White House spokesman Robert Gibbs is in deep trouble for committing one of Washington’s most unforgivable sins. He spread a vicious truth.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gibbs said out loud what every analyst in the capital knows: “There’s no doubt” that Republicans could regain control of the House in November. But his frankness caused such dismay in the party ranks that the White House dispatched Joe Biden to say on ABC’s “This Week” that he was “absolutely confident” the Democrats were in “great shape” with the voting public.
Gibbs’ remark was so noteworthy because it was so rare. The fastest-growing industry in Washington, D.C., today goes by different names: spin control, message discipline, crisis management, image branding. These are not exactly euphemisms for lying but they are certainly not formulas for truth-telling, either. Here’s a good rule to follow for the next 100 days until the fall elections: Anyone with a vested interest in the outcome can’t be trusted. The honest brokers are out of power and want to stay there.
Two of the most valuable candor merchants out there today are Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of a commission established by President Obama to recommend a solution for the nation’s exploding budget deficits. Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, retired from the Senate after 18 years; Bowles, a Democrat from North Carolina, was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and an unsuccessful Senate candidate.
Both are liberated from the burden of ambition to speak their minds freely. “There are many who hope we fail,” Simpson said recently, and if anything, he was understating the problem. Liberals say no solution should cut social programs, and conservatives say tax increases should be off the table. Neither side is willing to face reality, but they are both wrong, and Bowles said as much in a recent talk to the nation’s governors. “This debt is like a cancer,” he warned, “that will destroy the country from within.
“We can’t grow our way out of this,” insisted Bowles. “We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. ... The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”
Simpson, who works hard at being folksy, put the problem a bit differently: “I was in the Senate for 18 years, and the cry to me was always, ‘Al, go bring home the bacon.’ Well, the pig has died.”
Yes, it has. And it’s refreshing when someone says so. Take Rep. Bob Inglis, an obscure backbencher from South Carolina who lost the Republican primary this past spring and is firing some parting shots at his old party.
