One trick any magician learns early on is misdirection. Get the audience to look at your left hand while you do something with your right. Make sure they concentrate on what’s going on here while something secret happens over there.The economy is stuck in neutral. Jobs are not being created. The deficit is skyrocketing. Consumer confidence is plummeting. Business investment is shrinking. Meanwhile, Americans are dying in Iraq, and nobody is quite sure why we went there in the first place. We have fewer and fewer friends around the world, and more and more enemies. The Secretary of Homeland Security says that despite the unconstitutional "U.S.A. Patriot Act", all the billions spent, and capture of Saddam Hussein, America is no safer than we were a year ago (could Howard Dean have been right?). And the Bush team, nearly a year after the invasion of Iraq began, has found no sign of WMD.
Or have they?
The Bush reelection campaign has a war chest of unprecedented size. They can easily spend over $100 million between now and Labor Day. It's apparently not enough. The president has been on several fundraising swings lately, like a kid with a fistful of French fries (excuse me, "freedom fries") grabbing even more with the other hand.
They're also apparently the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Just last week, the administration got hit hard on several fronts. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson was derided publicly by a Republican congresswoman on drug reimportation from Canada. President Bush appeared to come out against extending the assault weapons ban and background checks (he didn't, exactly, but the difference is pretty subtle). John Ashcroft's Department of "Justice", in a desperate attempt to force doctors to turn over abortion records, filed a brief in court saying that federal law "does not recognize a physician-patient privilege".
And then there were those campaign ads. The Bush reelection team, facing poll after poll that show him losing, spent what used to be considered a fortune on four television ads. These ads are theoretically designed to show a kinder, gentler Dubya who is also a true Commander in Chief. Two of them feature post-9/11 shots of the World Trade Center, and one actually shows the coffin of a firefighter killed in the attack.
But the result has been drastically different. Families of 9/11 victims, and firefighters who survived, are speaking out on national television. They are angry, and rightfully so, that the Bush administration should try to benefit politically from a national disaster they did nothing to prevent.
So what was the Bush team thinking? Perhaps they've turned to the old magicians' trick. Perhaps, after a year of failure at finding WMD in Iraq, they've created their own. Only this, time, "WMD" stands for "Weapons of Mass Distraction."
Copyright 2004, Dan Jacoby
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