The most underplayed story of the past month was the one about the events of Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein. There is no direct link between the two. This despite the fact that George W. Bush and the members of his administration have labored tirelessly to suggest one ever since they decided to invade Iraq. This despite the fact that they've been spectacularly successful at convincing American citizens of this fiction: More than two out of three believe the Iraqi leader was personally responsible for the terrorist attacks. "No evidence," the president finally was forced to admit publicly, that this was so.
The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune ran this extraordinary exercise in backpedaling on page one, where it belonged, but most other major papers buried it inside. The New York Times gave the story barely 300 words on page A22. The New York Post didn't mention it at all, perhaps because it happened soon after it turned out the link between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck had also been overstated.
Until now Bush has been uncommonly lucky. He has managed to turn a budget surplus into the most monumental deficit in history, in part because of ill-conceived tax cuts. He mounted a war in Iraq with the promise of weapons of mass destruction that have never materialized. He went after two sworn enemies, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and has managed to apprehend neither despite the most expensive intelligence-gathering apparatus on Earth. He used Saddam and al-Qaida in the same sentence in his State of the Union address, then had to confess that his innuendo had false underpinnings. He traveled the other day to the United Nations to ask for help from a body whose members he treated with utter, unilateral contempt not long ago.
To truly appreciate what a free pass the president has gotten, it is necessary only to imagine what the response from Republicans -- and reporters -- would have been if President Clinton had been responsible for one of those things, much less all of them. Clinton is one reason George W. has developed a Teflon coating slicker and thicker than that of Ronald Reagan. Bush's predecessor set the bar low: As long as the American people were convinced that the president was not having sex in the Oval Office, they felt mollified.
...
Maybe that's how presidential elections ought to be handled. Just a long checklist of positions: the minimum wage, free trade, tax policies, the use of force, the Supreme Court, entitlements. Then people, including us newspeople, wouldn't spend so much time on the candidates' chins or whether a spouse was going to be a liability and instead could concentrate on what matters. That is, finding a leader who is willing to take straightforward positions and support them with facts, not innuendo and suggestion and then the disingenuous coda "no evidence." Instead of a Teflon president with a phalanx of frontmen, the opposite is what is called for: a person willing to say, "The stuff sticks here."
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Oct/10042003/commenta/98497.asp
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