Pour It On

The following is a great post from the WSJ that is worth a read. For those of us who have ever seen W live, we understand completely. During the Clinton years, the press always spent a lot of sympathetic time on "how difficult it was for poor Bill". All decent Democrats ought to be getting regular oral sex in the workplace I guess and that evil Republicans would seek to restrict a guy with as tough a job as Slick who felt everyone's pain, was just too much to contemplate. The MSM "support for Bush" ... or even any notice if he does anything positive is quite evident.

I've blogged enough in the past on some very solid attempts by Bush and Cheney to get the real story about Iraq out. There have also been ads run in MN at least by private groups that make a good attempt. The reason that Bush was re-elected is that when 100's of millions are spent actually getting the other side of the story out, and people are faced with having to vote for an actual Democrat, the numbers get quite different. Yes, there is "Fox News", and while it isn't over in the left ditch like the MSM, it isn't exactly the "Bush support system" that the MSM and Democrats make it out to be either. It was the network that broke the Bush DWI story just prior to the first election for example. What makes Fox noteworthy is that it is PRO-AMERICAN ... that is what is unique about it comparted to the MSM. Yes, Conservatives tend to be more pro-American, so in that way it is more "conservative", but it is a long way from "Republican".

The whole MSM, the Democrats, and a goodly number on farther right want to see this President break. This article makes a point that I suspect to be true ... bring it on, it ain't going to happen.


Pour It On
Whatever Laura's feeding George, it's working.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, March 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

For those of us who've complained for more than two years that this White House was ill-serving the troops in Iraq by not making the public case for Iraq, that changed this week in Wheeling, W.Va.

Whatever George Bush had for breakfast Wednesday morning, Laura should see that the White House larder is packed with it. By noontime, Mr. Bush was in Wheeling delivering the third in a series of public speeches to defend the Iraq war. For a president whose public persona--West Texas accent, smirk, swagger and errant word choice--has become the biggest butt of presidential comedy since Richard Nixon, it was an astounding, bravura performance. In fact, I'll pay him the highest possible compliment: It was Clintonesque.

Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill reside in the Valhalla of great communicators, but Bill Clinton and Harry Truman thrived as mere mortals, not only connecting with the mythic "common man" but somehow bonding to them. George Bush joined that class in Wheeling on Wednesday.

It wasn't the sort of set speech that presidents normally read, bobblehead bouncing between two teleprompters. Holding a hand microphone, Mr. Bush walked around a stage before a few thousand people giving a largely extemporaneous talk on Iraq and his presidency. It was mesmerizing. One kept expecting Mr. Bush, whose deepest supporters despair at his inarticulateness, to stumble into the underbrush of confused facts or argument to nowhere. Never happened. Not once. For over an hour, it was nothing but net.

OK, it wasn't Demosthenes, but it was George W. Bush at his Everyman best. The same George Bush who, when televised in front of the White House news corps comes across as a smart aleck, poured off the cable-news screens from Wheeling as a relaxed, buoyant, passionate evangelist for his presidency's most deeply held ideas--political freedom, military pre-emption and playing not to the polls but for the verdict of history.

Two obvious questions: Where's this guy been? And, to quote a long-ago factory boss, Is it a day late and a dollar short?

First answer: He was last sighted on the campaign trail. This is the man, liberal mockery and amazement notwithstanding, who won two hard-fought presidential elections, not as spin has it, only by Rovian genius but by connecting with audiences. But why what worked for a campaign was abandoned in time of war is something that will have to await an answer from the Bush White House memoirists.

The second question--does it come too late for his presidency or the war--is a tougher nut. Eerily, the Ides of March, the 15th of the month, just passed over the Bush presidency at perhaps its lowest ebb. His rating with the pollster's mob is an unseemly 37%. His version of the Roman Senate, the Republican Party, is in virtual political anarchy and content to let Mr. Bush bleed alone. Various Beltway solons have declared the president's war on Mesopotamia's Islamic fanatics a failure; Iraq is described by the press as on the edge of civil war. And almost daily one's close friends, strong supporters of Mr. Bush, say, "It's over."

But not until it's over.

When in our time people think of collapsed presidencies they often have in mind Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. For different reasons, both men broke. What Bill Clinton proved above all else is that no matter what the press, law and politics throw at you, the protective powers of the presidency are almost limitless--if you don't break. Mr. Bush's opponents, such as Democrats waving censure motions or blood-soaked front pages, had better get a grip: He isn't going to break. The Wheeling performance makes that clear.

Wheeling, however, also suggests both the promise and near-term peril for the Bush presidency. It was a signal event, but the print press largely ignored it. The Washington Post Thursday had no story; the New York Times and L.A. Times had minor accounts inside. The talk in fact broke no news in the traditional sense. But as in a presidential election, events that strike the print press as "nothing new" matter hugely in terms of public sentiment, that is, whose ideas win.

At the same time, the status of Iraq's government should be news. In last Thursday's Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius, writing from Baghdad, described in detail "unmistakable signs here this week that Iraq's political leaders are taking the first tentative steps toward forming a broad government of national unity that could reverse the country's downward slide." The column described intense negotiations following the February Samarra mosque bombing to form a national security commission acceptable to all political parties. A search of the Dow Jones-Reuters Factiva database for other accounts of these negotiations turned up only one story, a good one days later by Edward Wong of the New York Times, albeit on the bottom of page A10.

The tendentious editorial decision to paint the high-traffic front pages red with blood and demote the hard slog of political progress in Iraq to the unread inside has an effect. Any normal person would be depressed by constant face-time with stories of barbaric slaughter. If what amounts to a kind of contemporary brain-washing of both the American public and Washington elites causes them to falter and Iraq to "fail," no future president of either party is again likely to deploy U.S. military resources in any sustained, significant way. You can't imagine what "lose" will mean then.

The public's pessimism is at least understandable. Less defensible is that of Washington's exit-seeking elites. A bracing reality check for these folks has just been written by Frederick W. Kagan, a military specialist with the American Enterprise Institute. Hardly a flack for the White House, Mr. Kagan argues persuasively in "Myths of the Current War" (find under the Scholars listing at aei.org) that all the woulda, coulda, shoulda about going into Iraq and now getting out fast is simply irrelevant. "It does not matter now why we went into Iraq," Mr. Kagan writes, "only what will happen if we do not succeed there."

The White House has paid a price for not engaging these issues. Wheeling was a start. Keep pouring the Wheaties, Laura.