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Drake Bennett is an American Prospect writing fellow. Heidi Pauken is an editorial assistant at the Prospect.
Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling. Lyndon Johnson was said, politely, to have suffered a "credibility gap" when it came to Vietnam. Richard Nixon, during Watergate, was reduced to protesting, "I am not a crook." Bill Clinton was relentlessly accused by both adversaries and allies of reversing solemn commitments, not to mention his sexual dissembling. But George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president.
The pattern is now well established. Soothing rhetoric -- about compassionate conservatism, about how much money the "average" American worker will get through the White House tax program, about prescription-drug benefits -- is simply at odds with what Bush's policies actually do. Last month Bush promised to enhance Medicaid; his actual policy would effectively end it as a federal entitlement program.
More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-9/11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there's more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president's lies?
One thing is clear: If a Democrat, say, Bill Clinton, engaged in Bush-scale dishonesty, the press would be all over him. In the spirit of rekindling public outrage, here are just some of the president's lies.
The Education President
"Every single child in America must be educated, I mean every child.... There's nothing more prejudiced than not educating a child." -- George W. Bush, presidential debate versus Vice President Al Gore, Oct. 11, 2000
Along with tax cuts, education was Bush's top priority when he entered the White House. He charmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in an effort to get his bill passed, a bill that combined greater accountability and testing with increased funding. Then, in what has become a trademark, he pulled the plug on the funding.
Members of Congress had good reason to believe Bush was being sincere. As governor of Texas, he had raised state education spending by 55 percent, tightened curriculum requirements and pushed for more accountability from the schools themselves. Even state test scores shot up -- although that was likely the result of the tendency to "teach to the test" rather than an actual increase in learning or knowledge. (The increase wasn't reflected in national standardized test scores.) Still, Bush was able to persuade the top two education Democrats in Congress, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), to work with him on the No Child Left Behind Act. And when the lawmakers objected to voucher provisions, Bush dropped the vouchers -- and toned down the testing measures to win Congress' approval.
But in his 2003 budget, Bush proposed funding levels far below what the legislation called for, requesting only $22.1 billion of the $29.2 billion that Congress authorized. For the largest program, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides support to students in impoverished school districts, Bush asked for $11.35 billion out of the $18.5 billion authorized. His 2004 budget was more than $6 billion short of what Congress authorized. Furious, Kennedy called Bush's proposal a "tin cup budget" that "may provide the resources to test our children, but not enough to teach them."
The result: States already strapped by record deficits are being held responsible for the extra testing and administration mandated by law -- but aren't getting nearly enough money to pay for it. So the number of public schools likely to be labeled "failing" by the law is estimated to be as high as 85 percent. Failing triggers sanctions, from technical assistance to requiring public-school choice to "reconstitution" -- that is, firing the entire school's staff and hiring a new one. And Bush isn't doing much to help. The New Hampshire School Administrators Association calculated that Bush's plan imposed at least $575 per student in new obligations. His budget, however, provides just $77 per student. It's a revolution in education policy, all right, but No Child Left Behind was simply a lie.
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