Americans hate excuses. And excuse makers.
The Kerry campagin needs to make use of this.
This Administration is the opposite of Harry Truman and the 'buck stops here'. They are the Dog Ate My Homework Administration.
Blaming others for their failures is the Bush team's SOP. They blamed the CIA for the WMD fiasco. When they announced the miscalculation of the new Medicare costs (from 400 billion to 540 billion), they blamed this on bad numbers from the CBO.
This list is endless.
And its most horrifying example is responsiblity for 9-11. Rice today was a never-ending version of 'we only had 232 days' and 'someone else should have seen to it.'
Americans HATE excuses. Kerry should be calling this the greatest excuse-making team he's heard in a lifetime. Just the sort of group you'd never want to go out on patrol with.
And he should establish this theme--the Dog-Ate-Ny-Homework Administration--before the Commission's final report is published. So that the theme is out there ready for the mother of all excuse-making that will mark the Administration's response to the report.
(Full disclosure: this is something I proposed directly earlier to the Dean campaign.)