After overcoming a 17-point deficit in the polls in the late summer, Bush went on to coast to victory.

But the point isn't Atwater's success. The point is he was a guy who knew busy. He received, he told me, roughly 400 messages a day. That's not just busy, that's on intimate terms with busy.

He slept four hours a night.

And, he told me, he returned all his calls.

Now, for all I know, he was spinning. Maybe­ he received only 200 calls a day. Or maybe he returned only half the calls he received. There's no way to know.

All I do know is that he did get a ton of calls. And he returned one from me - some guy he'd never heard of. He could easily have been "too busy" to call back, but there he was, the most significant political operative of his time, on the phone with me.

So here is what I take from that: If Atwater can do it, anybody can.

The other problem with "I'm busy" is that nobody believes it anymore.

Not accepting falsehood imperils the social order. That's because the basis for civilized society rests in allowing for acceptable fabrication. People don't leave dinner parties because they are deadly boring, but because "Whew, look at the time - we have to get up early tomorrow."

Polite mendacity lubricates the machinery of human interaction. Without it, we are no better than most animals.

So in a bid to help us as a society maintain civility and thus our position near the top of the animal kingdom, I want to help develop a few new, believable excuses.

Here are some ideas:

• "Sorry, but you're just not important enough."

• "I'm too self-absorbed to call you back or to help out."

• "I generally figure if you want something done, let somebody else do it."