Dick Cheney’s bizarre speech last night accusing Democrats of violating the sacred canons of Washingtonian candor and honesty is drawing the catcalls it deserves, but it does help raise an issue that’s been percolating just between the surface about the nature of this administration’s obstinant mendacity. Have these guys been consciously lying through their teeth all this time about Iraq, about the economy, about the budget, about, well, all those things they are getting so egregiously wrong? Or is there an element of self-deception going on? Now, for many Democrats, this very question is provocative: of course they are consciously lying, every day, on every subject, and to suggest otherwise is to go soft and concede some decency to people who will just see this as a sign of Democratic weakness. But as Mark Schmitt usefully points out over at TPMCafe, self-deception in high office is arguably more dangerous and damning than conscious deception. His post lays out the idea that the White House under Bush has been dominated by an “ideology of information” that sorts evidence into “useful” and “not useful” categories based on a pre-conceived agenda, essentially filtering out any empircal data interfering with the administration’s agenda in a way that creates a hermetically sealed echo chamber of self-validation. Even as the bloodhounds continue to search out and find multiple examples of conscious White House mendacity, the one truly incontrovertible thing about this administration is its incredible intolerance for anything like internal debate and self-criticism. Sure, there are differences of opinion, but only at the margins, and only on occasions where The Line is not dictated by ideology or the dark political calculations of Karl Rove. In the Bush White House, the only deadly sin has been anything like a continuing internal, much less external, dissent (see O’Neill, Paul and DiIulio, John for Object Examples of what happens to people who violate this rule). This is an inherently disastrous approach in any executive operation, much less one commanding a multi-trillion dollar budget, the world’s most powerful military, and to be blunt about it, the power to ruin and end lives, and shape a society for decades to come. There are very few costless mistakes in the White House. In my first government job, working for a Georgia Governor (recently deceased) named George Busbee, anyone briefing the Governor knew he would have to run the gauntlet of an incredibly smart young lawyer named Cecil Phillips, whose job was to sit in on any policy discussion and raise tough questions about anything proposed. This Policy Ombudsman approach always struck me as one of the smartest and simplest quality control arrangements I’ve ever seen. Nobody went into that Governor’s office without marshalling facts and thinking about contrary opinions. And a lot of bad policy decisions were probably avoided as a result of that process. In the White House of George W. Bush’s predecessor, you didn’t need an Official Devil’s Advocate, because free-flowing debate went on every day on every subject, and nobody shut up until The Big He made a final decision. And even then, dissenters did not get sent to Siberia. Moreover, Bill Clinton’s intellectual voracity–so different from Bush’s remarkably unreflexive nature–drove him to seek out advice from people who were not on his payroll, over and over again.Many of the failures of the Bush administration are easily and directly attributable to this huge blind spot: a White House hostile to debate, dissent and contrary evidence on issues large and small, and where all the incentives pointed to lockstep conformity and demonization of any divergent point of view. And this attitude of “don’t-confuse-me-with-facts” has been echoed among the Republican regime on Capitol Hill, especially in Tom DeLay’s House.Given the overwhelming evidence that Republican self-deception is feeding its attempted deceptions of the American people, why do some Democrats insist on proving that these people are consciously lying to us? After all, it’s easier to prove criminal negligence than criminal intent, and even though the latter carries heavier penalities in courts of law, the former is if anything more damaging in the court of public opinion.It’s entirely possible that some key White House players are in fact cynical liars, and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are obvious suspects in this case. But in general, a president and an administration so isolated from reality that they don’t even know when they are lying to themselves or to us, is a bigger danger and a bigger target for Democrats.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 15: How Democrats Might Flip the Senate
As the 2026 midterms move closer, it’s time to recalibrate expectations now and then, and there’s now a glimmer of hope that Democrats could flip the Senate as well as the House, as I explained at New York:
Much of the early coverage of the 2026 midterm elections dwells on the fight for control of the U.S. House. The current GOP majority in that chamber, after all, is very fragile, and historically the president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterms. Busting up the Republican governing trifecta that is working to implement Donald Trump’s agenda is both a realistic and an important goal for Democrats, who gained 41 net seats and flipped the House in the 2018 midterms after Trump’s first election.
If Republicans do lose the House next year, they won’t be able to enact “big beautiful” budget-reconciliation bills that Democrats can’t filibuster. But if the GOP holds on to the Senate, Trump can still get his judicial- and executive-branch appointees confirmed, and Republicans can block any Democratic legislation with ease. Thanks to the peculiarities of the Senate landscape, in which only a third of the chamber is up every two years, Republicans have a good chance of maintaining control of the Senate, even if 2026 turns out to be a fine year for the Democratic Party. In 2018, after all, Republicans posted a net gain of two Senate seats despite getting pasted in House races.
At this point the 2026 Senate landscape is very favorable to the GOP. Yes, it must defend 22 Senate seats. But as Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times points out, 20 of them “are in states that Mr. Trump carried by at least 10 percentage points in 2024.” The authoritative Cook Political Report rates 19 of these 20 seats as “solid Republican,” meaning the races shouldn’t be competitive at all. Meanwhile, Democrats must defend two seats in states Trump won in 2024 (Georgia and Michigan), and four of their seats (in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire) have no incumbent running. Flipping the Senate would require a net gain of four seats (thanks to Vice-President J.D. Vance’s tiebreaking vote), and the arithmetic for doing that with just three competitive races for Republican-held seats is daunting, to put it mildly. Democrats need to win all seven of the races Cook rates as competitive and then somehow make a safe Republican seat unsafe.But as Nate Silver observes, Democrats could have a very strong wind at their backs in the midterms:
“I’m a fan of what groups like Cook and Crystal Ball do. But having been in the forecasting game for a long time, they have what I consider to be a persistent bias. Namely, they tend to assume a politically neutral environment until there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
“This assumption is wrong. It ignores years and years of history of the president’s party performing poorly in the midterms.”
Silver calculates the average midterm advantage of the non–White House party since 1994 as 4.4 percent in the House national popular vote but suggests that Trump’s history of subpar job approval (even if he doesn’t blow up the economy or threaten the future of democracy) and Democratic overperformance in recent non-presidential elections should bump up the Democratic edge: “In fact, the pattern looks a lot like 2018, when Democrats won the popular vote for the House by 8.6 points.”
A national wave of anything like that 2018 percentage could change the Senate landscape significantly:
“States like North Carolina and Georgia actually become ‘lean D.’ And while the next tranche of states — Florida, Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Alaska — are still ‘lean R,’ it’s not by such a large margin that you’d write the Democrats’ chances off.”
At that point, the path to a Democratic Senate is a matter of candidate recruitment and possibly sheer luck. One place to watch in particular is Texas, where John Cornyn is facing an existential primary challenge from the state’s attorney general, right-wing scandal magnet Ken Paxton, in what is sure to be a nasty, expensive, and competitive race. It could also provide an opening for a Democrat like Colin Allred, who ran a creditable campaign against Ted Cruz last year and might run for the Senate again. If former senator Sherrod Brown attempts a comeback in Ohio, it’s likely he could provide a stiff challenge to recently appointed Republican senator Jon Husted. And in Alaska, the state’s unique top-four/ranked-choice voting system gives any centrist Democrat in a good year a shot against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who, according to a recent poll, isn’t terribly popular. One possible candidate, Mary Peltola, won a statewide House seat in 2022 (defeating Sarah Palin) before narrowly losing it last year.
Candidate recruitment will matter in some of the contests where Democrats have a particular reason to be optimistic. Beating Thom Tillis in highly competitive North Carolina won’t be as much of a reach if popular former governor Roy Cooper runs against him. And in Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff has high hopes of a divisive Republican primary to choose his opponent among relatively little-known candidates, now that both Brian Kemp and Marjorie Taylor Greene have given the race a pass. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Republicans failed to convince Governor Chris Sununu to run for the seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen, which probably means the GOP nominee will be retread Scott Brown, who lost Senate races in Massachusetts in 2012 (following his shocking special-election win in 2010) and in New Hampshire in 2014.
A lot can change between now and November 2026 in terms of both individual Senate races and the national political landscape. At present, you’d have to say the Democratic odds of flipping the Senate along with the House have gone from none to slim — but that’s still a very real opportunity for the party.