campaigns have become permanent. Campaign mechanics dominated the Clinton White House and do so even more in Bush’s.

In campaigns, the standards of truthfulness and honesty are very low. They resemble the standards we've stooped to in corporate life, just as the techniques of campaigns imitate corporate ones.

We’ve come to expect companies to behave like Enron. We know they are full of smart, talented, highly trained people — most of them honest and good. But we don’t expect corporations to be altruistic, honest or transparent. We do expect books to be cooked and companies to pursue profit ruthlessly.

We expect regulators, tax agents and consumers to be deceived. We fill our gullets with their deceptive, manipulative advertising every day, without complaint. We let publicly traded companies pretend they "care" about us and maybe some believe it. We pretend reality television is more real than make believe. We hope markets work.

You can like the president and his policies and there’s still not much in this picture that doesn’t fit. There’s not much going on at the White House that isn’t business as usual at our other large institutions. Pundits and political scientists better figure that out soon and come up with some analytic tools.

Unfortunately, the Bush White House embodies the new American Way.

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Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.

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