Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2138404/?nav=foMessage: I Hear
The president tries to prove he gets it.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, March 21, 2006, at 7:10 PM ET
For months, White House officials reacted to bad news in Iraq by scheduling another Bush speech and blaming the media for relentless negativity. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney appear still to prefer this approach. But starting last fall, White House aides realized that the country would not follow a president they thought was clueless. As big and bad a wolf as the media may be, if the president didn't acknowledge some of what regular Americans saw on their television screens or read in their newspapers, he'd never be able to rebuild support for his administration and the Iraq war. People wouldn't bother to listen to his plans for fixing the problem, administration aides admitted to themselves, if they thought he didn't know what it was.
This realization did not unleash any bold acts of confession. Bush has not participated in freewheeling town halls or regular press conferences or a heart-to-heart with Barbara or Oprah. His doses of candor have come in thimblefuls, first in a series of December speeches and more recently in question-and-answer sessions. What Bush says is aimed at believers, Republicans and independents who don't need to see a firing of Donald Rumsfeld or troop redeployment but who believe the U.S. cannot leave and want to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. If they think the president is giving them the straight story, they'll regain their faith in his ability to find a solution. All this worked briefly last year. Polls showed an increase in support. But the candor didn't keep pace with the carnage.
Today the president tried again. He held a press conference in which he tried to show that his perseverance is not blind and that he is not "optimistic for the sake of optimism." Here's how he tried to win back support: He's hearing bad news from the troops too. In the past, when the administration has refuted news reports from Iraq, the president and his aides have cited reports from military commanders or the field that offer more upbeat assessments. Today, the president did just the opposite. He enlisted the troops in the march to candor. "I understand how tough it is," he said of Iraq. "Don't get me wrong. I mean, you make it abundantly clear how tough it is. I hear it from our troops. I read the reports every night."
Iraqis are not fighting a civil war. It's easier for the president to show he understands what's going on in Iraq when he embraces views that Americans already hold. That's why he talks so often about the violence people see on the television news. He's trying to explain that he's not so detached that he can't recognize basic facts. When he's on the opposite side of public opinion, people are more apt to think that he's sugarcoating the facts. That's the position he found himself in today on the central question of the moment—whether Iraq is in a civil war. Seventy percent of Americans believe it is, as does Ayad Allawi, Iraq's former prime minister, but the president made the opposite case, arguing that despite chaos and high sectarian tensions, the Iraqi military and religious leadership remains intact. It's hard for Bush to distance himself from Allawi's judgment. He was once a key player in a previous White House PR gambit, standing by the president in September 2004 explaining to the skeptical press corps that things weren't as bad in Iraq as they were reporting.
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