on Bush's "credibility gap":

"Five years ago, when a President was fighting for his political life, his
defenders struggled to keep his sins in perspective. All he did was lie
about sex, they said of Bill Clinton's breach of trust--it's not as if he
had been fooling around with matters of war and peace. Imagine how ugly a
debate like that could become over the issues that matter most, matters of
life and death."

"For a President, trust is the one asset that, once lost, he can't buy back
.. . . It now seems likely that either Bush wasn't telling the truth about
his reasons for going to war or he didn't know the truth and can't quite
admit it. Neither prospect is very reassuring."

Time/CNN polls further indicate that "the public faith in the President
seemed to be
faltering." 44% described Bush as "a leader you can trust," while 55% said
they "had some doubts and reservations." The story chronicles the unraveling
of that public faith:

"But then came January and the ill winds. Bush's fired Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill greeted the President in the New Year with revelations in a
tell-all book that made Bush out to be at best incurious and at worst
deceitful, bent on war with Iraq from the very first days in office. The
manned mission to Mars was rolled out with a flourish and then muted when
the polls showed people thought it was a ridiculous waste of money. Bush's
State of the Union address seemed, even to sympathetic Republicans, to have
been mailed in, with the vision of a grocery list. His popularity numbers
dropped after he gave it. Next came the admission by the Administration's
handpicked weapons hunter, David Kay, that after hundreds of interviews and
months of hunting, we had not found any weapon stockpiles after all. Nor was
the link between Saddam and al-Qaeda ever proved. Meanwhile, that much
vaunted Medicare bill, which deficit hawks already found impossibly
expensive at $400 billion, will probably cost an additional $134 billion. By
the time the President released his $2.4 trillion budget last week, packing
record $521 billion deficits and a promise to reduce them 50% in five years,
it was hard to know what to believe anymore."