I agree with Alan that we will see turnout return to the 70-plus mark in this election, in which three parties seem to be offering credible administrations and the result is so close and unpredictable.
It will take time, they argue, to turn the Tigers from a ruthless terrorist army into a credible civilian administration that might even countenance a political opposition.
But it's not really credible.Obama administration officials will tell you that outlandish ideas to avoid a default, like minting a platinum coin, would never be considered.
The Obama campaign also argues that Mr. Romney has not offered a credible alternative to the administration's plan.
The law was designed in part to make it more credible when a senior administration official is investigated and cleared by an outside lawyer rather than the Justice Department.
Lawyers for Mr. Alamoudi said they believed that the administration had credible information about the Libyan plot as far back as last November, when a Libyan intelligence officer implicated in it was jailed in Saudi Arabia.
"Is it remotely credible that [the Obama administration] would stop intelligence-sharing?" Thomas asked yesterday, referring to Obama's recent decision to publish CIA torture documents in the US.
The markets would quickly conclude that the United States did not dare pull the same trick twice -- because it would not want to exhaust its emergency reserves or give Mr. Gore's Republican opponent, Gov. George W. Bush, the chance to make a credible argument that the administration was endangering America's energy security in an effort to get Mr. Gore elected.
Some experts on Al Qaeda believe the message, which was also issued under the name of Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Taliban leader who is also on the run, could be credible, though a senior administration official said the C.I.A. is unsure.
The 1972 agreement enshrined vulnerability as a virtue by barring both superpowers from building a credible national defense, and administration officials now say it should have been allowed to fall with the Berlin Wall; it was, after all, based on the notion that the only way to control cold war animosities was to make nuclear war a synonym for mutual suicide.
