What they really want is for Bush to do what they think
is wise - liberal policies. It's not the consultation
they care about, but the decision.
Betsy's Page
For years I've subscribed to Newsweek Magazine and found that each week I read less and less of it. Mostly I used the covers for a mural I have in my room of covers going back to 1997. It's a colorful and entertaining way to point out to my students stories from a time when they were in grade school and to show the evolution of various stories from the impeachment of President Clinton to the 2000 election to the war in Iraq. But, the obvious bias in story after story in Newsweek finally got to me and I cancelled my subscription. For about the past three years, any cover story that could be tied at all to Bush was cast to show Bush in a negative way. The contrast in its cover stories on John Kerry and Bush in the 2004 election are quite striking. Even its coverage of Reagan's death was then twisted into a story slamming Bush on stem cell research without any real coverage of the problems with such research and the promise of research on adult stem cells. Newsweek still keeps arriving, and every week I say to my husband that, if I hadn't already cancelled it, I would be ready to do so again. Now, I just beg the covers from my students and I have one very nice girl who brings them in to me each week.
Their cover story this week is really a joke.
They have Bush in a bubble and then blast him for not consulting enough with the power elites in Washington. What they really mean is that he's not talking to them and he's not talking to Democrats. Read Brent Bozell on this silly non-story.
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There's still more. Newsweek's reporters are actually indifferent to the actual foreign-policy records of the presidents they're touting as role models of consultation. They are conducting the ultimate exercise in Washington insider-dom. They are all about The Process. It doesn't matter if you succeed; it only that you make the right phone calls.
Early in the article, Thomas and Wolffe hang the hats of bipartisanship on their Bubble-Boy critique by noting Sen. Richard Lugar "cited Bill Clinton as the model" of consultation with the other party. And what in blazes did that accomplish? Did Clinton consult before his Wag-the-Dog two-day wars? Did Clinton get Osama bin Laden? Or did Clinton follow Murtha's actual advice to him and withdraw from Somalia and embolden Osama? They also cite John F. Kennedy, whose consultation skills didn't exactly help at the Bay of Pigs.
The same goes for domestic political consultation. Thomas and Wolffe hail Daddy Bush as a Murtha-consulting role model. The Thomas-Wolffe story ends by citing Daddy Bush's heroic tax increase as "doing the right thing." He consulted with Democrats and raised taxes. And spending went through the roof, the deficit rising to all-time highs. But he talked it out, slapped some backs, shook some hands. He moved left, and he lost.
In the end, this is about wanting the current President Bush to be moderate . His fault isn't just insularity, it's his occasional outbursts of conservatism. They cite that even Ronald Reagan reached out in his troubled second term to moderate old hand Howard Baker as his chief of staff. But Fred Barnes noted on Fox what Newsweek left out: Newsweek pulled this same attack on Reagan in 1981, with a story that fall on "A Disengaged Presidency."
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They just can't stand the thought that a president of the United States doesn't consult them, doesn't stroke them, doesn't create the impression of reaching out. What they really want is for Bush to do what they think is wise - liberal policies. It's not the consultation they care about, but the decision. What if he did call up all these wise men and journalists and solicit their opinions, but then rejected their suggestions and made a different decision. Would the fact that he had stroked them better while rejecting their advice be of any comfort to Newsweek? We all know the answer. There would be a cover story of how Bush is forging his own path despite the good advice he'd been given.
This is just like the Democrats who whine that Bush asked them for their ideas on who would make a good Supreme Court nominee but refused to tell them whom he was going to nominate and let them veto his suggestion. They didn't want consultation; they wanted a veto. And no president is going to give the other party that sort of control over his decisions.
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