ashingtonPosted on 06/13/2004 11:08:58 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
ashington
George Bush begins today to try to refocus the nation on his presidency after a week when it seemed, at least from the constant replays of 1980's-era videotape on CNN, that Ronald and Nancy Reagan were fox-trotting in the White House again.
At times it also seemed as if Mr. Reagan were running for president one more time. This past weekend, the White House Web site prominently featured a collection of Reagan remembrances and a photo essay of Mr. Bush at the funeral for the former president. The Bush campaign Web site went one better, offering a video of Mr. Reagan uttering his most famous lines - "These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc" - interspersed with Mr. Bush's own words - "He had the confidence that comes with conviction, the strength that comes with character."
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It was difficult to tell where the 40th president ended and the 43rd began, a blurring further promoted by Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, who told an Iowa Republican Party convention on Saturday that Mr. Reagan's spirit lived on. "Every time an American soldier, sailor, airman or marine risks his or her life to ensure our security and peace, Ronald Reagan will be there," Mr. Mehlman said.
Of course, Mr. Bush's effort to wrap himself in the Reagan legacy drew plenty of skeptics, including a number of top Reagan officials, who said, all anonymously, that the presidencies could not have been more different. Mr. Reagan was pragmatic, they said, but Mr. Bush is ideological. Mr. Reagan was a unifier, they argued, while Mr. Bush has polarized.
"Bush wants to defeat his opponents, Reagan wanted his to join him," one former official of the Reagan White House said.
Leaving aside what many historians call a nostalgic rewriting of the Reagan era - plenty of Democrats despised and derided Ronald Reagan in a highly partisan time -there are still striking and significant contrasts in the politics, artifice and style of the two presidencies.
The first that leaps out is Mr. Reagan's ease with the camera and the way it captured his personality and seemed to enhance who he was. Americans felt they knew Mr. Reagan, who was little different off television than on.
"He had so much experience - he knew the expressions, the posture, the lighting, the angles," said Michael Evans, Mr. Reagan's White House photographer, who recalled that Mr. Reagan, so used to Hollywood sets, had no problems letting him into the Oval Office on historic occasions to shoot through the day.
"I'd say hello in the morning, and then he'd just totally ignore me," Mr. Evans said.
Mr. Bush, in contrast, is stiffer and often more tongue-tied on television than in person. He finds the camera so distracting that his staff quickly shoos photographers away. "He just likes to get it over with," said David Hume Kennerly, who has photographed every president since he was Gerald R. Ford's White House photographer. "If he had his choice, he wouldn't do it."
The second difference is in the business of politics. Mr. Bush, who is his own de facto campaign manager, loves the combat and gossip. His advisers say he knows his exact standing in recent polls, the names of his chairmen in the battleground states and probably the names of important county chairmen.
Mr. Reagan, in contrast, did not. "Are you kidding me?" said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who was Mr. Reagan's last White House chief of staff. "He didn't want to hear about the political ups and downs." Mr. Reagan's detachment meant that his operatives handled the dirty work, while Mr. Bush's immersion has helped drive one of the most politically aggressive White Houses in decades.
The third difference is their style in the capital. Both men ran against Washington, but once elected, Mr. Reagan was determined to be different from Jimmy Carter, who had ignored the city's power elite. "When you come to town, there's a tendency as an officeholder to act as if you're a detached servant," Mr. Reagan said at a party he gave at the F Street Club in Washington when he was president-elect in 1980. He invited the capital's political, business and social leaders, many of them Democrats. "Well, I decided it was time to serve notice that we're residents."
The Bushes, in contrast, have gone to bed early and kept largely to themselves, socializing mostly with old friends from Texas and some of the president's Yale classmates. On the campaign trail, Mr. Bush takes frequent swipes at Washington, drawing big applause, but Democrats say his approach has helped polarize the mood in the capital.
In any case, Mr. Bush, not Mr. Reagan, is this year's candidate. After a hiatus of nearly two weeks - when he spent time in Europe, at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Sea Island, Ga., at the observances for Mr. Reagan and at a celebration in Texas for his father's 80th birthday - Mr. Bush will spend four of five days this week on the campaign trail.
Even so, Mr. Bush will have an odd opening act today, tied to yet another previous presidency: the unveiling of former President Bill Clinton's official portrait at the White House.
President Bush's problem is that he can't fill Ronald Reagan's shoes. An explicit comparison is laughable and even Bush aides have refrained from drawing one. In the end what will make or break Bush's bid for a second term is not nostalgia for President Reagan but the voters' perception of the Bush record. For better or worse, it is a referendum on the incumbent.
Bush sure as hell can't fill Reagan the myth's shoes. Even Reagan could not fill those shoes.
. . .LOL; but mercifully, President Reagan has no idea just how far these people have gone.
Exactly. That's why a lot of conservatives have unrealistic expectations of what a President can do in Washington. No mortal can live up to a myth.
IMHO this is the reason Bush is hated so.
The New York Times: "All Is Skewed To Fit Our Bent"
Jayson Blair the liar plus the activist homosexual editorial board.
The Old Gray Drag Queen is not fit to line bird cages or garbage cans.
In point of fact, Jean-Fraud Kerry, fifth-column quisling, is not fit to fill George W. Bush's boots.
Reagan will not be on the ballot in November, a detail the NYT would have us miss in its continuing Goebellsian-Riefenstahlisch hysteria.
We need not concern ourselves with anything in this propaganda rag.
Bush has risen to the occasion, is defeating terrorism and re-energizing the economy--
--remarkably like our fortieth president.
All I can say to clinton is Reagan is a hard act to follow. His timing couldn't be worse for kerry either. Wait until people campare Reagan with clinton and kerry while the Reagan legacy is still fresh in their minds. This will be quite a contrast and will hopefully be a good time for Bush to get his positive messages out to the people.
"In any case, Mr. Bush, not Mr. Reagan, is this year's candidate."
Oh but Mr. Reagan CAN run again this year posthumusly. I think the GOP should give Nancy a prime time speaking spot at the convention after they show a documentary film on the life of Ronald Reagan. Nancy could then nominate Dubya as the heir of the Reagan Legacy and conclude by saying: Go out and win one more for The Gipper".
In George W's first year, he tired all sorts of stuff to socialize and form rapport with the other side of the aisle. He had Ted Kennedy over for movies, he went to the Democrat retreat, etc. etc.
The Democrats in Reagan's day were different than those today. Some of them were still patriots, and put America first. Some of them were still human beings rather than angry ideologs, and could still socialize amicably with their adversaries afterhours.
Now their only hope of getting back into power is to break the public from liking President Bush. They can't do anything that makes it look like they like him if they are pushing a line to the public that he is awful, so they are the ones who made this division, not the Bushes.
ELISABETH BUMILLER & STEVEN WEISMAN
A wife-and-husband team from The New York Times
Born in Aalborg, Denmark, and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Elisabeth has a bachelor's in journalism from Northwestern University and a master's from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
STEVEN WEISMAN became a member of the editorial board of The New York Times in February 1995, after having served as deputy foreign editor since May 1992.
Before Elisabeth Bumiller lived in India in the mid-1980s, she had reported mainly on upper-crust Americans for the Washington Post.
For Women Only: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Sexual Dysfunction & Reclaiming Your Sex Life
Written by Jennifer Berman , Laura Berman , Elisabeth Bumiller
Exactly .. and the NYT wouldn't be trying to downgrade the mantle if it didn't fit so well.
Jelousy is an evil trait.
Elisabeth Bumiller, White House correspondent for the New York Times, recently chronicled the many ways this administration has crafted presidential must-see TV.
ELISABETH BUMILLER: In our news room at the Times they were saying my God! -- this is the biggest spectacle of presidential theatre we've ever seen. If you have been watching the Bush White House for the last 2 years you can see in some ways that they were really building up to it. They haven't, you know, invented the wheel here. They have just added on to a lot of -- if you can call them White House tricks and, and methods of staging the president that's been going on since Ronald Reagan, really.
The main thing that people remember in America was on the one year anniversary of September 11th President Bush gave a speech on Ellis Island and the White House had gone so far as to rent three sets of Musco Lights which they set down on a barge across New York harbor and tethered in the water around the base of Liberty Island and then sort of blasted them upward and lit up the Statue of Liberty in a huge, fabulous way so it could be seen on television.
BOB GARFIELD: You mentioned the Reagan administration. Michael Deaver was widely credited with turning the routine business of making the president look good into a sort of high art. But even he has looked with admiration at the work of the current administration. Who are the people behind the scenes who are making President Bush look so presidential?
ELISABETH BUMILLER: I guess you could call them "Deaver's Children." Interestingly all of them have previous network television experience. The first among equals is a young man named Scott Sforza who used to be a producer at ABC.
There's another guy named Bob DeServi. He was an NBC cameraman during the 2000 Bush campaign. The Bush people liked his work so much that he was hired when this administration began to do all the lighting for President Bush.
There is a new guy who's head of the presidential advance team. Presidential advance is the group of people that sets up all the presidential events 2, 3, 4 or 5 days ahead of time. He was a producer for Fox News.
So they hired some of the best in the business, and what's interesting is that this is all technical, a lot of it, but it turns out that making the president look really good does come down many days to camera angles and lighting and staging and backdrops.
BOB GARFIELD: What about the subtle and not so subtle altering of reality? There was a speech in Indianapolis in which the president was trying to demonstrate that his proposed tax cuts would benefit the working man.
ELISABETH BUMILLER: There was a report on a local television station in Indianapolis where local Republican leaders told the television reporter that the White House people had asked some of the Republican officials sitting behind the president who would be seen on television to remove their ties, and the idea was they didn't want it to look formal -- that they wanted the people to look you know more like ordinary folk who might be benefitting from the president's tax cut, or so the president was saying.
Notice how they never mention how Kerry looks as compared to Reagan.
Yup... I'm convinced Ms. Bumiller does style, not substance.
As we learned from the Clinton years, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Substance matters.
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