Instant Scandal: "Bush Was Tardy"
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
How do you create a political scandal out of a natural disaster? A hunting accident? A business transaction of a sort that ordinarily goes unnoticed? The national press corps has figured out a way: Take a standard that is relative, such as timeliness, and allege that in each case, President Bush failed to meet the standard.
Let's take the first example — Bush's "late" response to Hurricane Katrina. As we now know, the disastrous aftermath of the storm occurred primarily for three reasons:
1. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco failed to create an adequate evacuation plan for the city, and many people were left behind after the storm.
2. A levee collapsed because the government contractor that built it during the 1990s made a fatal error and did not sink the concrete walls deep enough into the ground.
3. FEMA was not prepared to handle the resulting devastation because its director, Michael Brown, had spent the previous years fighting debilitating turf battles after its absorption into the Department of Homeland Security, rather than strengthening its ability to respond to natural disasters.
So the governor and the mayor failed to evacuate the city, a flawed levee built before Bush became president collapsed and problems endemic to FEMA had rendered it ineffective in responding to the disaster. There is nothing Bush could have done at the time to rectify any of these problems. Nevertheless, his critics in the press repeated over and over that the root of the problem was Bush's "late" response to the storm. Of course, these same critics also argued that his arrival on the scene days later was nothing more than a distraction and a photo-op — charges they would doubtlessly have made had he flown in much earlier.
On the second example, the "Cheney shooting," the press again made the charge that the administration was "late" in telling the public — even though there is no consensus on when or how the vice president should inform the public that he has been involved in a hunting accident. Nevertheless, you would have thought from the press's response that the administration was involved in a public deception on par with the movie Dave, in which the president has a stroke and is covertly replaced with a look-alike.
That brings us to today's Washington Post, where we find the headline: "Bush's Response To the Ports Deal Faulted as Tardy":
<<< Sen. Charles E. Schumer, an outspoken liberal Democrat from New York, two weeks ago began publicly denouncing a deal to let a Middle Eastern firm take over terminal operations at six U.S. seaports. From the other end of the political spectrum, even more outspoken conservative radio host Michael Savage was doing the same — and recruiting Republican lawmakers to his cause.
To anyone listening, it was clear that President Bush had a problem on his hands. But Bush was not listening. And his political team had its attention elsewhere. By the time they noticed, Bush's problem had grown a lot bigger.
A behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the ports deal's rapid evolution from obscurity to uproar shows how Bush was blindsided by the same emotion-laden politics of terrorism that he used to win elections in 2002 and 2004. It also raises anew questions of why the White House message machine, so sharply effective in the first term, seemingly has gone dull in the second. >>>
And why was the president's political team "tardy" in reacting to this latest attack?
<<< The political breakdown was partly a matter of timing. The controversy started to build when Bush's top aides were consumed with the fallout of Vice President Cheney's recent hunting accident. >>>
Every week it's a new attack. Every week, the press cranks the amplifier up to 11 and lets loose on the White House — because whatever opportunities these reporters saw in attacking Clinton, they positively loathe Bush. They've made that clear at their award ceremonies this year, at which it's become routine to denounce the Bush administration's "staggering arrogance" and declare that the First Amendment is "under assault." Before the furor over the last attack can die out, they launch a new one. When the administration is late to respond to the new attack because it's still fending off the last one, it is "faulted as tardy."
A president is going to have political enemies, and those enemies are going to criticize him no matter what he does. But when the press makes every one of those criticisms the dominant news story of the week, every week... let me put it this way: If the administration's critics and their allies in the press are whipping up scandals faster than the president's team can deal with them, imagine what such constant preoccupation is doing to the president's ability to focus on the war, the economy, or anything other than crafting a response to the latest media-manufactured controversy. Liberals should understand this — Bill Clinton argued in Clinton v. Jones that the president should be immune from civil litigation because being sued might distract the President of the United States in a way that could have devastating consequences for national security. And whether you agree or not, one could at least make the case that he was right.
That's what I'm worried about — not the leasing of a few port terminals to Dubai.
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