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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (29807)	10/8/2003 10:11:20 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

White House plans a to slam the country with a massive publicity campaign full of more lies: By Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 8, 2003; 2:47 PM Confronting falling polls and balky lawmakers, White House officials said yesterday that they plan a public relations offensive to convince voters that the United States is succeeding in Iraq despite the casualties and setbacks. President Bush complained this week that it is hard to tell progress is being made in Iraq "when you listen to the filter" of the news media. Bush's aides hope to elude that filter through a series of presidential interviews with local and regional news organizations, trips by Cabinet members to Iraq and hard-hitting speeches by Bush, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Each of Bush's weekly radio addresses in October will be devoted to the subject, aides said. "This will be a sustained effort to talk to the nation about the progress we are making and what we're achieving," a senior administration official said. "We are making significant progress on many fronts, and it's not easy to put it into a sound bite." The campaign comes as Congress continues debating Bush's $87 billion budget request for the war on terrorism next year, and the administration is fighting a variety of challenges to the package. "We want to make sure the American people and the members of Congress know that their money is being well spent," another administration official said. The communications strategy reflects the view of many top administration officials that their biggest problem with Iraq is public relations. Democratic presidential candidates contend in increasingly biting attacks on Bush that the problems are substantive, including a shortage of troops and international financial support that resulted partly from the administration's resistance to giving the United Nations a larger role in the reconstruction. A senior administration official said the White House recognizes the need to "show tangible progress in short order." Rice's shake-up this week of the Washington components of the reconstruction bureaucracy was aimed partly at achieving that. "This is Condi realizing she has a big problem on her hands," the official said. [As part of the effort, Rice told a foreign policy forum in Chicago Wednesday, said that the team led by chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay strong evidence of materials and equipment that could have been used to produce weapons of mass destruction, the Associated Press reported. ["Right up until the end, Saddam lied to the Security Council. And let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activity," she told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.] Bush will travel Thursday to New Hampshire. An aide said he will speak about Iraq six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government and "the results that we are achieving for the Iraqi people, the American people and the world." Bush will speak at the same time about the state of the economy, linking the two issues as the nation's highest priorities. Cheney will speak Friday in Washington on "the importance of fighting the war on terror on offense," an aide said. Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans will travel to Iraq next week to make the case that the postwar economy is developing, and that Iraq is a growing country and could be a strong trading partner. © 2003 The Washington Post Company