What do you think? Is the Bush administration “hiding something or lying” about what it knows about the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation? Or are you, perhaps, the sort of sucker who just accepts things on trust and believes everything that government officials tell you? Maybe, like Roy Marshall, a fifty-eight-year-old air-conditioning salesman from Albany, you think that “the Bush administration knows more than they’re telling.” But then, also like Roy, you are smart enough to realize that “all politicians do that.” Tell me about it! So then, what does Roy say to the big question? “Are they lying flat out? I don’t think so.” But, clearly, he’s got his eye on them. Roy’s no fool. He’s the sort of guy who, if you ask him whether Enron’s crooked accounting practices are “widespread in other large corporations” or “an isolated case,” will be with the sophisticated 70 percent who say “widespread” and not the 10 percent of naïfs who picked “isolated case.” Where have those guys been?

In the same way, he’ll be with the 50 percent who said that the Republicans’ policies favored the rich and not the 14 percent who said that they favored the middle class. And is Roy the kind of guy who would doubt for a single minute “that big business wielded too much influence, not just with the Bush White House but also with members of Congress of both parties”? Don’t make me laugh. Yet I’ll bet that Roy also knew which