"Trust Is Like Virginity"

If anyone doesn't want to believe the negative things I have to say about George W. Bush, fine. Don't take my word for it. Instead, read today's excellent column from Philadelphia Inquirer political analyst Dick Polman, to which I have very little to add. He gets paid to do that sort of thing, while I attempt to do it pretty much as a hobby (I can think of better things to do in my life, actually, but I believe this is necessary).

Bush's urgent campaign: Save his presidency

By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst

Let's put it in Texas terms: President Bush is trying to blast his way out of Credibility Gap.

He is plummeting in the polls, with still no indication that he has hit bottom. A solid majority of Americans now give him the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon - a verdict that seemed unimaginable when he was reelected one year ago - and, even more ominously, he is now judged by the majority to be an untrustworthy leader who lured the nation into war on false pretenses.

So it's no surprise that the Bush administration is in campaign mode, employing all facets of the far-flung Republican communications apparatus, in a perhaps futile attempt to rebuild the Bush image, assail his critics as spineless flip-floppers, and defend his war to an increasingly skeptical electorate.

Everybody from the top leaders (including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) to the grassroots bloggers (who are trying to persuade radio stations to play a new pro-war song titled "Bush Was Right") has been enlisted in the cause. The goal is not merely to boost wartime morale on the home front. Ultimately, the goal is to save the Bush presidency.

"Bush Was Right," huh? Gee, could this be another dimwitted production of "Move America Forward" or some other collection of sycophants under the watchful eye of Frank Luntz and the RNC?

Actually, if anyone who may be reading this knows how I can track down a copy, please let me know, because I would be grateful if I had the opportunity to eviscerate it.

That's how conservative leaders view this historic moment. As Iraq hawk William Kristol put it the other day: "If the American people really come to a settled belief that Bush lied us into war, his presidency will be over. He won't have the basic level of trust needed to govern." And David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, contended: "The Iraq war is the Bush administration... . The President has to defend, champion and explain the war - or else be destroyed by it."

But Frum fears that Bush's unpopularity "will be very hard to reverse." Indeed, Bush's predicament is dire, because he first ran for president on a vow that he, unlike Bill Clinton, would not become trapped in Credibility Gap. Character was Bush's calling card. He promised that he would "restore honesty" to the White House; yet today, nearly six in 10 Americans tell pollsters that Bush is untrustworthy.

It may be too late for Bush to win them back. As a number of historians and pollsters contended the other day, most Americans by now have developed a shorthand about Iraq: Bush cited weapons of mass destruction as his prime rationale for war; then we went to war and didn't find any. This shorthand has been embraced by swing-voting independents; according to pollster John Zogby, only 28 percent now side with the President.

Zogby said by phone: "Trust is like virginity. Once you've lost it, you don't get it back. That's what happened to Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam, and Nixon during Watergate. And Bush doesn't have much wiggle room to improve his status anyway, because, at this point, half the nation already hates his guts."

Is that all? What's the "over-under" on that one, I wonder?

George Edwards, a Texas-based presidential historian who is finishing a book on Bush, said: "It's very difficult to recover after most people have already formed a negative conclusion about you. That's why the White House is so desperate to strike back. I doubt there are any magic words he can utter that would change their minds. After five years, people feel they know this guy by now."

But David Winston, a Republican pollster who often works with the White House, believes that the pivotal independents might swing Bush's way again - if the seeds of democracy sprout in Iraq.

"Independents are willing to support the ideal of establishing democracy," he said. "They want to be supportive. But instead they see significant casualties, and they don't see definite success points. So they're being somewhat negative, and that is understandable....

"But next month [during Iraqi parliamentary elections], the President will have an opportunity to say, 'This is a crucial step forward.' So what's coming down the pike looks positive. It's just a matter of getting to that point."

That kind of argument might not be enough to comfort even the Republicans; in a new poll of 326 registered Republicans, sponsored by the nonpartisan Political Hotline, only 37 percent strongly approve of Bush's performance - down from 59 percent eight months ago.

In the red state of Arizona, Republican congressman J.D. Hayworth was asked the other day whether he would welcome Bush's help on the stump; he replied, "In a word, no." And last Tuesday, Senate Republicans rebuked the White House by requesting in an amendment that Bush's war team become more accountable to the chamber.

Robert Dallek, a major Lyndon Johnson biographer, said: "The Senate's action was only symbolic, but it was another nail in Bush's coffin. Republicans know that if they're caught in Iraq next year with no measurable progress, there could be a sea change in the 2006 congressional elections."

Given all this restiveness about Bush, it's debatable whether he can win back the American majority by shifting the focus to his critics - and assailing them as weak-kneed opportunists who are endangering the troops. That's a big component of the current PR campaign; last Tuesday, for instance, talking points were circulated at a Senate Republican luncheon; by 11:56 a.m., the document was posted on Spectator.org, a conservative Web site.

The tactic was vividly employed late Thursday, after conservative Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania - a powerful backroom operator, stalwart hawk, ex-Marine, Vietnam vet, and recipient of the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts - called for U.S. troop withdrawals. Within hours, the White House was equating Murtha with Hollywood lefty Michael Moore, and Redstate.org, a prominent conservative blog, was dismissing Murtha as "a back-bench nobody... a second-rate congressman."

As I said about a week or so ago, I could fill this site with all kinds of content if I weren't constricted by something that approximates the truth. And I have no doubt that these fine, upstanding Americans at redstate.org are completely prepared to communicate these disgusting sentiments to Rep. Murtha in person.

It's also debatable whether Cheney is the ideal person to employ this tactic. It is true, as Cheney points out, that some Senate Democrats attacking the war in 2005 were hawks back in 2002. (Case in point: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, now the focus of a GOP TV commercial.) But new polls show that Cheney is viewed favorably by only 27 percent of Americans - largely because, on the war, he too has apparently become trapped in Credibility Gap.

Cheney is the guy who repeatedly insisted that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with an agent for Saddam Hussein - even though the Czechs, the CIA and the FBI told the White House, long before the war, that no such meeting had occurred; in 2004, Cheney denied on CBS that he had ever described the Atta story as "pretty well confirmed" - even though he was captured on tape by NBC using those exact words in 2001. And Cheney maintained in 2002 that there was "irrefutable evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program, even though, long before the war, the Energy and State Departments had concluded otherwise.

For those reasons, Dallek believes that the Bush attacks on wobbly Democrats will be dismissed by most Americans as "white noise." Some Republicans are urging radical steps; Ken Duberstein, a former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan, has even suggested that Bush apologize for missteps, recalling that a Reagan apology for the Iran-contra scandal "was vital to repairing his relationship with the public."

Edwards, the presidential historian, doesn't see that happening: "Reagan's situation was different. There was no broad support among his followers for the concept of trading arms for hostages. Whereas if Bush came out and said, 'We screwed up,' yes, that might appeal to independents - but it would infuriate his conservative supporters, who don't think he has screwed up and don't want their President to say Iraq is a failure."

Even Winston, the Republican pollster with White House ties, suggests that the road to political recovery won't be smooth: "Remember, at the end of World War II, that we reached Berlin? Well, in this war, we don't have milestones like that. In the 21st century, with the new kinds of wars that we're fighting, it's important for the President to define the new kinds of milestones. It's a learning process. But that's the responsibility of leadership."

And that's coming from a conservative pollster. Winston had better hope that Karl Rove doesn't read that, or else Winston will get sent back to the same factory that another character named Winston was sent to in the book "1984."

Bush is a "one-trick pony." All he and his people know is "attack, attack, attack." They've lived by that, politically speaking, for far too long. And now, they're dying by it.