I knew Bush’s staff choreographs every public appearance, but I didn’t appreciate the details until today.
The White House leaves little to chance when it comes to projecting Bush in a favorable light. With its extensive location-scouting, technical expertise and attention to minute detail, the Bush administration is setting new standards in presidential stagecraft.
On that same April planning trip, Jenkins and his staff from the White House Office of Presidential Advance found themselves in a vast courtyard in Ankara, contemplating which footpath Bush should take in approaching the mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state. One aide produced a pedometer to gauge the distances. Another considered the sun’s angle. Others busied themselves with digital cameras.
Jenkins and his colleagues soon returned to Washington and choreographed, to the last step, the president’s recent visit to Ireland and Turkey.
For the Bush team, life’s unpredictability is an enemy to be crushed. Every White House in the TV era has worried about putting the president in a positive light, but I don’t think any administration has sought to overcome spontaneity the way these guys have.
Bush doesn’t have townhall meetings with regular Americans; he has discussions with carefully-selected partisans who rehearse their questions for hours before the event takes place. Audience members are moved around to maximize diversity for the cameras. Bush aides even manipulate audience members’ attire — men remove their ties to appear more “ordinary” and workers are given hard hats to appear more “working class” — for the benefit of the cameras.
It’s as if every appearance is literally political theater in which the president is the star. And as in any professional production, nothing is left to chance, especially training the lead actor to hit his marks perfectly.
In dry runs, White House planners send to the podium a stand-in who is Bush’s height in order to set the lighting and camera angles. Before the president emerges from behind the curtains to deliver a speech or participate in a town hall meeting, they show him a precise diagram of the event’s layout, including camera positions.
And though the LA Times story didn’t mention it, Bush’s remarks are also as controlled as humanly possible. When the president has to speak spontaneously, we all know, mistakes happen, and Bush aides do their best to prevent it.
The only good news is that sometimes excessive stagecrafting can backfire.
[Presidential advisor David] Gergen said that in his view, Bush’s “most important” public relations event backfired. He was referring to the president’s May 2003 landing by military jet on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and his speech under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” after Hussein was toppled. Bush proclaimed an end to major combat operations in Iraq, but far more U.S. troops have been killed there than before Bush donned a flight suit for the announcement.
“I wish the banner was not up there,” Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political strategist, said this year.
“Sometimes substance has an odd way of cropping up and undoing your picture,” said [Clinton Press Secretary Joe] Lockhart.