Something In The Water? More Than Floride?

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110008133

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.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Telling it like it is.

 

[no1tovote4]

Go Bush, bring it back! How can they consistently miss the fact that when the President is telling people what is happening, why it is happening, and when it will happen his numbers go up? When he stops telling the people what is happening and lets his enemies define it his numbers go down. He needs to learn to use the power of his office to get the message going.

He still has noticeable discomfort when in public speaking on a large forum so they have taken the numbers down a notch and started giving interviews during the workday, this has raised his level of eloquence but reduced the audience reached. The Stage Fright effect has had some noticeable effect on his speeches. Who can forget the, "It's hard work that we are working at hard to complete the hard work." performance at the debates?

I think that this is a good compromise for him if he continues to go at it. The problem is, once the numbers begin to rise they will stop. At least past performance tells us that they will.

 

[SweetBoy]

Go Bush, bring it back! How can they consistently miss the fact that when the President is telling people what is happening, why it is happening, and when it will happen his numbers go up? When he stops telling the people what is happening and lets his enemies define it his numbers go down. He needs to learn to use the power of his office to get the message going.

He still has noticeable discomfort when in public speaking on a large forum so they have taken the numbers down a notch and started giving interviews during the workday, this has raised his level of eloquence but reduced the audience reached. The Stage Fright effect has had some noticeable effect on his speeches. Who can forget the, "It's hard work that we are working at hard to complete the hard work." performance at the debates?

I think that this is a good compromise for him if he continues to go at it. The problem is, once the numbers begin to rise they will stop. At least past performance tells us that they will.

Something positive happens in Iraq itself. Efforts to raise poll numbers sometimes lead to impressions that the oratory is about just that: it is propaganda about something that on the MSM shows no change. I would change the topic. Get back into Katrina or push immigration reform.

 

[Adam's Apple]

So we can accept what the MSM reports about Iraq as absolute truth--they're telling us what REALLY is going on there??????????

 

[Annie]

Something positive happens in Iraq itself. Efforts to raise poll numbers sometimes lead to impressions that the oratory is about just that: it is propaganda about something that on the MSM shows no change. I would change the topic. Get back into Katrina or push immigration reform.

There is and has been 'lots' of positive things happening in Iraq, you just don't see them often in MSM. That's the problem.

 

[SweetBoy]

There is and has been 'lots' of positive things happening in Iraq, you just don't see them often in MSM. That's the problem.

No doubt, but it is not likely that the MSM is going to change its appetite for the dramatic, which means telling the worst of it: death, destruction, tragedies brought on by the insurgency. I remember many years ago PBS, I think it was, tried a news program based on telling the "good news." It went down like a lead balloon. Nobody was interested. The MSM is what it is. Even Fox is doing the same thing. It sells. Deal with the reality: the MSM is not going to change.

 

[kgoodwin10]

It was a welcome if not an overdue answer by President Bush this week. After weeks of allowing the Liberal free gut shots the President was at his best. My hope is that he will continue to fight until the fight is won.

 

[Annie]

No doubt, but it is not likely that the MSM is going to change its appetite for the dramatic, which means telling the worst of it: death, destruction, tragedies brought on by the insurgency. I remember many years ago PBS, I think it was, tried a news program based on telling the "good news." It went down like a lead balloon. Nobody was interested. The MSM is what it is. Even Fox is doing the same thing. It sells. Deal with the reality: the MSM is not going to change.

You may have a point. Relatively the public has abandoned the MSM traditional networks, the MSM newsdailies are heading towards the junk status from ratings services, the MSM weekly magazines can't give them away.

None of them seem to notice.

 

[dilloduck]

It was a welcome if not an overdue answer by President Bush this week. After weeks of allowing the Liberal free gut shots the President was at his best. My hope is that he will continue to fight until the fight is won.

Agreed---the media is certainly not going to come to him to understand anything so he has to go to the people.

 

[Adam's Apple]

It was a welcome if not an overdue answer by President Bush this week. After weeks of allowing the Liberal free gut shots the President was at his best. My hope is that he will continue to fight until the fight is won.

I hope so, too, but I wonder if George W. has really learned the lesson that you can't turn a deaf ear to what the opposition is saying on a daily basis and think that it won't have some kind of effect on the public. Bush has just let the Democrats say what they wanted without responding, and this huge mistake has cost him dearly in how the public sees him and his performance as president.

 

[kgoodwin10]

I hope so, too, but I wonder if George W. has really learned the lesson that you can't turn a deaf ear to what the opposition is saying on a daily basis and think that it won't have some kind of effect on the public. Bush has just let the Democrats say what they wanted without responding, and this huge mistake has cost him dearly in how the public sees him and his performance as president.

I agree, this has been a painful mistake by GW. I truly believe that he doesnt pay much attention to poles. That is a good thing when leading! But he can't remain blind to it, because the Dems are beating him up. You will hardly ever hear me give slick Willie a compliment. But he was always selling, and I mean that in a positive context. The problem with slick was he governed by poles. Bush has lead, but a leader needs to sell those that follow, and that has been his weakness. Time will tell if it's a lesson learned or if he was reacting. I hope it's the former.

 

[no1tovote4]

Something positive happens in Iraq itself. Efforts to raise poll numbers sometimes lead to impressions that the oratory is about just that: it is propaganda about something that on the MSM shows no change. I would change the topic. Get back into Katrina or push immigration reform.

(You can always tell the visitors from DU, the title bar is irresistable to them...)

Anyway, If you want to see how it works as I stated go here:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Bush_Job_Approval.htm

Daily numbers support my assertion. While still low his approval rises as he continues to publicly speak. It happens every time he does this, not just this time. If he continuously informed the public I doubt his numbers would be below 50%.