I’ve seen the lack of public appreciation of the bailout bill described as a failure of communication by the Bush administration. Actually, it’s a consequence of their communications successes in the past. By now the ginning up of the war is well known, with its planted stories, cheerfully manipulated journalists, false data presented to the UN, and Condi Rice on TV talking about smoking guns and mushroom clouds. Throw in a few color-coded terrorism alerts that seemed transparently timed to the political news of the day, an overreaching treasury secretary who initially sent up a bill that insisted (again) that this most despised and inept of all administrations should be beyond all review or oversight, and natural skepticism on the subject of robbing the poor and middle class to feed the rich, and you have a public that just isn’t going to buy the urgency of this, even if the claim may be legitimate.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 3:29 am and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.