Since the Clinton years, this has been the era of the permanent campaign, with the line between running for election and running the country practically erased. Bush took Karl Rove into the White House, turned policy into an arm of politics, and governed the same way he campaigned: treat the press as an out-of-favor interest group, control the message at all cost, repeat it incessantly regardless of changing facts, admit no mistakes, show no uncertainty, reward loyalists, and ignore critics or else, if necessary, destroy them. This approach to what’s known as strategic communications won Bush two elections; it also helped destroy his Presidency. Campaigning and governing are not the same. They are closer to being opposites.
Packer goes on to note that when you insist on living in a world of 24/7 spin, you eventually lose touch with reality, and control of the debate. You can't rationally answer your critics, nor effectively rally yours supporters.
All you can do is spin.
Spin is a necessary part of getting things done- recall President Roosevelt likening his Lend-Lease Plan (which, in effect, set America up as a supplier of war materiel to Britain even though we were officially neutral) in 1941:
Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire...I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it."... I don't want $15--I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.
But you can't let it define reality. Waldo had the feeling the outgoing administration more or less arrived in office trapped in the world of spin after a Ron Suskind article in The New York Times magazine five years ago. In it, Suskind recalled,
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
John Adams warned, in the Boston Massacre trials in 1770, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." By hewing to the view that they can create their own realities,the President and his people came a cropper, over and over and over. And all they did in response was attack. His party has been attacking the federal government and its employees for so long one wonders why they want to get involved with it at all, except to indulge huckster Grover Norquist's fantasy to undermine and strangle the government until he can haul it into the bathtub and strangle it. when the federal courts didn't do their bidding, they had church TV shows with Bill Frist attacking the judiciary, and Senator Cornyn of Texas said he could understand how a frustrated, half-mad litigant might feel moved to break into a federal judge's home and murder her husband and mother after not getting what he wanted from the judge. The media's properly adversarial role was recast as being "in the tank" for..whomever. The President's closed-door, invitation-only pressers with media types in the tank for him- well, that's different.
Packer- and anyone who saw it can agree- the President-elect was one tightly buttoned-down fella in his press conference. That carries its own hazards, too. Just as no president ever gives up powers bequeathed by his predecessor, no matter how illegally or improvidently obtained, so no president gives up any means of trying to control his message and spin it over the heads of the press.
Packer concludes he'd like to see the President-elect succeed. surely all Americans will, except for certain talk show hosts and SC political bloggers. But it's way too soon to hail a new era of openness after one fifteen-minute press conference.
We'll see. The most we can say is at least the President-elect doesn't seem to be phoning in from the alternate universe where the other party's leaders say the economy is going through a bad patch but its fundamentals are strong.
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