More than any of his predecessors, President Bush understands the conventions of journalism and the traditions of political debate. These require that respectful attention be paid to whatever claims the president makes. Journalists who have the temerity to question whether the claims ring true (or whether the numbers add up) can count on being pummeled as liberal ideologues, even when they are only seeking the facts.
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What's particularly ingenious about the administration's approach is that it throws out so many questionable claims at once that its opponents are left fuming, furious, sputtering -- and easily dismissed as "Bush haters." First the administration understates how much long-term borrowing its Social Security privatization plan will require. Then it claims to have made deep cuts in the deficit when in fact its less-touted tax cut proposals ($1.4 trillion over 10 years) will just ramp the deficit back up again. And you never know on any given day what the new cost estimates of that prescription drug benefit will look like.

Oh, yes, and the administration's "tough" budget doesn't even include the costs of the Social Security plan or the long-term costs of the war in Iraq, let alone the huge costs of permanently fixing the unintended effects of the alternative minimum tax.

As one critic put it, Bush's spending cuts "may grab headlines but will have little impact on the tide of red ink that Bush has ridden since 2001." Bush's budget "will obscure an agenda that is likely to generate ever-larger deficits over the coming decades" and "resembles Swiss cheese -- and the holes may be more interesting than the substance."

Are those the words of a big-spending, Bush-loathing, partisan Democrat? Nope. They come from a budget commentary in the current issue of Business Week, a magazine that can hardly be accused of ultra-leftism. Then there was a description of the Bush budget as "tough talk, but not enough to reassure the world that U.S. public finances are in safe hands." That would be from the Financial Times, another journal free of any taint of Marxism.

...All the pious claims by less candid conservatives that they and their president truly care about the deficit can now be ignored. The whole point (and, yes, this happened in the 1980s, too) is to create deficits, followed by a "crisis," followed by demands for cuts in domestic programs, especially in those "federal outlays" for low-income people.