How bad is the Bush administration’s credibility problem? This bad:
A majority of Americans don’t trust the upcoming report by the Army’s top commander in Iraq on the progress of the war and even if they did, it wouldn’t change their mind, according to a new poll.
President Bush frequently has asked Congress — and the American people — to withhold judgment on his so-called troop surge in Iraq until Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, issue their progress report in September.
But according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Thursday, 53 percent of people polled said they suspect that the military assessment of the situation will try to make it sound better than it actually is. Forty-three percent said they do trust the report.
CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said he doesn’t think the mistrust is directed at Petreaus as much as it is what he represents.
Holland said, “I suspect most people are hearing the words ‘general’ and ‘Iraq’ and that’s what they’re basing their opinion on.”
He added, “It does seem to indicate that anyone associated with the Bush administration may be a less than credible messenger for the message that there is progress being made in Iraq.”
There’s another big factor now leading to the likelihood that this report will be disbelieved by a large chunk of the American population that can’t be labeled cut and runners or Democrats. And it got a lot of publicity. The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin:
The “Petraeus Report” — the supposedly trustworthy mid-September reckoning of military and political progress in Iraq by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker — is instead looking more like a White House con job in the making.
The Bush administration has been trying for months to restore its credibility on Iraq (as well as stall for time) by focusing on Petraeus — President Bush’s “main man” in Iraq — and his report to Congress. But now it turns out it that White House aides will actually write the “Petraeus Report,” not the general himself.
This means that the report is going to be released and it is now predictable what is going to happen.
If Petraeus himself totally wrote it, or at least appeared to, there are some Americans who might even against their other inclinations give him the benefit of the doubt if the report indicated signs of progress due to the “surge” coupled with a “let’s hang in there” message.
But the fact that it now is going to be written by the Bush administration means it will only be embraced and pointed to by those who already strongly defend the war and by people such as conservative talk show hosts and Fox News commentators. Democrats will likely reject it out of hand. Independent voters and those who once supported the war but feel it has been hideously mismanaged and that it’s time now to declare a visible end-game will distrust it and consider it one more White House effort to manipulate and buy time.
In other words, it’ll wind up being one more Bush administration document in a government that increasingly seems to be of the base, by the base and for the base — often acting to dole out information to give supporters debating talking points support and ignoring the wishes of its critics and other Americans who seek information from sources other than folks with a political agenda.
Meanwhile, in Congress, a report written by the White House is unlikely to give Republicans running for re-election and facing increasingly angry voters the support they will need to “stay the course” and continue to strongly back the White House. A report written by Petraeus himself had been what they were expecting to get.
The seemingly solidified skepticism on the war that the poll reflects will not be melted by yet another Bush administration report that says to voters “Trust us when we tell you these are the facts. When have we ever misled you before?”
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.