It's Not Working

The White House is set to repeat the strategy of a series of major presidential speeches on Iraq.

When are they going to figure out that this strategy isn't working?

They wait for a big drop in support for the war, then schedule a series of "major" speeches, hoping to stem the bleeding.

You can't treat the responsibility of the President to sustain support for a war that way. It's purely reactive, and it permits the press to spin this perfectly legitimate presidential role as "a pr offensive."

Instead, the President should be arguing for the war on a constant basis. He doesn't need to be doing it regularly in "major" speeches, but should be making arguments that are new, that account for daily events, that defend administration policy, as part of his regular schedule. If he's daily offering soundbites that respond to the news of the day, the press can't ignore that every day.

He can't offer the same stale, bumper sticker arguments in his speeches over and over, wait until the poll numbers drop and then frantically schedule a week of major speeches and expect to have them covered as anything but "pr," expect to have those speeches necessarily covered as he wants, with the best soundbites always pulled. If it's a soundbite a day on Iraq, he offers the press no choice.

Support has to sustain over time; so does the effort to justify that support.

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

For Augustine, charity meant thinking the best of others, rather than the worst. Only much later did it come to mean money.

Bush takes charity seriously.

It is not, unfortunately, the basis of soap opera, and soap opera is what the news editorial process runs on.

Good character, so far, is not winning ; though more people hate the media every day, the media still edits the news for everybody.

It does not help that Bush is the most inarticulate President ever.

[PoeFokes]

You don't seem to understand that Bushco doesn't give a shit what the public thinks, what might change the public's view of his Iraq war. What the Bush strategy DOES accomplish is this: It uses the bully pulpit to make media talk about what the president says rather than how and why we should get rid of the president. As long as we're in an uproar about Dubya's latest idiot speech, we won't focus on impeachment. The end of Bush will come if and when the MSM find the courage to ignore Bush's antics and focus on his crimes. As long as he can prevent that, he can stay in office.

[John J. Coupal]

President Bush realizes that the MSM is not going to learn to love him. Most importantly, he doesn't care.

He does realize that we are at war and that we expect him to protect the American people. Our political left continues to roll out its personality assigned to 15 minutes of fame (Jack Murtha, Cindy Sheehan, etc.) and watches the subject go down in flames.

It ain't pretty, but it sure is fun to watch!