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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (255575)	5/18/2002 11:25:40 AM
From: bonnuss_in_austin	Respond to of 769670

Hi TP...:"White House hard at work on damage control:" Section A today Aus Amer-Stsm: austin360.com Have a nice weekend, TP. ________________________ White House hard at work on damage control Mounting revelations about hijack warnings could chip away at Bush's image as leader. By Jena Heath and Bob Deans AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Saturday, May 18, 2002 WASHINGTON -- White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer gathered his notes and headed for the door Friday. He had survived a second contentious day before a White House press corps demanding answers to the questions of the moment: What did President Bush know, and when did he know it? Reminded that he'd forgotten to recite Bush's schedule for next week, as promised, Fleischer cracked a wan smile: "Thank you for continuing the pain," he said. The White House communications operation has been in full damage control mode since news broke Wednesday that President Bush received an intelligence briefing on Aug. 6 warning that Osama bin Laden's followers might try to hijack an American airplane. Since then, information and accusations have come toppling out about that briefing, about a presidential directive to dismantle al Qaeda that won final approval on Sept. 10 and about requests from the White House to Congress to delay investigations into intelligence failures. On Thursday, the White House press office took the unusual step of providing reporters with a transcript of Fleischer's daily off-camera morning briefing. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice later appeared in the White House briefing room to explain the steps the administration had been taking to deal with al Qaeda. The Washington Post reported that officials familiar with the White House's strategy for Thursday said senior aides sought to dispel the impression of a cover-up and wanted to avoid appearing defensive, either in front of cameras or behind the scenes. Despite such efforts, the revelations have sparked questions about the Bush White House's vaunted policy of tightly controlling information. The story broke Wednesday night after it was leaked to CBS News. "It touches on the leadership question, and that's the area (Bush has) had 100 percent," said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University in Maryland and an expert on White House communications. "This can chip away at that leadership." The Sept. 11 attacks transformed Bush's and popularity, lifting him from just over 50 percent support in opinion polls to 90 percent. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll released Friday found that two-thirds of Americans -- 68 percent -- said the Bush administration should have discussed earlier the information it had about a hijacking threat. Only a third said the news that Bush had warnings has made them feel less favorably toward the president. The poll of 598 adults conducted Thursday has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Senior administration officials and Bush have said they did not have specific enough information to have foreseen the suicide hijackings. Critics say that earlier disclosure of the information could have prevented this week's controversy. "The one thing that I think we always learned, sometimes the hard way, is the longer you let these questions go, questions that only the president can answer, the harder it is to answer them," Joe Lockhart, a press secretary in the Clinton White House, told CNN. Lockhart's predecessor, Mike McCurry, said it might not have occurred to anyone in the White House to put out the story early because the top-secret presidential daily briefing has long been off the table as a topic of public discussion. "That is literally the most sensitive intelligence product that gets produced by our intelligence community every day," said McCurry, press secretary during two Balkan campaigns and in the early months of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The White House now faces questions from legislators, including Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican and the ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelli- gence. Those questions might have been softened had the administration spoken in more detail earlier, Kumar said. "When congressional hearings are involved, you can get nicked to death through daily disclosures," she said. "When you release the information before the hearings begin, the hearings themselves become a Day Two news story, worthy of less interest than fresh news." jenah@coxnews.com