President Bush's ignoring the advice of experts has been a common thread to many science stories during his administration. Credit: Natalie Slocum
From the JUNE/JULY issue of Seed:
When the "eminent NASA climatologist versus 24-year-old Republican apparatchik" story broke earlier this year, America went into yet another round of convulsions about science and the Bush administration. Having just finished touring to discuss my book The Republican War on Science, my initial reaction to the news could be summarized as follows: Here we go again. I was outraged, certainly. But I was also, perhaps, experiencing a bout of issue fatigue as I dutifully filed away yet another case study.
After a while, though, I started to ask myself why this issue can't seem to stay dormant for more than a week at a time—why it's showing up in "Doonesbury" strips and even in overseas headlines. And I realized something: Even I, who had written a book about the Bush White House's conflicts with science, had probably underestimated the heft and political longevity of this particular meme. Perhaps we all did. The White House PR machine itself, I suspect, "misunderestimated" the potency of a science-based critique of President Bush—and even as the James Hansen-NASA scandal hit, had been positioning itself for damage control.
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Just days later, there was Bush giving his State of the Union address, trying to reclaim the science issue by announcing a new plan to promote science education and shore up America's scientific competitiveness. To make the image complete, the president then had himself photographed peering into a microscope at a Dallas high school. (In Texas, at least, Bush and science are still chums.)
If Bush's handlers thought he needed better marks on science badly enough to make such an appeal—and, moreover, to make it at a time when his poll ratings had taken a considerable plunge—then somebody must have sensed a political vulnerability. After all, never in the history of the United States has good science been so crucial to good policymaking, and never has a presidential administration been dogged by such extensive and persuasive accusations of political abuses of science. The effect of these charges, it seems, may be lingering along with many, many other issues bringing the presidential acumen into question.
The mystery, of course, is how such lingering is possible. It certainly would seem to defy the laws of political arithmetic. When people go to the polls in the United States, few pull the levers based upon how they feel about science policy. And science isn't typically an issue that affects the political fortunes of presidents.
Nevertheless, we're seeing a fascinating kind of synergy here, one in which the science policy issue has gained remarkable salience because it is—in a complex but undeniable way—now wrapped up in the larger, more prominent debates about Bush's handling of central issues like Iraq and New Orleans. Bush's mistreatment of science has expanded into a story that resonates deeply within his own country, and widely throughout the world, because it's similar to the greater political narratives already being played out.
For instance, a key case study of this administration's abuse of science is its promotion of the dubious notion that Iraq's confiscated aluminum tubes were intended for centrifuges and uranium enrichment, rather than for rocketry—a claim that the Department of Energy's own centrifuge experts pretty uniformly rejected. Does that sound familiar? If it does, it's because a similar pattern—ignore experts, favor ideologues—has been followed by the administration on any number of other science issues, ranging from global warming to the morning after pill.