If memory serves, the last administration had a quite strict policy that the Treasury Secretary was the only person who spoke for the administration on certain key points of economic policy. I’m wondering if we don’t need something similar from the current administration on developments in the Anthrax case. Actually, such a policy might profitably extend to Congress as well.
Our political leaders have been all over the place in the last several days on two key questions: 1) the precise quality and nature of the Anthrax spores contained in the letter to Tom Daschle, and 2) what if anything we know about connections between the Anthrax letters and 9/11.
This morning Dick Gephardt seemed to nudge the scale in a more ominous direction on both the weaponization question and the 9/11 tie-in issue.
The problem with all these different opinions and phrasings from Daschle, Gephardt, Fleischer, Ridge, Ashcroft, et.al. is that it’s very difficult to get a handle on whether this is just Dick Gephardt’s opinion (in which case, who cares), whether he’s being freer with information the administration is holding back, or whether administration officials are using Gephardt to float new information which they themselves don’t feel comfortable announcing publicly.
In normal circumstances, these sorts of differences just come out in the wash. But the necessity of getting clarity on these critical questions demands a bit more discipline and uniformity.
