Defeats don’t matter

"Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Vice President Dick Cheney told then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill.

Cheney realizes, of course, that deficits do matter a great deal in terms of long-term interest rates, economic growth and the tax burden on future generations and on working Americans who must pay to service this growing debt. What he seems to have meant is that deficits don't matter politically.

The two-part lesson Cheney seems to have learned here is: 1) if you never take responsibility, you will never be held accountable; and 2) it doesn't matter if the actual world around you is going to hell, as long as it doesn't affect your standing in the polls.

"Deficits don't matter" because even though very, very large, very, very long-term deficits are a very, very Bad Thing, they probably won't affect the president's poll numbers. And since fiscal responsibility would involve potentially unpopular steps — controlling spending and/or increasing revenue — it's better, in Cheney's way of thinking, to be irresponsible and screw the grandkids.

What terrifies me most about the unrelenting stream of happy talk from the Bush administration is that they seem to be applying Cheney's maxim to the failing war in Iraq. Reagan's legacy was proving that "deficits don't matter." Bush's hopes for a second-term rest with the idea that "defeats don't matter."

This is the fear that grown-up Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel expressed yesterday on CBS' Face the Nation, when he said:

We can't lose this. This is too important. … But to say, "Well, we just must stay the course and any of you who are questioning are just hand-wringers" is not very responsible. The fact is we're in trouble. We're in deep trouble in Iraq.

Hagel does not want America to lose this war. Neither, I hope, does President Bush. The difference between them is that Hagel is willing to take politically unpopular action to avoid disastrous defeat — if that is still possible. George W. Bush is not.

FTN host Bob Schieffer outlined the evidence the Bush campaign/administration sees as supporting the theory that "defeats don't matter":

When polls show that voters feel the country is headed in the wrong direction and that they are worried about the president's handling of the economy, that president … is going to have a tough-time getting re-elected. Add on voter worry about this president's handling of the war in Iraq and you would think that would make it very hard for him to win re-election. Yet, the new CBS News-New York Times poll suggests all of the above, but it also reports something else, that George Bush has now opened a 9-point lead over John Kerry.

The emperor's new wardrobe is very popular.