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The message out of the White House lately: President Bush is on top of things.
Take today for instance. Canceling a trip to Topeka where he was supposed to be the headliner at congressional fundraiser (he sent First Lady Laura Bush instead), the president left the White House at 7 a.m. to fly to Houston for a briefing on damage from Hurricane Ike. Then he took an aerial tour of the region, and got a briefing at Galveston Emergency Operations Center. He explained his role:
I'm now asking questions about how the federal government can help the response and help the recovery effort begin. One thing is, is that we have decided to match 100% or pay 100% with no state match for debris removal as well as the emergency preparedness that the state and local government have put in place and executed.
Then it was back to the White House in time to make a 3:30 p.m. meeting with his working group on financial markets, including Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
But, concerned about roiling the already-skittish markets, the White House decided not to allow pool coverage of the president's meeting with the team. Explained spokesman Tony Fratto:
We decided it would be best to limit public comment about markets today, and so there will not be press coverage of the president’s working group meeting this afternoon. The president looks forward to the briefing by the working group.
Added press secretary Dana M. Perino:
The president was briefed this afternoon by his working group on financial markets. He appreciates their work to strengthen and stabilize the markets.
In researching presidential vacations and efforts by the White House to portray a vacationing president as nevertheless on the job, the subject of a Countdown to Crawford post on Monday, we corresponded with former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
He was on duty during the president's first extended visit to Crawford during the summer of 2001.
He offered his thoughts -- some drawn from his book "What Happened" -- about why a White House staff goes to the extent it does to create the aura of business-as-usual during a president's out-of-town downtime, and how it does so.
Here is McClellan's e-mail:
The vacationing president narrative is a convenient and potentially damaging one for critics to try and push, and one that in the day of 24/7 cable news you have to be cognizant of. If it takes hold it can help create a lasting impression in some people's minds. Katrina is a prime example. I wrote about the image of the president strumming the guitar he was given backstage in San Diego following the 60th Anniversary event for V-J Day being transposed with images of people being rescued off the hoods of cars or rooftops in New Orleans. The image could not be erased in some people's minds. Georgia is another to a lesser extent as images of the president hitting the volleyball at the Olympics were transposed with images of the unfolding crisis in Georgia.
We were cognizant of it from the very beginning, including his first extended August stay in Crawford back in 2001. I remember briefing the press corp and defining it as a "working vacation." We made sure the press corps knew the president was tending to official business and released White House photos of the president meeting early in the morning with staff. The president's first prime time address was held during that "vacation," when he made his stem cell announcement.
It is true that a president in this day and age is never entirely on vacation. I think most Americans recognize that, but it is still important to visually show the president duly engaged. Wherever he goes, including Crawford, the White House picks up and moves along with him -- or at least a skeletal staff. He continues to stay in constant contact with senior advisers, participates in his usual morning intelligence briefings on a daily basis and is kept apprised of events and situations as warranted, including participating in secure video-conferences with his national security team or others, such as homeland security advisers when it comes to natural disasters.
It does not take much to demonstrate the president is remaining engaged in his official duties while on vacation. It can be simple things such as photo releases of meetings to readouts of his official activities of the day, including world leader calls or briefings on developing situations of concern, to more formal press availabilities. It is part of feeding the media beast and making sure that the public sees and hears about the president tending to business in order to preemptively counter charges of a vacationing president carefree and unconcerned about current events that are unfolding or may later unfold.
Vice President Dick Cheney has been one of the key players pushing for a muscular response to Russia in the Georgian crisis. And it was Cheney who this afternoon stopped by the Georgian embassy for two minutes on his way home from the White House to drive home that message in one sentence.
To be precise, he spent two minutes 20 seconds in a foyer -- 75 seconds of which were passed writing a message in a leather-bound remembrance book.
To make certain he wrote the correct message -- this being diplomacy, where every comma (or missing comma) might be parsed -- he copied his words from a blue note card. Four times he put pen to paper in a large hand, three times he paused as he wrote, to consult the card.
"To the people of Georgia" the vice president wrote, omitting punctuation after the salutation and at the end of his message.
He continued: "In this hour of sorrow, I offer the respect, condolences, and solidarity of the United States of America"
He signed it: "Dick Cheney"
He arrived at 4:31 p.m. He spent 20 seconds greeting Ambassador Vasil Sikharulidze and two senior aides; he passed another 45 seconds saying goodbye.
One way or another, every presidential administration must face it once a year: August.
Washington quiets down. Congress leaves town. The president goes on vacation. He just can't quite let it look that way.
August, after all, is the month of Saddam Hussein's assault on Kuwait in 1990, Katrina's assault on the Gulf Coast in 2005, and, now, depending on whether you are in Sochi or Crawford, Georgia's assault on South Ossetia or Russia's assault on Georgia.
It was in August from a Kennebunkport, Maine, golf course that President Bush memorably delivered --after a suicide bomb attack in Israel--a nearly-one-breath-no-nonsense message:
"I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers thank you now watch this drive."
That gaffe was one of the few slip-ups in a concerted White House effort to make the point that the president is never fully on vacation. Never mind what Mike Allen, writing in the Washington Post in 2002, called "golf-cart diplomacy."
Now, with Bush's ratings hovering around 30% month after month, it certainly wouldn't do to suggest that the president was just "on vacation," as reasonable as it might seem for any president to need to take some time off, specially in his eighth war-torn year in office.
Regardless of popularity, the staffs of all recent presidents have gone to some length to present him as hard at work--even as he clears brush and rides his bike (President Bush); clears brush and rides his horse (President Reagan); plays aerobic golf and rides on his speedboat (the first President Bush); plays slow golf and schmoozes aerobically with friends (President Clinton); or plays softball and swats gnats (President Carter).
Could the Bush administration or Israel accomplish anything with a surprise attack on the heart of what the United States contends is an Iranian nuclear weapons center?
Probably not, a Washington think tank -- and former U.N. weapons inspector -- contend, in a detailed report that has quietly cast a skeptical eye on a central focus of U.S. foreign policy and national security attention.
It is not an idle question. It continues to dog President Bush, with critics expressing the fear that he is determined to attack Iran before leaving office.
The little-noticed study published Thursday by the Institute for Science and International Security cast doubt on comparisons between potential attacks on Iran's Natanz enrichment plants and its Esfahan uranium conversion facility, on the one hand, and, on the other, the surgical strikes by Israel on a clandestine Syrian nuclear reactor in September 2007 and Iraq's Osirak reactor in June 1981. Those attacks set back efforts to produce a plutonium bomb by several years, the report noted.
But any analogy between an attack on the Iranian facilities and the Syrian and Iraqi sites "is grossly misleading," it said.
The report stated:
It neglects the important differences between a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment program and a reactor-based program, and fails to account for the dispersed, relatively advanced, and hardened nature of Iran's gas centrifuge facilities.
Besides, it said, Iran has purchased reserve stocks, in many instances, from abroad, and "an attack on Iran's enrichment program could not just rely on a single strike."
Among the authors is David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former U.N. weapons inspector.
"Following an attack, Iran could quickly rebuild its centrifuge program in small, easily hidden facilities focused on making weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons," he said, in a Washington Post report.
Bush has said repeatedly that his focus on dealing with Iran is diplomatic -- built on trying to isolate the country on the world stage and increase the cost of what he says is its pursuit of nuclear weapons (and which Iran's leaders say is a civilian nuclear power program).
For a long time now, polls have not been friendly to President George "30%" Bush. He professes to pay them no heed. But just in case he's bored over there in Beijing and is checking out Countdown to Crawford, we present some poll news that might give him some (very) temporary cheer:
On the energy front, an ABC News survey found what the Washington Post characterized as "broad public support for government action." That could translate into new pressure on Congress to push ahead with loosening of restrictions on offshore drilling. The survey found that 63% favor an end to the embargo on new drilling in U.S. coastal waters, the Post reported.
On the other hand, the poll found even stronger support for tougher fuel efficiency standards, an area that has not drawn the same degree of presidential attention, to put it mildly.
But the president may not want to plunge too deeply into the polls.
A survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation looked into the question of how New Orleans residents feel they have been treated by Washington nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.
It found that 60% thought that rebuilding New Orleans was "not a priority" of the president and Congress, and that although 59% said their lives were "almost back to normal" or "largely back to normal," there were still 41% who said their lives were "still very disrupted" or "still somewhat disrupted."
On second thought, rather than reading the blogs, maybe the president would prefer to keep his focus on the Olympics. (In the photo at top, Bush takes in the U.S.-China basketball game with his wife, his father and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.)
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the man who first publicly revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative, hit a pedestrian while driving his black Corvette to work this morning along Washington's K Street.
The 77-year-old conservative journalist and TV pundit -- whose column on Plame unleashed a federal investigation that led to vice presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby's conviction for lying -- told the Washington Post he had no idea he had hit anyone until he was flagged down by several witnesses, including a bicycle messenger who called D.C. police. Novak said the messenger (since reported to be not a messenger but a lawyer commuting to work) was "shouting at me that I couldn't just hit people and drive away. But I didn't know I'd hit him. I really didn't have any idea it happened until they flagged me down and told me."
Turns out this is not the first time Novak has had a run-in with pedestrians. The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove reported back in March of 2001 that CNN researcher Evan Glass was walking across Pennsylvania Avenue at noon one day when he passed in front of Novak's Corvette. "Learn to read the signs!" Novak snapped, according to Glass. Novak told Grove: "He was crossing on the red light. I really hate jay walkers. I despise them. Since I don't run the country, all I can do is yell at 'em. The other option is to run 'em over, but as a compassionate conservative, I would never do that."
Novak told the local ABC affiliate that he had no idea if the victim was even a man or a woman. You can see the WJLA-TV video of their interview with Novak here. The victim, a man in his 60s, was taken to George Washington University Medical Center with "very minor injuries," said D.C. Fire Department spokesman Alan Etter.
Asked by C2C (that's us, Countdown to Crawford) if the columnist had been talking on his cellphone, a spokeswoman for Novak said, "I know for a fact that he was not." She said Novak, cited for failing to yield a right of way and fined $50, is no longer taking press calls.
It was the fist bump heard round the world -- the power greeting that Michelle Obama gave her husband the night he wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president.
Fox News anchor E.D. Hill wondered aloud if the thumbs-up knuckle-tap gesture between the Obamas was a "terrorist fist jab." The Obama campaign, sensitive to false Internet rumors believed by about 12% of Americans that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is a Muslim, encouraged him to stop using it. In fact at a rally in Zanesville, Ohio, Wednesday, Obama all but ducked when a young fan at the Eastside Community Ministry stretched out his fist. "If I start that ... " the candidate remarked.
But now comes our president, Republican George W. Bush, who has decided that he is hip enough to bump fists with constituents.
On a swing through Arkansas on Tuesday, Bush had just honored a 12-year-old for his volunteer efforts. Robbie Powell, a student at Bob Courtway Middle School, had given Bush a green silicone "Live 4 Ben" bracelet he sells to honor a friend who died of a neurological disorder. According to the Associated Press, Bush put on the bracelet. Then, said Powell, the president "just held out his fist and I knew what that meant."
Maybe the president's a secret Obamacan? Or part of the terrorist fist-jab movement?
Angered by the Bush administration's policies on war and torture, some Methodists are gearing up for what they call the final campaign to stop Southern Methodist University from housing the new George W. Bush Presidential Library and a companion conservative Institute for Democracy think tank spearheaded by political guru Karl Rove.
Although the university has approved the library deal, Andrew Weaver, a Methodist pastor and SMU alumnus from Brooklyn, N.Y., said in an interview that "the fight is not over."
Arguing that the war in Iraq is contrary to Methodist teachings, Weaver said critics are appealing the decision to the United Methodist Church's South Central Jurisdiction, which owns the land for the Bush complex.
"People are morally offended," he said, noting the 12,000 signatures gathered on a petition drive against the Bush complex.
The Bush family name is popular in the Dallas area, where the school is located, and First Lady Laura Bush is an alumna of SMU. As a result, Weaver concedes that nixing the library is probably unlikely.
"The real intensity is around the think tank," he said, speculating that Rove is using the institute to try to "re-brand George" by attaching the president's name to the "positive" name of Methodists. "Rove must be delighted," he said.
The South Central Jurisdiction meets July 15-17 in Dallas. Watch this space.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the man who first publicly revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative, hit a pedestrian while driving his black Corvette to work this morning along Washington's K Street.
