NYTimes.com > Opinion

That Magic MomentBy PAUL KRUGMAN
(also available on pkarchive.org)

Published: January 18, 2005

A charming man courts a woman, telling her that he's a
wealthy independent businessman. Just after the wedding,
however, she learns that he has been cooking the books,
several employees have accused him of sexual harassment and
his company is about to file for bankruptcy. She accuses
him of deception. "The accountability moment is behind us,"
he replies. 

Last week President Bush declared that the election was the
"accountability moment" for the war in Iraq - the voters
saw it his way, and that's that. But Mr. Bush didn't level
with the voters during the campaign and doesn't deserve
anyone's future trust. 

I won't belabor the W.M.D. issue, except to point out that
the Bush administration, without exactly lying, managed to
keep most voters confused. According to a Pew poll, on the
eve of the election the great majority of voters, of both
parties, believed that the Bush administration had asserted
that it found either W.M.D. or an active W.M.D. program in
Iraq. 

Mr. Bush also systematically misrepresented how the war was
going. Remember last September when Ayad Allawi came to
Washington? Mr. Allawi, acting as a de facto member of the
Bush campaign - a former official close to the campaign
suggested phrases and helped him rehearse his speech to
Congress - declared that 14 or 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces
were "completely safe," and that the interim government had
100,000 trained troops. None of it was true. 

Now that the election is over, we learn that the search for
W.M.D. has been abandoned. Meanwhile, military officials
have admitted that even as Mr. Bush kept asserting that we
were making "good progress," the insurgency was growing in
numbers and effectiveness, that the Army Reserve is
"rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force," and oh, by
the way, we'll need to spend at least another $100 billion
to pay for war expenses and replace damaged equipment. But
the accountability moment, says Mr. Bush, is behind us. 

Maybe we can't hold Mr. Bush directly to account for
misleading the public about Iraq. But Mr. Bush still has a
domestic agenda, for which the lessons of Iraq are totally
relevant. 

White House officials themselves concede - or maybe boast -
that their plan to sell Social Security privatization is
modeled on their selling of the Iraq war. In fact, the
parallels are remarkably exact. 

Everyone has noticed the use, once again, of
crisis-mongering. Three years ago, the supposed threat from
Saddam somehow became more important than catching the
people who actually attacked America on 9/11. Today, the
mild, possibly nonexistent long-run financial problems of
Social Security have somehow become more important than
dealing with the huge deficit we already have, which has
nothing to do with Social Security. 

But there's another parallel, which I haven't seen pointed
out: the politicization of the agencies and the
intimidation of the analysts. Bush loyalists begin frothing
at the mouth when anyone points out that the White House
pressured intelligence analysts to overstate the threat
from Iraq, while neocons in the Pentagon pressured the
military to understate the costs and risks of war. But that
is what happened, and it's happening again. 

Last week Andrew Biggs, the associate commissioner for
retirement policy at the Social Security Administration,
appeared with Mr. Bush at a campaign-style event to promote
privatization. There was a time when it would have been
considered inappropriate for a civil servant to play such a
blatantly political role. But then there was a time when it
would have been considered inappropriate to appoint a
professional advocate like Mr. Biggs, the former assistant
director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security
Privatization, to such a position in the first place. 

Sure enough, The New York Times reports that under Mr.
Biggs's direction, employees of the Social Security
Administration are being forced to disseminate dire
warnings about the system's finances - warnings that the
employees say are exaggerated. 

Still, there are two reasons why the selling of Social
Security privatization shouldn't be another slam dunk. 

One is that we're not talking about secret intelligence;
the media, if they do their job, can check out the numbers
and see that they don't match what Mr. Bush is saying. (A
good starting point is Roger Lowenstein's superb survey in
The Times Magazine last Sunday.) 

The other is that we've been here before. Fool me once ...