Wampum

The Washington Post has a Dan Baltz story on the political challenges President Bush faces in trying to turn public opinion on the Iraq war:

As he leads a fierce campaign this month to rebut criticism of the Iraq war, President Bush faces twin challenges -- one of them rooted in history, the other in the political realities of the moment.

Bush's historical burden is that there is no recent precedent for a leader using persuasion to reverse a steady downward slide for a military venture of the sort he is facing. Only clear evidence of success in Iraq is likely to alleviate widespread unease about the central project of this presidency, public opinion experts and political strategists say.

I thought the sourcing for a couple of points in the story was interesting. First:

White House counselor Dan Bartlett acknowledged the concern. "I do think that it demonstrates that if you spend enough money and repeat the charge enough, the old political axiom in Washington can come true: that charges left unanswered can stick," he said.

The administration, as the inventors and practitioners of the Swift Boat attacks, the line that any disagreement with the President is anti-American, the "uniter not a divider" campaign, the "fuzzy math" charge, the "Al Gore doesn't know who he is" meme, the Joe Wilson outed Valerie Plame by marrying her fraud, and the "mushroom cloud" over an American city scare tactic really should be experts on just how that works. Please note that Barlett was willing to to on the record when making the argument that the White House was suffering from a determined and well financed political attack.

The second quote defended the President:

One White House official, who was willing to talk candidly about internal strategy only without being identified by name, acknowledged that "those numbers are troubling" in recent polls, but expressed confidence that they will recover because the public fundamentally regards Bush as "a person of honesty and integrity."

Why, one might ask, does it require confidentiality for a White House Official to argue that the public thinks that Bush is a fundamentally honest man of integrity?

Why is the White House willing to attack political opponents on the record (see Bartlett, Dan,Supra,) but willing to defend the President only with the cloak of confidentiality?

Isn't that backwards? Would one not expect White House officials to line up to go on the record calling Mr. Bush an honest man of integrity while accusing administration opponents of engaging in a smear campaign to be anonymous?