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TALLAHASSEE - Trying to put the best face on the worst of October surprises, Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that Iraq has been "a remarkable success story to date when you look at what's been accomplished overall." That was just after some 40 of our Iraqi allies were massacred and nearly 400 tons of high explosive were found to be missing.
Did he expect anyone to believe him?
Another question cut from the same cloth is why an administration that has managed so many things so badly, including a war launched on false pretenses, is even in a close race.
The answer to both is an old truism: the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed. The German dictator who was its most cynical practitioner attributed it to the goodness of most people. Since they would be ashamed to tell big lies themselves, it doesn't occur to them that anyone else would.
The goodness of the American people - was Jimmy Carter the last to extol that? - is taking a frightful beating this season. You can't turn on the TV, read your newspaper, open your mailbox or even answer your telephone without seeing or hearing something that is either an outright lie or a grain of truth that has been distorted beyond recognition.
I can't recall a campaign that has made so many people so angry and at the same time has left so many still undecided so late.
Part of that phenomenon is that as of of Thursday there were 10 newspapers that supported Bush in 2000 but can't bring themselves to recommend him or anyone now. (Thirty-eight have switched to Kerry, according to Editor & Publisher, with six Gore papers going for George Bush.)
In that regard, Tampa Tribune publisher and president Gil Thelen tells me that I got it "dead wrong" last week when I surmised that they had wanted to endorse Kerry only to be overruled by Media General headquarters. He says it was the editorial board's own decision to recommend no one. Richmond knew but did not interfere. That was very good news for those of us who worry about the future of American journalism under chain ownership.
But of course newspapers don't vote; people do. If the choice comes easily for liberals this time, it doesn't for many conservatives.
"I suspect the country has not been so polarized since the Revolution and one man and his team can take full responsibility," one wrote in a personal e-mail to me last week.
But that doesn't necessarily mean he's voting for John Kerry. "I have never voted for a Democrat in the presidential race," he said. "What to do?"
If that were my quandary, I think Cheney's remark would decide it for me. An administration that claims success for such a plain disaster can't be trusted with anything.
It's not that they lied us into war, which hasn't been proven. I think they believed what they were saying. The trouble was that they believed what they wanted to believe and disbelieved the evidence, such as the actual purpose for those aluminum tubes, that didn't support what they wanted to do. The Congress, poor trusting souls, couldn't believe that the White House would mislead them so.
The unforgivable part is that they insist it was a success, which means they have learned nothing and don't intend to. Even worse, they think they can make the people believe that it was a success, which means that if they weren't lying then, they are lying now.
The closest presidential election since 1880, in terms of the popular vote, was John F. Kennedy's disputable victory over Richard Nixon in 1960. Kennedy's plurality was a mere 118,574 votes, two-tenths of a percent. If fewer than 27,000 had gone the other way in five of the closest states, Nixon would have won an electoral majority.
Unlike Bush, Kennedy did not try to govern as if he had won in a landslide, nor did his supporters expect him to. Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins, who had chaired the Democratic convention, opined that the returns reflected "a rather great feeling of satisfaction on the part of the American people."
And when JFK blundered by allowing the Bay of Pigs invasion - air cover couldn't have saved it, the Cuban people weren't ready - he admitted to his mistake and learned from it.
What Collins said in 1960 was true also of the American mood four years ago, when Bush was elected with 537,179 fewer popular votes than the incumbent vice president. Expecting a middle-of-the-road administration, Americans got instead one whose ends-justify-the-means arrogance, especially toward the treatment of prisoners suspected (and presumed guilty) of terrorism, would be more appropriate to a South American military junta. When treaties as hugely important as the Geneva Conventions no longer matter, what else does?
"Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country," wrote Judge Gerald Tjoflat, a conservative Floridian, in a recent 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the rights of peaceful protesters.
It cannot be the day that truth perished, either.