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.<\/p>\n
It started in earnest on Friday, when the president used his Veterans’ Day to single out John Kerry<\/a> for criticism. Later that day, the White House targeted Ted Kennedy<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was apparently the start of a new trend. On Sunday, the White House published a “fact sheet” (which wasn’t particularly factual<\/a>) going after a Washington Post article<\/a>. Yesterday, top White House officials specifically targeted Sen. Carl Levin<\/a>, Sen. Jay Rockefeller<\/a>, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg<\/a>, each by name.<\/p>\n As a factual matter, the attacks play fast<\/a> and loose<\/a> with the truth. But in this instance, that’s beside the point.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It’s not presidential. It’s small<\/i>. The leaders of the executive branch of our government are supposed to be above this kind of thing.<\/p>\n 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. Kevin recently reminded us<\/a> of John DiIulio’s White House experience<\/a>, when he served as a senior Bush aide in 2001.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n ….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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s only gotten worse since then.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This team of hacks is shrinking the presidency, making Bush less of a leader and more of a campaign chairman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nAnd 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.<\/p>\n