The Washington Post had a good item today about one of my favorite topics: Bush’s unprecedented avoidance of people who disagree with him. It’s a solid article, but I think it left out an important detail.
Several Bush advisers said the president may well pay a price for his decision to remain isolated from tough or unexpected questions when he faces Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), whose events are notably less scripted, in a town-hall-style debate tonight at Washington University in St. Louis.
[…]
Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University, said the first debate showed Bush had been overprotected. “If you don’t talk to the press and deal with audiences with some degree of skepticism, you can’t build understanding so people have confidence in you in hard times,” Fields said. “His handlers think they’re doing him a favor, but they’re not.”
Obviously, all of this is true. Bush doesn’t talk to reporters, and when he does public events, the audiences are carefully-screened supporters, some of whom have been forced to sign “loyalty oaths” to the campaign. It’s hardly a way to get prepared for skeptical audiences or voters who have not yet been won over.
The only thing I’d like to add is that while Bush is safeguarded against an inquisitive press and unconvinced voters, which is bad, he’s also shielded from naysayers in his own White House, which is worse.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn recently noted that it’d be nice if Bush answered a tough question once in a while, but the even bigger problem is the way in which the president only hears one side of any story.
[I]n general, he does not surround himself with people who present opposing views, based on everything we know from insider accounts (Suskind, Woodward, etc.). And, even when he is briefed on opposing views, those briefings are carefully managed by Rove, Cheney, et al, to point him in the right direction. The only exceptions are those rare occasions when the person bringing a different point of view (i.e., Colin Powell) has the cache to bypass the palace guards.
This, to me, goes well beyond any “presidential bubble” we’ve seen in the past — it’s a real problem with Bush’s governance and can be linked to myriad policy failures, Iraq being the most obvious and significant.
Exactly. Bush would be prepared for tough debate questions if he heard similar questions on the road sometimes, as Kerry does. But I think Bush seemed utterly stunned and overwhelmed in last week’s debate in part because he was hearing some of this criticism for the first time. He doesn’t follow the news, he doesn’t hear from skeptics, and everyone at the White House tells him the exact the same thing, under Karl Rove’s direction. Suddenly, mean ol’ Kerry starts telling it like it is, and Bush is dumbfounded.
Bush’s faces in Miami probably weren’t a sign of obnoxiousness, but rather, incredulity.