Former Vice President Al Gore
August 7, 2003
The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me – not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.
Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk.
The way we went to war in Iraq illustrates this larger problem. Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn’t really happen with this war – not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm’s way.
I’m convinced that one of the reasons that we didn’t have a better public debate before the Iraq War started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong.
In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:
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** Now, of course, everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong.**
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In other words, when you put it all together, it was just one mistaken impression after another. Lots of them.
** And it’s not just in foreign policy. ** The same thing has been happening in economic policy, where we’ve also got another huge and threatening mess on our hands. I’m convinced that one reason we’ve had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted, including:
(1) The tax cuts would unleash a lot of new investment that would create lots of new jobs.
(2) We wouldn’t have to worry about a return to big budget deficits – because all the new growth in the economy caused by the tax cuts would lead to a lot of new revenue.
(3) Most of the benefits would go to average middle-income families, not to the wealthy, as some partisans claimed.
Unfortunately, here too, every single one of these impressions turned out to be wrong. Instead of creating jobs, for example, we are losing millions of jobs --** net losses for three years in a row. That hasn’t happened since the Great Depression ** .
And of course the budget deficits are already the biggest ever - with the worst still due to hit us. As a percentage of our economy, we’ve had bigger ones – **but these are by far the most dangerous we’ve ever had for two reasons: first, they’re not temporary; they’re structural and long-term; second, they are going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby-boomer retirement surge starts. **
** Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.
The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, “This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history…This is not normal government policy.” In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America’s future, Akerloff added, “What we have here is a form of looting.” **
Ominously, the capital markets have just pushed U.S. long-term mortgage rates higher soon after the Federal Reserve Board once again reduced discount rates. Monetary policy loses some of its potency when fiscal policy comes unglued. And after three years of rate cuts in a row, Alan Greenspan and his colleagues simply don’t have much room left for further reductions.
** It seems obvious that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first Pre-emptive War in U.S. history should have been debated more thoroughly in the Congress, covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn’t happen, and in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes – and the die – were cast.
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** And I’ve just about concluded that the real problem may be the President himself and that next year we ought to fire him and get a new one. **
Earlier, I mentioned the feeling many have that something basic has gone wrong. Whatever it is, I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future – allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.
That last point is worth highlighting. Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we’re all used to that. I’ve even been guilty of it myself on occasion. **But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.
Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem – the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy. **
Americans have always believed that we the people have a right to know the truth and that the truth will set us free. The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth – and a shared respect for the Rule of Reason as the best way to establish the truth.
** The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process, and I think it’s partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren’t very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it. They and the members of groups that belong to their ideological coalition are true believers in each other’s agendas. **
There are at least a couple of problems with this approach:
First, powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who work their way into the inner circle – with political support or large campaign contributions – are able to add their own narrow special interests to the list of favored goals without having them weighed against the public interest or subjected to the rule of reason.** And the greater the conflict between what they want and what’s good for the rest of us, the greater incentive they have to bypass the normal procedures and keep it secret. **
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Secondly, when leaders make up their minds on a policy without ever having to answer hard questions about whether or not it’s good or bad for the American people as a whole, they can pretty quickly get into situations where it’s really uncomfortable for them to defend what they’ve done with simple and truthful explanations. That’s when they’re tempted to fuzz up the facts and create false impressions. And when other facts start to come out that undermine the impression they’re trying to maintain, they have a big incentive to try to keep the truth bottled up if – they can – or distort it.
** For example, a couple of weeks ago, the White House ordered its own EPA to strip important scientific information about the dangers of global warming out of a public report. Instead, the White House substituted information that was partly paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. This week, analysts at the Treasury Department told a reporter that they’re now being routinely ordered to change their best analysis of what the consequences of the Bush tax laws are likely to be for the average person.
Here is the pattern that I see: the President’s mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America’s economy by his tax and budget proposals.
In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts – policies designed to benefit friends and supporters – and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.
The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which – in its purest form – is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible – except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle. **
For the same reasons they push the impression that government is bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What’s important to them is private interests. And what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth should be left alone, rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.
Perhaps the biggest false impression of all lies in the hidden social objectives of this Administration that are advertised with the phrase “compassionate conservatism” – which they claim is a new departure with substantive meaning. But in reality, to be compassionate is meaningless, if compassion is limited to the mere awareness of the suffering of others. The test of compassion is action. What the administration offers with one hand is the rhetoric of compassion; what it takes away with the other hand are the financial resources necessary to make compassion something more than an empty and fading impression.
Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.
** Whenever both houses of Congress are controlled by the President’s party, there is a danger of passivity and a temptation for the legislative branch to abdicate its constitutional role. If the party in question is unusually fierce in demanding ideological uniformity and obedience, then this problem can become even worse and prevent the Congress from properly exercising oversight. Under these circumstances, the majority party in the Congress has a special obligation to the people to permit full Congressional inquiry and oversight rather than to constantly frustrate and prevent it. **
Whatever the reasons for the recent failures to hold the President properly accountable, America has a compelling need to quickly breathe new life into our founders’ system of checks and balances – because some extremely important choices about our future are going to be made shortly, and it is imperative that we avoid basing them on more false impressions.
One thing the President could do to facilitate the restoration of checks and balances is to stop blocking reasonable efforts from the Congress to play its rightful role. For example, he could order his appointees to cooperate fully with the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, headed by former Republican Governor Tom Kean. And he should let them examine how the White House handled the warnings that are said to have been given to the President by the intelligence community.
** Two years ago yesterday, for example, according to the Wall Street Journal, the President was apparently advised in specific language that Al Qaeda was going to hijack some airplanes to conduct a terrorist strike inside the U.S. **
I understand his concern about people knowing exactly what he read in the privacy of the Oval Office, and there is a legitimate reason for treating such memos to the President with care. But that concern has to be balanced against the national interest in improving the way America deals with such information. And the apparently chaotic procedures that were used to handle the forged nuclear documents from Niger certainly show evidence that there is room for improvement in the way the White House is dealing with intelligence memos. Along with other members of the previous administration, I certainly want the commission to have access to any and all documents sent to the White House while we were there that have any bearing on this issue. And President Bush should let the commission see the ones that he read too.
** After all, this President has claimed the right for his executive branch to send his assistants into every public library in America and secretly monitor what the rest of us are reading. That’s been the law ever since the Patriot Act was enacted. If we have to put up with such a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism prevention, surely he can find a way to let this National Commission know how he and his staff handled a highly specific warning of terrorism just 36 days before 9/11. **
** And speaking of the Patriot Act, the president ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he’s at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD “Total Information Awareness” program that’s right out of George Orwell’s 1984.
The administration hastened from the beginning to persuade us that defending America against terror cannot be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place them in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts. And that view is both wrong and fundamentally un-American. **
But the most urgent need for new oversight of the Executive Branch and the restoration of checks and balances is in the realm of our security, where the Administration is asking that we accept a whole cluster of new myths:
For example, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was an effort to strike a bargain between states possessing nuclear weapons and all others who had pledged to refrain from developing them. This administration has rejected it and now, incredibly, wants to embark on a new program to build a brand new generation of smaller (and it hopes, more usable) nuclear bombs. In my opinion, this would be true madness – and the point of no return to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty – even as we and our allies are trying to prevent a nuclear testing breakout by North Korea and Iran.
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The administration is now trying to give the impression that it is in favor of NATO and UN participation in such an effort. But it is not willing to pay the necessary price, which is support of a new UN Resolution and genuine sharing of control inside Iraq.
** If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a “healer, not a divider”, a president devoted first and foremost to “honor and integrity.” Yet far from uniting the people, the president’s ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of ‘civil cold war’ against those with whom they disagree.
And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:
For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military – as recently proven – and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.
So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent. **
** I believe that we must stand for a future in which the United States will again be feared only by its enemies; in which our country will again lead the effort to create an international order based on the rule of law; a nation which upholds fundamental rights even for those it believes to be its captured enemies; a nation whose financial house is in order; a nation where the market place is kept healthy by effective government scrutiny; a country which does what is necessary to provide for the health, education, and welfare of our people; a society in which citizens of all faiths enjoy equal standing; a republic once again comfortable that its chief executive knows the limits as well as the powers of the presidency; a nation that places the highest value on facts, not ideology, as the basis for all its great debates and decisions. **