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OP-ED COLUMNIST
I Read, I Smoke, I Spin
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: February 22, 2004

WASHINGTON

Laura Bush does not want that Chanel-wearing, shawl-draping, senator-marrying Teresa Heinz Kerry to get her house.

It's a swell house, with doting servants, fresh flowers and grand paintings.

And she does not want her Bushie to be tarred for lacking character, after he ascended by promising to restore character to an Oval Office still redolent of thongs and pizza.

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So the reserved librarian who married the rollicking oilman on the condition that she would never have to make a political speech has suddenly transformed herself into a sharp-edged, tart-tongued, defensive protectrix of her husband's record.

Many White House reporters, including ones the first lady has been testy and sarcastic with, say they are thrilled with the new Laura. They found the old Laura "plastic" and "unreal," limited to treacly concerns about children, reading and being George's rock. The new Laura, they say, has "juice."

But I kind of miss the old Laura, the one who long ago shocked W.'s paternal grandmother by describing her interests in a way that sounded, heaven forfend, French: "I read, I smoke and I admire." The new Laura reads polls, fumes and admonishes. A cool Marian the Librarian morphed into a hot Mary Matalin, running around the country spinning reporters, slicing and dicing Democrats, and raking in dough at fund-raisers.

I always had a cozy image of Laura Bush curled up in a window seat in the White House solarium, reading Dostoyevsky and petting a cat dozing beside her. She seemed beyond politics, an estimably private, utterly classy presence unsullied by the nasty edge that Bush family politics takes on when a Bush pol gets in trouble, not the sort to needle political rivals and the press or rigorously catalog injustices the way Barbara Bush did.

Not that Laura was bland. I liked the confidence with which this champion of literacy blew off the poets she'd invited to the White House last year, once she realized they planned to do to her husband what Eartha Kitt did to Lyndon Johnson — turn a cultural event into an antiwar protest. It was her party, and she could cry foul if she wanted.

During the 2000 campaign, she was content to be the serene counterpoint to her husband's boyish bouncing off the walls. She rejected Hillary's two-for-the-price-of-one mantra and told The Times's Frank Bruni, "I'm not that knowledgeable about most issues. . . . And just to put in my two cents to put in my two cents — I don't think it's really necessary."

Bush advisers liked her detachment from the messy arena. They thought she made her husband seem grounded, moderate and down to earth, a contrast with the obsessive, egoistic ambition of the Clintons and Al Gore.

But this time around, it is Mr. Bush who is getting attacked on credibility and do-whatever-it-takes ambition. His strategists, panicked about chaotic Iraq, confused economic policy, cascading deficits and incoherent National Guard records, needed to draw, if you'll pardon the expression, the most unimpeachable person in the White House into the fray. They pitched her as Mr. Bush's secret weapon. Maybe, after the David Kay debacle, the White House just needed to unearth a weapon — any weapon.

The woman known for telling her husband to tone it down is now telling his critics to get lost. In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, she said of the National Guard flap: "I think it's a political, you know, witch hunt, actually, on the part of Democrats."

Speaking to The Times's Elisabeth Bumiller, a prickly Mrs. Bush defended her husband on Iraq and shared the chip on his shoulder about the East Coast elite, apparently resentful that they might consider her a 50's throwback, doing women's work.

Talking to ABC's Terry Moran, Mrs. Bush harshly responded to Terry McAuliffe's AWOL charge: "I don't think it's fair to really lie about allegations about someone." She stated flatly that W. was pulling Guard duty in Alabama. When Mr. Moran asked how she knew, she replied, "Well, because he told me he was."

The last time a powerful man from Texas got into trouble and sent his wife out to defend him, it was W. contributor Kenny Boy Lay.

The president can't skirt the issues by hiding behind Laura's skirts forever. One way of showing character is to come out from behind all her protestations about his character.

liberties@nytimes.com

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Calling GWB a draft dodger is as pathetic as saying Clinton is not. At least he served time in the coast guard & if it was to avoid the main conflict nobody can really say except GWB himself.

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When political supporters start comparing their Presidental aspirant to an impeached President, things must be really bad. Ya think?

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Originally posted by Grey:
Its just alot harder to get away with saying anything wrong about any Dem but say what you want about a republican true/false does not matter whats important is the shock value of the charge & how many people you can make believe it.

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Byrd Rips Bush's Aircraft Carrier Use
By KEN GUGGENHEIM
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Questioning the motives of a "desk-bound president who assumes the garb of a warrior," Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd on Tuesday reproached President Bush for flying onto an aircraft carrier last week to declare an end of major fighting in Iraq.

"I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan , and yet that is what I saw," Byrd said on the Senate floor.

Byrd, 85, of West Virginia, is the Senate's most senior member and was one of the most outspoken critics of the Iraq war.

Dressed in a flight suit, Bush was flown onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on Thursday, his small S-3B Viking jet making a tailhook landing. The ship was near San Diego on its return from action in the Persian Gulf.
With the sea as his backdrop, Bush announced that the United States and its allies had prevailed against Saddam Hussein.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Byrd's criticisms are "a disservice to the men and women of our military who deserved to be thanked in person."

"Senator Byrd did not support the president at the beginning of this, and it is no surprise that he does not support the president at the end," Fleischer said. "Senator Byrd is a patriot, but on this we disagree."

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California asked the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, to find out the cost of the president's trip. , the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee , to the GAO.

Byrd contrasted the speech with the "simple dignity" of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address during the Civil War.

"I do not begrudge his salute to America's warriors aboard the carrier Lincoln, for they have performed bravely, ... but I do question the motives of a desk-bound president who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech ," he said.

He said American blood has been shed defending Bush's policies. "This is not some made-for-TV backdrop for a campaign commercial," he said.

"To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the president to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech," he said.

Fleischer has rejected any suggestion that the landing was intended to provide campaign footage for Bush's re-election campaign.

Earlier Tuesday, he also said Bush decided to land on the carrier on a jet instead of his usual helicopter because the president wanted "to see an aircraft landing the same way that the pilots saw an aircraft landing. He wanted to see it as realistically as possible."

Waxman said Fleischer had provided conflicting accounts of the reasons for the president's trip by jet, initially indicating that the carrier would be hundreds of miles offshore, too far from land to be reached by helicopter.

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Missteps on economy worry Bush supporters
Ammunition being handed to Kerry, GOP lobbyists fearBy Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen

Updated: 3:45 a.m. ET March 13, 2004WASHINGTON - A string of glaring missteps by President Bush's economic team has raised alarm among the president's supporters that his economic policymakers may have lost the most basic ability to formulate a persuasive message or anticipate the political consequences of their actions.

In recent weeks, the White House has had to endure its chief economist's positive comments about job "outsourcing," or sending work overseas; controversial passages in the annual Economic Report of the President; questions over the legitimacy of Bush's 2005 budget; a California swing in which Bush bragged about the creation of two jobs in Bakersfield; and a flap over a job-creation forecast that not even the president could stand by.

On March 1, a host of U.S. industries began paying trade sanctions to Europe because Congress and the White House have not replaced illegal export subsidies with new aid for ailing manufacturers.

'Machinery's not working very well'
But the non-naming of Anthony F. Raimondo on Thursday as assistant commerce secretary for manufacturing and services has brought the concerns to a boil.

The long-anticipated announcement of a manufacturing czar was supposed to be a good-news day for a White House struggling with its economic message. Instead the planned, smiling photo op fizzled when it came to light that a year ago Bush's choice had opened a major plant in Beijing.

"Clearly, the machinery's not working very well," said Bruce Bartlett, an economist with the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, who noted that this White House has been known for its discipline on message.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the lobbying world of K Street say that the incidents may be minor, but they are many, each amplified by the last. And they are supplying a steady, nourishing diet for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who has made jobs and Bush's economic policies a centerpiece of his campaign to capture the White House.

Several former administration officials said the debacle over Raimondo illustrated broader weaknesses in Bush's White House as he gears up his reelection campaign. Some Republicans said the situation crystallized their concerns about his weakened political position. These Republicans refused to speak for the record because they said that if they did, they could not be candid about the problems without infuriating Bush and his most powerful aides.

Close scrutiny
These Republicans noted that several key officials who were steeped in Bush's first campaign have moved out of the West Wing or out of the government, and their replacements -- especially in the economic arena -- have weaker political antennae.

"People are doing their jobs, but most of them don't have the authority to do something once they find a mistake," said a former official who stays in frequent touch with the West Wing. "Somebody over there has to take complete and utter responsibility for everything that is publicly released from that White House. And no one is doing that."

They also note that Democrats are drawing scrutiny to errors and inconsistencies that might have passed unnoticed a few months ago. "This is a hyper-charged political environment, and they have not adapted," the former official said.

And Karl Rove, who is on the government payroll as the White House senior adviser, is stretched thin between trying to watch what the administration is doing and overseeing the ramping up of a campaign that has accelerated its plans in response to Kerry's early lock on the nomination.

"There's a trade-off," said a Republican who advises both the administration and the campaign. "It means you end up talking through get-out-the-vote activities instead of looking at every single element of the economic report before it is released."

Personnel issues
A former White House official pointed to other personnel issues. Bush loaded his first economic team with brash, outspoken officials, full of ideas, such as Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, National Economic Council Director Lawrence B. Lindsey and economic adviser R. Glenn Hubbard, he said.

But those ideas often clashed, and the officials proved too outspoken. So Bush swung the team in the opposite direction, filling it with replacements who would stick to the White House message and keep out of the news. But those officials have not generated fresh policies.

"They've populated the place with an absence of ideas guys, which is fine if you think you can put it on autopilot and win," he said. "But it doesn't look like it's working.

Others say the economic team was kept straight in the first two years by Joshua B. Bolten, the deputy chief of staff for policy. When Bolten left last year to head the White House budget office, the wheels started coming off the operation, one Senate GOP aide said.

Administration officials contend that as the economic recovery takes hold and jobs begin proliferating, Republican concerns will disappear. Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said that already, the unemployment rate has fallen, disposable income has risen, single-family home ownership is at record levels and worker productivity is high.

But outside the White House, allies are worried. The recent losing streak has the administration "on its heels," said Daniel J. Mitchell, an economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Rich fodder for Democrats
This week, Reps. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) and Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.), who represent hard-hit manufacturing districts, requested a meeting with Bush to get him to refocus his economic message. "Let me try to be diplomatic about this," Manzullo said. "The president needs to bring together in a single, simple focus the things he really believes in. He's got the right stuff. He just needs to sharpen the focus."

The flap over Raimondo may be the most glaring breakdown, critics say. He is a well-respected chairman and chief executive of a prefabricated-building manufacturer. But his company -- Behlen Manufacturing Co., of Columbus, Neb. -- laid off 1,180 workers from its five U.S. plants in the past three years while opening a plant in Beijing.

That was only the most recent problem. The release last month of the Economic Report of the President by the White House Council of Economic Advisers has proven to be rich fodder for Democrats, who promise it will appear in ads. First came the flap over a passage that appeared to praise the recent movement of U.S. service jobs to such low-wage countries as India: "When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than make or provide it domestically."

Then, critics turned their attention to the report's anticipation that 2004 employment would on average be 2.6 million jobs higher than last year. The secretaries of commerce and the Treasury, and then the president, quickly backed off that projection.

The outsourcing issue
Finally, Democrats latched onto an obtuse question in the report, "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger . . . is it providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a product?" The point, administration economists say, was to question the practicality of congressional proposals to offer tax breaks to manufacturers. But Democrats accused the White House of wanting to reclassify burger flippers as Joe Lunchpails.

The reactions were unfair, said two former White House officials, but in an election year, they should have been anticipated. They said the extensive vetting process that governed previous report releases must have broken down. "Clearly, people didn't read it," one of the former officials said. "This stuff was not hard to find."

As the White House was putting out those brush fires, officials had to deal with the comments of N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Mankiw managed to anger manufacturers, software writers and even radiologists in his extended take on the "outsourcing" of jobs overseas.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," he told reporters. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's a good thing."

But administration officials admit that so far, it has been a good thing mainly for Democrats.

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Bush Administration Paid Actors To Impersonate Journalists

U.S. Videos, for TV News, Come Under Scrutiny
New York Times
March 14, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 14 — Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines.

The videos are intended for use in local television news programs. Several include pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation from a crowd cheering as he signed the Medicare law on Dec. 8.

The materials were produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, which called them video news releases, but the source is not identified. Two videos end with the voice of a woman who says, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

But the production company, Home Front Communications, said it had hired her to read a script prepared by the government.

Another video, intended for Hispanic audiences, shows a Bush administration official being interviewed in Spanish by a man who identifies himself as a reporter named Alberto Garcia.

Another segment shows a pharmacist talking to an elderly customer. The pharmacist says the new law "helps you better afford your medications," and the customer says, "It sounds like a good idea." Indeed, the pharmacist says, "A very good idea."

The government also prepared scripts that can be used by news anchors introducing what the administration describes as a made-for-television "story package."

In one script, the administration suggests that anchors use this language: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare. Since then, there have been a lot of questions about how the law will help older Americans and people with disabilities. Reporter Karen Ryan helps sort through the details."

The "reporter" then explains the benefits of the new law.

Lawyers from the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, discovered the materials last month when they were looking into the use of federal money to pay for certain fliers and advertisements that publicize the Medicare law.

In a report to Congress last week, the lawyers said those fliers and advertisements were legal, despite "notable omissions and other weaknesses." Administration officials said the television news segments were also a legal, effective way to educate beneficiaries.

Gary L. Kepplinger, deputy general counsel of the accounting office, said, "We are actively considering some follow-up work related to the materials we received from the Department of Health and Human Services."

One question is whether the government might mislead viewers by concealing the source of the Medicare videos, which have been broadcast by stations in Oklahoma, Louisiana and other states.

Federal law prohibits the use of federal money for "publicity or propaganda purposes" not authorized by Congress. In the past, the General Accounting Office has found that federal agencies violated this restriction when they disseminated editorials and newspaper articles written by the government or its contractors without identifying the source.

Kevin W. Keane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said there was nothing nefarious about the television materials, which he said had been distributed to stations nationwide. Under federal law, he said, the government is required to inform beneficiaries about changes in Medicare.

"The use of video news releases is a common, routine practice in government and the private sector," Mr. Keane said. "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools."

But Democrats disagreed. "These materials are even more disturbing than the Medicare flier and advertisements," said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey. "The distribution of these videos is a covert attempt to manipulate the press."

Mr. Lautenberg, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and seven other members of Congress requested the original review by the accounting office.

In the videos and advertisements, the government urges beneficiaries to call a toll-free telephone number, 1-800-MEDICARE. People who call that number can obtain recorded information about prescription drug benefits if they recite the words "Medicare improvement."

Documents from the Medicare agency show why the administration is eager to advertise the benefits of the new law, on radio and television, in newspapers and on the Internet.

"Our consumer research has shown that beneficiaries are confused about the Medicare Modernization Act and uncertain about what it means for them," says one document from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Other documents suggest the scope of the publicity campaign: $12.6 million for advertising this winter, $18.5 million to publicize drug discount cards this spring, about $18.5 million this summer, $30 million for a year of beneficiary education starting this fall and $44 million starting in the fall of 2005.

"Video news releases" have been used for more than a decade. Pharmaceutical companies have done particularly well with them, producing news-style health features about the afflictions their drugs are meant to cure.

The videos became more prominent in the late 1980's, as more and more television stations cut news-gathering budgets and were glad to have packaged news bits to call their own, even if they were prepared by corporations seeking to sell products.

As such, the videos have drawn criticism from some news media ethicists, who consider them to be at odds with journalism's mission to verify independently the claims of corporations and governments.

Government agencies have also produced such videos for years, often on subjects like teenage smoking and the dangers of using steroids. But the Medicare materials wander into more controversial territory.

Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, expressed disbelief that any television stations would present the Medicare videos as real news segments, considering the current debate about the merits of the new law.

"Those to me are just the next thing to fraud," Mr. Kovach said. "It's running a paid advertisement in the heart of a news program."

http://www.infowars.com/print/propaganda/paid_actor_journalists.htm

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