W.H. aides "at fault for assuming Bush was personally unassailable"

Bush_Eats_Beef

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Sun Nov-20-05 09:25 AM
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W.H. aides "at fault for assuming Bush was personally unassailable"

As Congress fled the capital for Thanksgiving, and Bush made his way back from a trip to Asia, White House aides were studying the political videotapes to see where they had lost control of events. Among those at fault, they decided, was GOP Sen. Bill Frist, outmaneuvered early this month by the Democrats' Harry Reid, who used a parliamentary trick to force the Senate into a secret session and demand answers on WMD issues. But White House aides concede that they, too, were at fault for having assumed that Bush was personally unassailable and that events—and explanations of them—would take care of themselves. A war-room defense was "something we did well during the campaign," said Nicolle Wallace, Bush's communications director. "Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn't be necessary after the election."

It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove. To answer the charges that Bush "deliberately misled" the country on WMD, the White House is arguing that most Democrats—and most U.N. officials and European intelligence agencies—thought Saddam had WMD, too. Bush aides argue that Democrats saw the same intel and came to the same conclusions Bush did (an assertion Democrats hotly dispute). "We recognized that we can't communicate our message effectively until we deal with this," said a top White House aide.

But it's unclear how calling Democrats hypocrites will help revive Bush's personal reputation. Rather than undermine Bush's foes, the strategy seems unlikely to do more than remind voters of the undeniable fact that the WMD simply weren't there. And to make their case at all, White House strategists have been forced to use a tactic they studiously avoided in the campaign: deploying Bush himself as the attack dog. "Having the president engaged in the argument is not the first choice," says Sen. John Cornyn, a Texan who is close to Bush and Rove. But the president pressed ahead. "While it is perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war," he told a military audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., last week, "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." Then he resorted once again to the argument all presidents unload in wartime: that criticism undermines morale and emboldens our enemies. "These baseless attacks," he declared, "send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy determined to destroy our way of life." But even using that weapon can be risky at a time when polls show most Americans doubt that the war in Iraq has made us safer.

War-room spinners also hope to highlight whatever good news there is to be found in Iraq, and which, they say, doesn't make its way into the American media. They recently dispatched one of their best operatives, Steve Schmidt (no relation to the Ohio congresswoman), to Baghdad to look for ways generate positive press. His answer: build better relations with the reporters. But they may be preoccupied these days by the need to dodge terrorist attacks on their hotels.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10118733/site/newsweek/page/2/