A question of credibility.
By: Hank Kalet
Bob Herbert in The New York Times focuses on Al Gore’s recent New York speech in today’s column. The speech reminds us, he says, that "Credibility is the Bush administration’s Achilles’ heel."
"If the public comes to believe that it cannot trust the administration about its reasons for going to war, about the real costs of the war in human lives and American dollars, about the actual state of the nation’s defenses against terror and about the real beneficiaries of its economic policies, the Bush II presidency will be crippled, if not doomed," he writes.
And, he says, it is to our discredit that we seem all too willing to ignore the former vice president.
"There’s something at least a little crazy about an environment in which people are literally stumbling over one another to hear what Arnold Schwarzenegger has to say about the budget crisis in California (short answer: nothing), while ignoring what a thoughtful former vice president has to say about the budget and the economy of the U.S.," he writes.
"Voters with children and grandchildren who may someday have to shoulder the backbreaking debt that is being piled up by the Bush crowd might want to carefully examine some of the points Mr. Gore is raising. The Bush administration would have you believe he is talking nonsense. But what if he’s not?"