Here's a question: if I went out and made a claim I believed but no one else thought possible - that a greyhound could outrun a cheetah, for example - would that be considered a lie or just naive, wishful thinking?

The reason I bring this up is because Bob Herbert made a rather astonishing admission about President Obama's health care plan in his column on Saturday:

The president also said, as he estimated the cost of his proposal at $900 billion over 10 years, that he “will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.”

I'm sure he means it. But I have not spoken to anyone, either on Capitol Hill or elsewhere, who believes that is doable. (emphasis added)

So Obama's assertion he can expand coverage and care without adding a dime to the deficit over the next ten years is, by the admission of even one of his most ardent supporters,  a claim that virtually no one believes. Generically speaking, when someone makes a claim that no one believes it's characterized as a lie.

But the difference between wishful thinking and a lie comes down to intent. This is why the operative line in Herbert's column is "I'm sure he [Obama] really believes it." Because if Obama really believes his claim then it can't be considered a lie, just as I  wouldn't technically be guilty of lying if I believed in my heart that a greyhound could outrun a cheetah. What I would be guilty of, however, is gross naivete and wishful thinking.

So, depending on what you think of Obama's intent, the best case scenario is that he's guilty of wishful thinking while the worst case scenario is that he is intentionally being dishonest and misleading the American people about the financials of his health care plan.

This brings to mind an episode not so long ago when another President made a claim which, by all accounts, he really believed to be true.  Unlike the case with Obama, however, where we can't find any experts willing to support his claim, when President George W. Bush went before the country in 2002 and stated he believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs there was a truckload of people - including a number of Democratic Senators, the Clinton administration, current and former intelligence officials, and a number of foreign governments - who had all seen the evidence and came to the same conclusion as President Bush.

But that didn't stop liberals and Democrats in Congress from repeating over and over again for years that Bush "lied" about the matter. Not surprisingly, one of the loudest and most shrill of those voices was Bob Herbert, who opined regularly that the Bush administration "specialized in deceit" and was guilty of "incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies."

In a December, 2005 column Herbert slammed President Bush over a speech he gave outlining the situation in Iraq, writing that "Mr. Bush could have been honest about this yesterday, but he chose not to be."

Herbert concluded by saying, "a president who's little more than a bundle of talking points cannot possibly maintain the long-term trust and confidence of the public."

Obama should heed those words because whether he's guilty of naivete, wishful thinking or something worse, the public doesn't seem to trust that his health care math adds up.