Running Against
Themselves
By MAUREEN DOWD,
Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes on the Web, October 25, 2006
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen
Dowd. |
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Things have become so dire for the
Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush.
The president is cutting and running from the president.
In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major
announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will
no longer stay the course on the rallying cry “stay the course.”
A presidency built on message discipline (Message: “Stay the course”) is
trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging (Message: “No
more stay the course”).
Of course, the administration has never really said what “the course” is, so it
was never really apparent what “staying” it meant, anyhow.
It was a wacky moment for Tony Snow, who renounced the slogan while sticking to
the policy. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on,” the
press secretary said, “and it allowed critics to say, ‘Well, here’s an
administration that’s just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the
situation is,’ when, in fact, it’s just the opposite.”
The important thing was that the cliché sounded good to Republicans, strong and
virile, for a while. But pollsters for the White House seemed to be the
last to learn that even many of the party faithful had soured on the phrase,
deeming it inflexible and stupid. Has Karl Rove, who urged G.O.P.
candidates to keep the Democrats on the defensive on national security, lost his
magic?
In a White House with a Fox News all-spin sensibility, officials don’t think
they need to change the strategy as much as they need to change their slogan.
The overworked Bush phrase suggested “burying your head in the sand,” Steve
Hinkson, political director at Luntz Research Companies, a G.O.P. public opinion
firm, told The Washington Post’s Peter Baker. “The problem is that as the
number of people who agree with remaining resolute dwindles, that sort of
language doesn’t strike a chord as much as it once did.”
Unwilling to admit mistakes or face the urgent need to go past semantic changes
in a protectorate that has fallen into a vicious civil war, in which Americans
are merely referees and targets, the White House is falling back on marketing.
Just as Andy Card rolled out the war as a marketing event, the Bush team now
thinks that all it needs to do is come up with a catchy and chesty new
advertising pitch.
Bay Buchanan assured Wolf Blitzer that the president still intended to stay the
course and seek victory, he just wouldn’t use that phrase, because it gave
people the impression that W. was unwilling to change tactics.
After all, Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh last week that the inept Iraqi
government was doing “remarkably well.”
But given the Republican meltdown, it’s obvious that Democrats are having better
luck mocking the Republicans for staying the course than Republicans are having
mocking the Democrats for cutting and running. But Democrats have no
ingenious ideas about how to extricate ourselves from this nasty war either.
Yet W. once more accused the Democrats of wanting to cut and run in Iraq at a
campaign stop in Sarasota, Fla., yesterday.
Many frantic Republican lawmakers are also running against themselves, either
reneging on their support for the war they started, or railing against
Washington, the town they absolutely control, claiming that the capital has
forgotten their values, or making ads denouncing the Democrats’ “homosexual
agenda,” even though Republicans are now the party of gay scandal.
It’s a hilarious spectacle of a whole party re-enacting the classic scene in Mel
Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles,” in which the sheriff holds the gun to his own head
to take himself hostage.
The Bushes don’t connect words with action. Action is something that’s
secretly plotted with the inner circle behind closed doors. The public
should stay out of it. The Bushes just connect words with salesmanship.
Poppy Bush never meant it when he said “Read my lips: no new taxes” at the
1988 convention. It was just a Clint Eastwood-sounding line in a Peggy
Noonan speech, meant to pump up his flighty image.
Just so, his son never paid any mind to his campaign promise not to
nation-build, and he didn’t come through on his bullhorn pledge to catch the
perpetrators of 9/11 or his tough-guy vow to bring in Osama dead or alive.
To W., the words he says to Americans don’t matter as much as the words Dick
Cheney says to him. He just has to hope that daddy’s friend, James Baker,
the smooth fixer who is co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group and who has already
suggested moving past the meaningless partisan jargon of “cut and run” and “stay
the course,” comes up with a plan to rescue Junior from a fine mess one more
time.
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