The Political Power of Truth

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - Strangely enough, we may look back on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006, as the day America found its moral compass, long buried at the bottom of the national dirty-linen bag. To win the midterm elections in November, the Democrats, whose motto might as well be "So Lame for So Long," will need to make sure the country focuses on that compass. By "moral" I'm not talking just about the "culture of corruption" in Washington. I'm talking about restoring a reasonable respect for at least minimum standards of truth.

As usual, the iconic moment took place not in the capital but at the heart of the entertainment-industrial complex—in this case, "Oprah." As it happens, I had just been to a screening the night before of "Thank You for Smoking," the forthcoming movie based on the Christopher Buckley book. The story is a hilarious and gloriously politically incorrect sendup of Washington's culture of shameless spin. But the theme depressed me. The satire was all too real—more proof that "truth" and "reality" were not just pretzels to be twisted for commercial purposes but thoroughly devalued coins of the media and political realm. James Frey and Doubleday were just the latest to lie all the way to the bank.

Until Thursday. Something happened in that studio that went beyond "good TV." Such is the power of Oprah that her moment of truth seemed to shame the American public into more respect for the actual facts of a situation. As if to prove the synchronicity, there was even some truth breaking out in the White House press room at the very moment Oprah was airing live in the Midwest. Reporters were pressing President Bush hard. James Gerstenzang of the Los Angeles Times asked Bush if he subscribed to President Nixon's notion that "when the president does it, it's not illegal." This was, indeed, the essence—the truth—of the president's position on the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping, which violates a 1978 law. Instead of the issue being framed in Karl Rove's phony and demagogic terms—where anyone who opposes the president's power grab doesn't want to protect us from Al Qaeda—we were edging our way toward a more accurate depiction of the controversy.

The news conference wasn't a complete truthfest. No reporter managed to ask the president about his statement of April 24, 2004, when Bush told a Buffalo audience: "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." This statement was false, and Bush knew it when he said it. The president lied in Buffalo, just as surely as Bill Clinton lied when he said: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Of course, Bush's Buffalo lie got a tiny fraction of the airplay of Clinton's Lewinsky lie.

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