A new poll has come out marking the anniversary of a day that was considered a masterstroke in political imagery at the time — but in the future will likely be studied in political science classes as a monumental political blunder:
Three years after President Bush declared major combat over in Iraq, Americans have strong doubts that the United States will fulfill the promise of his “Mission Accomplished” backdrop, a poll released Monday found.
The CNN poll, conducted April 21-23 by Opinion Research Corporation, found that only 9 percent thought the U.S. mission in Iraq had been accomplished, while 40 percent believed it would be complete someday.
An additional 44 percent said the United States would never accomplish its goals in Iraq, where American troops are still battling insurgents three years after the invasion that toppled former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
Even Rush and Sean can’t say “they must all be RINOs” on this one. The bottom line is that if you go back and read the original stories and the media description of it there was a presumption that the MISSION was actually accomplished. In recent times, talk radio hosts defending GWB have argued that, no, it was never meant that the overall mission was accomplished at all — just a small part of it. Everyone misunderstood the President.
Do the Google search yourself. The military assessment and political implications were clear. And if they were mistaken, do Americans have to now hire lawyers to parse every single pronouncement and speech government officials make to make sure there are no hidden verbal loopholes?
This poll cuts to the heart of the Bush administration’s key problem — one we predict will be written about in great detail when it passes into history: it has faced and faces a huge credibility problem that isn’t due to a biased news media or uncompromising opposition but due to its own verbal choices.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.