What, Me Worry?
Bush Abandons
WSJ.com
Alfred E. Neuman
December 2, 2005; Page A10
George Bush may be the feistiest president since Teddy Roosevelt. Dubya looks like the kind of guy who'd get in your face real fast if he weren't wound so tight behind that presidential reserve. So why, until this week, has he allowed himself to get beaten to a pulp on the Iraq war?
One of the great mysteries of public life has been the absence of an organized Bush effort to defend the war. To the extent there has been bad news and worse spin about the war's course, both the Bush White House and Defense Department have been pretty much willing to take it in the neck. Prior to this week's Annapolis speech and the release of a 38-page "Iraq national strategy," senior staffers at both the White House and Defense have privately vented frustration and even bitterness at the absence or incompetence of what is known as the war's "public diplomacy." Similarly, there's been no real effort to build a homefront to support the troops.
The war isn't unique. In November, opinion-poll approval of Mr. Bush's economic management was below 40%. This is astounding. As the Review & Outlook columns noted yesterday, this week's revised third-quarter growth rate of 4.3% was the 10th straight quarter of growth averaging nearly 4% on an annual basis. Economic "public diplomacy" is part of a Treasury secretary's portfolio. Jim Baker in the second Reagan term and Bob Rubin across two Clinton terms relentlessly promoted their boss's economic policies. On Wednesday, Treasury printed out a supportive statement over Secretary John Snow's name; yesterday the secretary was in London -- discussing European growth. Running a 4.3% quarter in the face of Katrina is shout-from-the-rooftop news, but for this administration it's just another tree falling in the forest.
This is the Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?" school of public relations. It doesn't seem quite appropriate for a major war.
I don't think the Bushies are numb to seeing their public standing dissed and downgraded. I think they've concluded this is a game that's rigged against them, something over which they have little control. Other presidencies -- Nixon, Johnson -- obsessed over their bad press. LBJ by legend watched the evening news about Vietnam simultaneously on three TVs, a ticket to neurosis and night sweats.
In contrast, the Bush media model has been to ignore the polls, skip the spin and govern for results. Mr. Bush's bet is that history will judge Iraq a success; the odds now suggest he's right. And if one believes in markets, as Mr. Bush largely does, sustained 4% growth is a better day's work than, like his predecessor, trying to govern to the polls.
For this White House, the mainstream media's spin is like bad weather -- uncontrollable. The polls, like the bad-weather blahs, don't matter. But clinical depression does matter and the polls now reflect clinical depression. Even the president's conservative base can't snap out of it. Consider the reality standing before a movement conservative: Sen. Joe Lieberman's essay on this page earlier in the week argued compellingly that Iraq is much better than imagined. The economic growth numbers validate tax-cut theory, and they're getting pinch-me-if-it's-real justices in John Roberts and Sam Alito. And they're depressed!
A visit to our editorial offices this week by about 40 conservative think-tank leaders revealed almost universal gloom and even distrust of the president -- primarily over years of pig-out spending. Not one of them uttered the word "Iraq."
When positive reality becomes irrelevant, you've got the blues. Or perhaps we have discovered a new form of brainwashing.
The Bush administration has underestimated the changed nature of modern media. The mainstream media alone is not the problem. All these political subjects -- the war, immigration -- get discussed at length, all the time, on talk shows and across the great expanses of the Web wilderness. In this new environment, the emotional content has become stronger and even more important than the facts, such as they are. The facts have been demoted. What's more, the language, the very vocabulary of all these conversations, has been ramped way up. Shrillness has monetary value now, and it has political value. If this were traditional spin, as the White House assumes, it wouldn't matter. But in our time the spin has become a vortex.
The leading exploiter of this phenomenon is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Despite the comparatively minimal numbers killed, his suicide bombers and car bombs have dispirited even normally clear-eyed supporters of the war effort and its purpose. Conservative columnists go from support for Iraq to advocating withdrawal and back to support depending on mood swings. Iraq has become simply "the violence." But if "the violence" has displaced the rest of reality, then the Bush model of ignoring the spin isn't viable. The result is John Murtha.
By not seeing that the spin is now a vortex, the White House let it suck down the president's support to a level that threatens his ability to govern.
Past need not be prologue. Under the old model, Mr. Bush nominated Harriet Miers and let the world scream. But there is a crucial difference between not caring what the MSM thinks and not listening to one's own party. Mr. Bush heard and changed the nomination. A legendary stubbornness, apparently, will not beget self-destruction. Now we have the Iraq counteroffensive in the opinion wars. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times followed the Annapolis speech with refutation articles (amusingly titled "Fact Check" in the Times). Fine. Now the MSM is reacting to the president's agenda rather than shaping it.
So far nearly all the recent addresses by Messrs. Bush and Cheney have been in front of military audiences or applause-prone conservative groups. The Green Zone is in Baghdad, not in the U.S. In the 2004 campaign Karl Rove sent Mr. Bush into an undiscovered America of right-leaning exurbs and edge cities such as Clermont County, east of Cincinnati. This is the real Bush base. The president should revisit it, to explain in person what he told the Middies at Annapolis -- why he has taken them to Iraq and why we intend to see this through to an honorable victory. |
