The Jack Welch War Plan
What Mr. Daschle and the rest of his incoherent party have failed to articulate (along with so much else) is that this presidency is all of one consistent piece, whether it is managing our money or managing a war. Now, as pre-9/11, it reflects the C.E.O. ethos of the 1990's bubble at least as abundantly as the previous administration did the promiscuous 1960's. Two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Bush invited Jack Welch, Ken Lay and a bevy of C.E.O.'s down to Texas, and he has always run the White House by the cardinal rules in their playbook. A chief executive can do no wrong. The directors (for which read Republicans in Congress) and outside directors (that would be the Democrats) are expected to give him a blank check and question nothing, including the accounting, while the grateful shareholders (the benighted voters) watch their portfolios bulge.

Now that we know that this model was a sham, with even Mr. Welch's General Electric under scrutiny for fiscal sleight of hand, you would think the Bush administration might revisit it. But instead it is following a discredited modus operandi more slavishly than ever, even as it prepares to fight a new war. "There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence," said Mr. Welch in "Jack: Straight From the Gut," his Bushian-titled memoir. "Arrogance is a killer." Mr. Bush and the C.E.O.'s around him seem as oblivious to this maxim as the C.E.O. who coined it.

The "fuzzy math" of this White House's tax cut and budget projections, chronicled by my colleague Paul Krugman from the start, is compounded daily rather than corrected. When we poor shareholders worry too loudly about our growing economic pain, the administration's antidote to our woes is not more honesty in bookkeeping but Ken Lay-style cheerleading. This month Mr. Bush's S.E.C. chief, Harvey Pitt, went so far as to tell Americans it is "more than safe" to get back in the market — as the Dow plummeted for its sixth consecutive month. It's the same pitch Mr. Lay offered his employees in an e-mail — "I want to assure you that I have never felt better about the prospects for the company" — on the day Jeffrey Skilling resigned as chief executive in anticipation of Enron's collapse.

But this administration no longer cooks the books merely on fiscal matters. Disinformation has become ubiquitous, even in the government's allegedly empirical scientific data on public health. The annual federal report on air pollution trends published this month simply eliminated its usual (and no doubt troubling) section on global warming, much as accountants at Andersen might have cleaned up a balance sheet by hiding an unprofitable division. At the Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Post reported last week, expert committees are being "retired" before they can present data that might contradict the president's views on medical matters — much as naysaying Wall Street analysts were sidelined in favor of boosters who could be counted on to flog dogs like WorldCom or Pets.com right until they imploded.

It's when such dishonesty extends to the war on terrorism, though, that you appreciate just how much a killer arrogance can be. Even with little White House cooperation in its inquiry, this month's Congressional intelligence hearings presented a chilling portrait of the administration's efforts to cover up its pre-9/11 lassitude about terrorist threats. Exhibit A was Condoleezza Rice's pronouncement from last May: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." In fact, the committee reported, U.S. intelligence had picked up a dozen plots of a similar sort, over a period from 1994 to pre-9/11 2001, with some of them specifically mentioning the World Trade Center and the White House as potential targets. In the weeks before the attack the C.I.A. learned that in Afghanistan "everyone is talking about an impending attack."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/28/opinion/28RICH.html