As part of its apparent new drive to get back on the offensive, the White House has done something unusual the past several days — the Bush gang has gotten personal.
It started in earnest on Friday, when the president used his Veterans’ Day to single out John Kerry for criticism. Later that day, the White House targeted Ted Kennedy.
It was apparently the start of a new trend. On Sunday, the White House published a “fact sheet” (which wasn’t particularly factual) going after a Washington Post article. Yesterday, top White House officials specifically targeted Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, each by name.
As a factual matter, the attacks play fast and loose with the truth. But in this instance, that’s beside the point.
There’s no modern precedent for a presidential team launching these kinds of public attacks. It’s not just that most White Houses don’t have time for such nonsense; it’s that most White Houses consider such condemnations beneath them.
It’s not presidential. It’s small. The leaders of the executive branch of our government are supposed to be above this kind of thing.
The president and his senior aides are lashing out individual senators by name? At a newspaper article? At a sitting justice of the Supreme Court? This isn’t the conduct of a White House; it’s the behavior of a desperate political campaign down in the polls.
And therein lies the point. The Bush White House is good at one thing: campaigning. They know how to attack, issue misleading press releases to reporters, manipulate stagecraft, and coordinate a message. It seems at some point over the last week, this gang realized they’re incapable of governing, so they decided to stop trying and go back to doing what they do best.
Kevin recently reminded us of John DiIulio’s White House experience, when he served as a senior Bush aide in 2001.
In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions….There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis.
….The “faith bill”…illustrates the relative lack of substantive concern for policy and administration. I had to beg to get a provision written into the executive orders that would require us to conduct an actual information-gathering effort related to the president’s interest in the policy….and we got less staff help on it than went into any two PR events or such.
It’s only gotten worse since then.
For someone who claims to be concerned with the power of the presidency in a historical context, Bush doesn’t seem to realize that running the executive branch as if it were a campaign team is undermining the stature and significance of the White House, not to mention its effectiveness.
This team of hacks is shrinking the presidency, making Bush less of a leader and more of a campaign chairman.