The Year We
Questioned Authority
For President Bush
and other public figures,
it was the end of the
free pass
Essay By ANDREW
SULLIVAN, time.com December 26, 2005
In mid-January 2005, President Bush
declared that the 2004 election had been his "accountability moment." He
spoke a bit too soon. The "moment," it turned out, lasted for the
following 12 months. The President didn't see it coming. And who
could blame him? For more than three years after 9/11, the American public
had given the Administration, and indeed many authority figures, the benefit of
the doubt. We were at war, even in mortal danger. Trust was
essential. The bigwigs kept assuring us they knew what they were doing.
And so most of us went along.
2005 was the year we stopped going along. We gave up blind trust and
demanded real accountability. We finally had it with a war in which Bush's
bromides didn't even begin to match the facts on the ground. We wanted
answers and detail and a plan for victory. We began to get one in the past
month or so, as the President finally started to give more candid speeches in
front of general audiences, even taking unscripted questions! He
acknowledged "setbacks" in Iraq and wrong prewar intelligence, predicted
violence ahead, asked for persistence and cited tens of thousands of civilian
Iraqi deaths.
It was a strange kind of relief, but relief it was. Some of us had
wondered if this man, who had so steadfastly refused to match rhetoric with
reality for so long, would ever finally hit a wall he couldn't deny, a fact he
couldn't dismiss, a world he couldn't fully control. We wonder no more.
Bush's signature second-term domestic agenda--Social Security reform--died a
pitiless, lingering death in 2005, as the public simply refused to buy it.
His gleeful opening of the fiscal spigot--the biggest increase in public
spending since F.D.R.--got deficit hawks squawking enough to force the first
tiny potential cuts in pork, if nowhere near enough to control the looming debt.
The Republican congressional guru, Tom DeLay, discovered that gerrymandering
districts in Texas could lead to a Supreme Court challenge and that
money-laundering campaign cash could lead to an indictment. Karl Rove lost
some sleep over Patrick Fitzgerald. The President's argument that he
didn't authorize torture but that he would veto any law that forbade it tanked
so badly in the Congress that he had to capitulate and co-opt the McCain
anti-torture amendment in full.
These weren't setbacks. They were outright, no-spin defeats:
thrilling, fleeting moments when democracy actually seemed to work, when the
powerful were forced to concede the limits of their own clout and spin.
Katrina was the turning point, the moment when the extent of cronyism,
incompetence and sheer smugness in Washington reached a level that even the
White House couldn't ignore. FEMA's Michael Brown, the American people
surmised with their wide-open eyes, was not doing a "heck of a job." And a
President who could say such a thing obviously had no clue about what was going
on in his own government.
But the President wasn't the only one to have an accountability moment in 2005.
The United Nations was finally compelled to concede that the oil-for-food
program for Saddam's Iraq had turned into a massive scam. The French
looked into the abyss of their tendency to segregate the races. Arnold
Schwarzenegger discovered that his charms had limits. Harriet Miers was
stunned to find that being the President's favorite lawyer and running the Texas
lottery were not actually qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice.
The New York Times's Judith Miller learned that you cannot be both a journalist
and a de facto member of the Bush Administration. Scooter Libby was
informed that fibbing to a grand jury--even if you are Dick Cheney's right-hand
man--is not, in the end, a good idea. Baseball players with necks the size
of most people's thighs were shocked to discover that we were on to them.
Saddam Hussein found himself in a court that he didn't control. Even the
journalistic giant Bob Woodward realized that he still worked for a newspaper to
whose readers he remained--yes!--accountable.
We tend to think democracies come truly alive only when we elect or throw out a
President or Congressman or Senator. But the truth is that sometimes the
democratic spirit is more vibrant in the intervals. Democracy is rooted in
the impertinent belief that our rulers are no better than we are and that they
are answerable always. We're occasionally amazed to discover that people
who are used to power forget that. That's why, every now and again, we
have to remind them. In that sense, 2005 was a great year for democracy.
Because it was reborn this time after the votes were counted.
Andrew Sullivan's blog, the Daily Dish, can be found at
andrewsullivan.com.
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