The WaPo’s Peter Baker reported over the weekend that the White House, left with no real alternatives, has decided to try a new, more relaxed style for the president.
As he takes to the road to salvage his presidency, Bush is letting down his guard and playing up his anti-intellectual, regular-guy image…. Call it the let-Bush-be-Bush strategy. The result is a looser president, less serious at times, even at times when humor might seem out of place. Aides used to dread such settings, worried about gaffes or the way Bush might come across in spontaneous exchanges. But with his poll numbers somewhere south of the border, they concluded that Bush handles back-and-forth better than he once did — and that they have little left to lose.
OK, so the idea is to show the public a looser, less-guarded president. With Bush’s national support in free fall, and much of Washington already thinking ahead to November (both ’06 and ’08), it can’t hurt to improve the president’s image a little bit.
Dan Froomkin noted, however, that Michael Reagan, the son of the former president, predicted in his syndicated column this week that this strategy will work wonders for the Bush White House.
I imagine that there were a lot of nervous nellies among the White House staff who were wringing their hands over the idea that the president was out there in front of the hostile media and nation being exactly what he knows himself to be: a no-nonsense chief executive who is sure of himself, knows his job, knows how to do it, and doesn’t care a whit if the media elite and the desperate Dems don’t like it.
Mark my words, if Bush continues to be Bush and allows the public to see Bush as Bush, his poll numbers are going to rise dramatically despite the efforts of his enemies in the media and the desperate Dems to blacken and slander him and lie about him.
Now, as political analyses go, this is more than a little odd, but in terms of political strategy, the idea that changing Bush’s style will dramatically reverse his fortunes doesn’t make a lot of sense.
First, to suggest that this is some kind of new strategy is rather silly. Bush has worked hard for a very long time to cultivate his “anti-intellectual, regular-guy image.” If Reagan were right, Bush’s national support would up near Clinton’s level in his sixth year in office, not Nixon’s.
Second, the point Reagan overlooks is that Bush’s problems aren’t stylistic, they’re substantive. Americans disapprove, not because they think Bush is stiff or insecure, but because his presidency has been a disaster, featuring one tragedy after another.
Look at Reagan’s description again. Bush “is sure of himself.” This much is true. Bush “doesn’t care a whit” about journalists or his Dem critics. Also true. But Bush “knows his job” and “knows how to do it”? He does? Since when? Who really believes this?
One of the principal causes of the president’s stunning decline is that the electorate considers Bush’s results in office and believe he doesn’t know how to succeed. A Pew poll recently asked Americans to describe the president in a single word. Respondents volunteered answers, and were not offered words to choose from. Three of the top four were “incompetent,” “idiot,” and “liar.” The public already sees Bush being Bush, and they’re not impressed.
The kind of change the Bush gang is trying is effective when the public fundamentally approves of a leader’s decisions, but disapproves of his or her style. Given the current circumstances, this seems to diagnose the opposite problem for Bush.