[Lerkfish]

this opinion/analysis piece is very interesting, no matter which side of the aisle you're on.
It is a very long but coherent, point by point analysis of the administrations' challenges, rhetoric and strategy of the last several weeks.

Of interest to ME were:

Tucked away somewhere in the White House, maybe down in the basement fridge, is a vat of Kool-Aid and a little stack of Dixie cups reserved for the true believers. Every Administration brews the stuff, but each makes it differently. Some stir in strong convictions, some just sweet loyalty.


Whatever the mix, the motive is the same: to instill in all who drink it an unshakable faith in the man and his mission, infuse discipline and ensure a second term. Belief runs so strong in this White House that when the President found himself with a suddenly serious credibility problem, his faithful were among the last to see it. "The White House's biggest problem is that there's been too much hubris," says Shays. "It's getting in the way of being rational."


Bush's troubles all came together in the space of a month, a perfect winter storm. The President had had a spectacular December, watching his ratings soar as Saddam Hussein was captured, the economy grew at 4% and he pulled a Medicare bill out of his hat in the final days of the last session of Congress. Howard Dean, meanwhile, appeared to have won the hearts of Democrats—if not the minds—which promised the campaign of Karl Rove's dreams.


But then came January and the ill winds. Bush's fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill greeted the President in the New Year with revelations in a tell-all book that made Bush out to be at best incurious and at worst deceitful, bent on war with Iraq from the very first days in office.


The manned mission to Mars was rolled out with a flourish and then muted when the polls showed people thought it was a ridiculous waste of money. Bush's State of the Union address seemed, even to sympathetic Republicans, to have been mailed in, with the vision of a grocery list. His popularity numbers dropped after he gave it. Next came the admission by the Administration's handpicked weapons hunter, David Kay, that after hundreds of interviews and months of hunting, we had not found any weapon stockpiles after all.


Nor was the link between Saddam and al-Qaeda ever proved. Meanwhile, that much vaunted Medicare bill, which deficit hawks already found impossibly expensive at $400 billion, will probably cost an additional $134 billion. By the time the President released his $2.4 trillion budget last week, packing record $521 billion deficits and a promise to reduce them 50% in five years, it was hard to know what to believe anymore.