Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/columns/barone_050824.htm
I agree with Barone that GW is not getting the message out, whether because of his speech writers or perhaps because he thinks 9/11 made the cause self-evident. It's past time to utilize some of the support already out there and highlight the good the troops are doing.
I agree with Barone that GW is not getting the message out, whether because of his speech writers or perhaps because he thinks 9/11 made the cause self-evident. It's past time to utilize some of the support already out there and highlight the good the troops are doing.
Time for fireside chats?
David Frum has a tough piece out today in National Review Online arguing that George W. Bush has been ineffective in persuading Americans to stay the course in Iraq. This is a direct slap not only at the president, but also at his speechwriters, and from a former colleague who served in the speechwriting office in 2001 and 2002. Frum argues that Bush makes the same case over and over again, and does not flesh it out with arresting details and enlightening narrative.
"The president could have made news yesterday by itemizing the reasons to regard Iraq more positively than most journalists do. He could have ticked off some of the achievements daily posted on the centcom.mil site. (Here's the latest.) He could have teased details even out of the mainstream media. (Mickey Kaus the other day noted that the reliably dour Robin Wright of the Washington Post casually mentioned in the course of her latest down-beater that Iraq has gone on a car-buying boom that has put a million new cars on the road since liberation. Kaus: 'A "car-buying boom"another shocking failure! Don't they know about global warming?')."
He also suggested that Bush should make his case not just before cheering crowds, like the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Salt Lake City on Monday, but in other, more informal settings.
The obvious model, though Frum doesn't mention it, is the fireside chats delivered by Franklin Roosevelt. These were radio broadcasts, made at a time when radio was a new but already well-nigh-universal medium. The texts are conveniently collected in a FDR's Fireside Chats, edited by Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy and published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1992. Roosevelt delivered 14 of these talks, almost entirely on domestic issues, from March 1933 to June 1938, and another 18, almost entirely on foreign policy and war, from September 1939 to January 1945. In these talks Roosevelt often explained painstakingly the current posture of the war; before the chat of February 1942, the White House press office suggested that listeners might want to have an atlas or a globe at hand to follow the President's discussion of the war in the Atlantic and Pacific...