The New York Times ran an interesting item over the weekend about how Bush has taken on a “direct role” in shaping his campaign’s tactics and strategy. I think the campaign officials who shared the information were hoping to convey one message, but I got a different one.
Several aides said Mr. Bush viewed this as the campaign of his life and had intervened on matters as large as the themes it should strike and as small as particular shots of him in his television advertisements.
[…]
Still, aides say that while Karl Rove continues to dominate the campaign as the top White House political adviser, the president’s involvement and interest is far deeper than is widely known.
This has all the makings of a story based entirely on carefully calibrated leaks. Bush aides want to convey the idea that the president is knowledgeable and engaged, countering the notion that he’s simply a puppet for his handlers. Speaking off and on the record, campaign officials described Bush — surprise, surprise — has having a vast knowledge of the political landscape and an acute understanding of the nuances of campaign strategy. How convenient.
While this was a story that intended to portray Bush as a competent leader, it reinforced an entirely different message: this is a man whose priorities are dreadfully misplaced.
The piece, for example, described a president who knows the intricacies of the campaign terrain.
As Mr. Bush was flying from Texas to New Mexico on Thursday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, turned to him on Air Force One and suggested that Albuquerque was heavily Democratic, White House aides said. Mr. Bush responded by saying the city was split politically, and he talked about the importance of its suburban counties.
In an interview, Representative Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, recounted a campaign trip with Mr. Bush this month on Air Force One to Traverse City.
“We talked a lot about northern Michigan; I was amazed at how much he knew,” Mr. Camp said. “He’s very strategic in the way he thinks. He had an understanding of the makeup of the district, of the nature of the registration and of the voting patterns.”
Representative Rob Portman of Ohio, a top campaign adviser, had a similar observation. “He understands the distinction between the Northeast and the Southwest, and he understands that central Ohio is a battleground,” Mr. Portman said. “He knows what it takes on the ground to win a campaign. Not every candidate has that feel.”
Presumably, this is supposed to be impressive. If Bush knows the partisan breakdown of the city of Albuquerque, he must not be incompetent, or so the argument goes.
These anecdotes, however, reinforced a far more troubling suspicion for me — the president doesn’t care about matters of state.
We know for certain, for example, that the president, when told his administration had just changed its position on global warming, said, “Ah, we did?” Moreover, this is the same president who incomprehensively described his policy on the global-gag rule as “the money from Mexico, you know, that thing, the executive order I signed about Mexico City.”
In other words, Bush doesn’t know his own administration’s policies but he allegedly knows the different intricacies of voting behavior between northeast and the southwest Ohio.
Either the NYT article is wrong, and Bush’s knowledge of politics is equally hollow to his knowledge of policy, or the Times article is right, and the president is a man whose priorities are tragically out of whack.