President Bush did just fine on Meet the Press. Why
this is emerging as the contrarian view, I’m not sure; I can only
assume that some commentators have high expectations that the
president can’t meet, and some won’t be satisfied no matter what he
does. But I simply can’t agree with the view that this was a
disaster for the President. He showed the requisite seriousness on
Iraq, and he was no more evasive than the average Russert guest. If
the President is to be judged a failure when he stutters a few
times, then he failed at his first press conference. Bush is who he
is, and the American public knows it; there aren’t many votes he’ll
lose simply by being a little inarticulate.
He also showed that the White House uses the resources of the
Internet a lot better than Howard Dean.
Last Tuesday on Hannity & Colmes, Kerry said that
he’d “never made any judgments about any choice somebody made about
avoiding the draft, about going to Canada, going to jail, being a
conscientious objector [or] going into the National Guard.” Bryan
Preston of JunkYardBlog pointed out that lumping in Guard service with
going to jail as a draft-dodger is quite a smear on the National
Guard. Guardsman John Moore wrote on his blog that attacks on Bush’s service record
amounted to “slandering my dead comrades, people who died in
military aviation serving their country.” Both were linked by Glenn Reynolds, the widely-read
Instapundit.
On Friday, the weekly email from Republican National Committee
Chairman Ed Gillespie to “GOP Team Leaders” included the line, “I expected
the Democrats to distort their own records for political
expediency, but I didn’t think they would attack President Bush’s
military service in the National Guard, and then disparage the
National Guard itself.” Of course, the RNC may have come up with
that independently, but I have a hunch that some sharp-eyed
Republican took note of the grumblings bubbling up from the
blogosphere. When Tim Russert asked the President about the dispute
over whether Bush went AWOL while serving in the Alabama National
Guard, the President made sure to add this:
I would be careful to not denigrate the Guard. It’s
fine to go after me, which I expect the other side will do. I
wouldn’t denigrate service to the Guard, though, and the reason I
wouldn’t, is because there are a lot of really fine people who
served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National
Guard today in Iraq.
To the President’s mouth, from something called “JunkYardBlog,”
in less than a week.
If my hunch is correct, then the GOP is treating the blogosphere
as an intellectual resource, much like the think tanks or
right-leaning editorial pages and opinion journals (and the
affiliated websites, like this one). The blogs are another part of
the reservoir from which policy ideas and political arguments can
be taken and distilled to serve the campaign. This is wise—far
wiser than the Dean approach, where a pool of generally neophyte
members of the “netroots” were counted on not only for fundraising
which demonstrably worked, making fundraising as much easier as
direct mail did a generation ago, but also to turn out the vote,
which demonstrably did not work. They instead built a campaign with
the trappings of massive support; in the past, 300 people showing
up for a candidate in New York would have had to have been the tip
of the iceberg. But since meetup.com so dramatically lowers the cost and
logistical hassle of getting people together, all the Dean Meetups
proved was that they could get an unusually high percentage of
supporters to show up for Dean, not that he had an unusually high
number of supporters. It amounted to a cargo
cult campaign, and the echo chamber it created scared everyone
off.
The Bush campaign has its own meetup and Internet fundraising
apparatus, even its own blog. But the campaign is in no in danger of
letting these newfangled trappings bog it down in the desires of
the base — as I wrote last week, Bush has, if anything, the opposite problem
from Dean — not enough support in the base. Though the
Russert interview reinforced Bush’s commitment to a muscular
foreign policy and to tax cuts, his answers on spending indicated
that he sees little political liability in his fiscal policy.
“Listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute,
they’re all saying you are the biggest spender in American
history,” Russert noted. Bush didn’t hesitate: “Well, they’re
wrong.”
They’re more right than wrong, in fact, but that was a deft
lunge toward voters who see Rush Limbaugh as an extremist (and have
no idea what Heritage and Cato are). A disaster? No way.
John Tabin is a frequent online contributor to
The American Spectator whose website is JohnTabin.com.
