I’m a cynic, so I never really put much stock in any claims of altruism from any politician of any party. Policy is policy and I generally evaluate it independent of the sponsoring politician’s love for America. Like the politicians and activists from any side, I bring my own biases and opinions to the table, of course. I just don’t think that any politician ignores partisan or fundraising concerns when considering policy. This is why I find the claim that the Bush administration ignores the polls to be, well, disingenuous. I also find it as yet another reason to want this President out.

TNR takes on a particular aspect of the White House’s poll aversion theory by claiming that the White House minimizes the involvement of area experts in policy and speech writing. They claim it’s some sort of phobia that extends out to conservatives in general. I don’t buy that, knowing many ideological conservatives (of both the religious and non-religious sort) that do believe in experts. The article does paint an interesting picture of the Bush White House, though, and on that account it’s worth passing on.

In nearly every corner of the administration, examples of this derisive attitude toward experts abound. Bush has stripped the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of his title “assistant to the president”–a migration down the organizational flow chart that requires him to report through White House aides rather than to the president himself. The Bushies have evicted the Council of Economic Advisers, an office renowned for its nonpartisan calculations, from the White House complex–a relocation that The Washington Post described as the “political equivalent of being sent to Elba.” And those are just the symbolic shots. Seemingly everyday, newspapers run stories about experts whose opinions have been either ignored or stifled. Last year, Medicare chief Thomas Scully reportedly threatened to fire one of his agency’s actuaries if he provided Congress with accurate estimates of the cost of the administration’s prescription-drug benefit. When the administration planned to loosen the regulation of mercury emissions from power plants last year, it never consulted Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) experts. “E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order,” according to the Los Angeles Times. And, in May, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) overruled the recommendation of a scientific advisory panel that had reviewed 40 studies and 15,000 pages of data, refusing to permit over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill.