It’s not unusual for Republicans to maintain a certain swagger, even when a fairly serious controversy arises. We’re talking about a group of people who take the strategy of “never let ’em see you sweat” very seriously.
And yet, there’s something about the leak scandal that has them rattled. The predictable swagger is gone. Bloomberg reported last week that “even some Republicans said they were concerned about the effect of the new disclosures,” and quoted former Bush speechwriter David Frum saying, “Those that believe this is a huge story now have a reason to believe it is an even huger story.”
[tag]Newsweek[/tag]’s Michael [tag]Isikoff[/tag] and Evan Thomas added that this one is difficult to spin away or turn around for partisan advantage.
Democrats jumped on the news, calling [tag]Bush[/tag] a [tag]hypocrite[/tag]. Republicans on Capitol Hill worried that the attacks on Bush’s integrity would further sink his poll ratings and hurt the GOP in November. “Leaker in chief is something that could stick,” said a senior GOP aide, who declined to be named for fear of angering the president.
It certainly doesn’t help that Newsweek dug up a quote from July 11, 2003, seven days before key portions of the NIE were released, when Condoleezza Rice declined to let some inquisitive reporters see some of the document. “We don’t want to try to get into kind of selective declassification,” Rice said.
There was one other sentence from the Newsweek piece that jumped out at me: “[T]he administration was unquestionably playing games with reporters, whether or not the president was directly involved.”
When the story first broke last week, I initially assumed the reporters wouldn’t be terribly aggressive in following up because, well, they usually don’t. But “Leaker in Chief” quickly became a major story and I think that Newsweek sentence helps explain why — reporters are taking this one kind of personally.
Consider these news items, by way of Dan Froomkin:
Tom Raum writes for the Associated Press: “President Bush insists a president ‘better mean what he says.’ Those words could return to haunt him. After long denouncing leaks of all kinds, Bush is confronted with a statement – unchallenged by his aides – that he authorized a leak of classified material to undermine an Iraq war critic. The allegation in the CIA leak case threatens the credibility of a president already falling in the polls, and it gives Democrats fresh material to accuse him of hypocrisy.”
David Lightman writes in the Hartford Courant: “Some pundits are calling President Bush leaker-in-chief and hypocrite, and while people may not fathom all the details about the Valerie Plame case, they understand barbs like those…. Calling him hypocritical or leaker-in-chief, a phrase pollster Scott Rasmussen has found is being used more and more, stings for several reasons. The phrases suggest Bush is not acting presidential. They are a reminder of how badly the president wanted to convince an increasingly skeptical public that Iraq was a dire threat to the United States. And most of all, tagging Bush with those phrases calls into question whether he deserves his reputation as an honest leader.”
Linda Feldmann writes in the Christian Science Monitor that “critics are now charging Mr. Bush with hypocrisy – a development that makes efforts to put his presidency back on track all the more daunting…. Even if Bush turns out to have been a bit player in an effort to discredit Wilson, he is now explicitly tied to the decision to selectively disseminate classified information. Whether that constitutes a ‘leak’ is a matter of semantics.”
Caroline Daniel writes in the Financial Times: “Although Mr Bush has the legal power to declassify documents, the revelation made his own assault on leaks look like hypocrisy.”
John Cochran writes for ABC News about the big questions that remain: “Was the president, a fierce critic of leaks, a hypocrite? Had he leaked material for political reasons?
It’s one thing to be corrupt, it’s another to be incompetent, but in this case, the White House has been “unquestionably playing games with reporters,” and that’s the one thing they just don’t tolerate.
It’s all come together in a sort of perfect-storm kind of way — Dems are on the offensive, reporters are angry about having been misled, Republicans are nervous, the White House appears ready to throw Cheney under the bus, and Scott McClellan spent several minutes on Friday parsing the meaning of the word “leak.”
How is this one going to play out?