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April 22, 2006

Goodbye, Scott McClellan. Hello, War in Iraq?

Press critic Jay Rosen argues in this astute piece that the painfully inarticulate stonewalling of outgoing Bush press secretary Scott McClellan wasn't just clumsy spin. It was a new kind of presidential press strategy. McClellan wasn't trying to "manage" the press as previous secretaries in the TV age have tried to do. Instead, his job was to delegitimize the press, and indeed the whole idea of the public's right to know. McClellan didn't try to persuade. He just repeated the same points over and over, running out the clock without even bothing with the illusion of engaging reporters' questions.

News organizations could and should have responded by refusing to play McClellan's game, and abandoning the pretense that what McClellan said every day was in any meaningful sense "information," let alone "news." Instead, they played into his hands by continuing to send their reporters out there day after day, legitimizing the administration's delegitimization strategy.

Will Tony Snow or anybody else who comes in to replace McClellan change this approach? Certainly, the administration will want to try to do something to shore up those tanking poll numbers. But they probably won't risk actually attempting to explain and defend their policies, simply because at this late stage, they've become patently inexplicable and indefensible.

More and more, I'm fearing that Karl Rove's grand plan to save congress for the Republicans will involve bombing Iran at the most politically opportune moment - maybe so close to election day that the blowback doesn't even have a chance to start until after the polls close. As Joshua Micah Marshall has been pointing out over at Talking Points Memo, one hallmark of the Bush administration is that every major policy initiative has peaked in popularity on the day of its announcement, then slowly and steadily declined. The important thing for Democrats - or anybody concerned with the security of our nation and the world - to do is to preempt this potential October (or even early November) surprise now, while there's still time. Lay the groundwork so that the idea of bombing Iraq right before the election is widely seen as intolerably craven and reckless, so that polls clearly show that doing so would end up backfiring. That might not be enough to sway the regime-change-aholics in Cheney's office. But it should be good enough for Rove, who may end up the only person on the planet capable of pulling Bush back from the brink.

God help us, we've reached the point where Turd Blossom could be the closest thing to a moderating influence left in the White House . . .

Posted by tedf at April 22, 2006 02:21 AM

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