Cheney, the White House, and the PR-spin

U.S. President George W. Bush listens to a panel on health care initiatives at the United States Department of Health and Human Services in Washington February 16, 2006. REUTERS/Jim Young

This is going to be an interesting post to write. First, I'm going to start off with the story in Yahoo News, Bush Approves Cheney's Handling of Mishap:

WASHINGTON - Texas authorities closed the investigation into Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident Thursday without bringing any charges.
President Bush said Cheney had handled the situation "just fine."

"I'm satisfied with the explanation he gave," Bush said, making his first public comments about Cheney's accidental shooting of 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington while aiming for a quail. Bush said the vice president's explanation was "strong and powerful."

The administration was eager to put to rest a public relations firestorm arising from Cheney's failure to publicly disclose Saturday's accident until the next day. The episode had knocked the White House off stride and distracted attention from Bush's agenda.

Bush said critics were drawing "the wrong conclusion about a tragic accident" by saying it depicted the White House as overly secretive. He raised no objection to the delay in the disclosure of the shooting — although senior White House aides had argued unsuccessfully for the announcement to be made more quickly and for Cheney to speak out sooner.

"The vice president was involved in a terrible accident and it profoundly affected him," Bush said in an Oval Office photo opportunity. "Yesterday when he was here in the Oval Office, I saw the deep concern he had about a person who he wounded."

So President Bush thinks Dick Cheney did "just fine" in this PR nightmare, and continued making the big sympathy play in how the vice president was "profoundly affected" by a "terrible accident." In other words, we're expected to believe that Cheney was the victim in this accident--even though he shot Whittington, and Whittington is still in the hospital.

Now we come to this little Yahoo News story, Cheney's PR: How Not to Do Damage Control

WASHINGTON - Damage-control experts in both political parties agree: The handling of Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting mishap has been a disaster, a case study in how not to handle bad news.

At best, it has fed criticism of Cheney as aloof and isolated. At worst, critics suggest, it has shown a president unable to control his own vice president.

"It's a self-created nightmare," said Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House troubleshooter who now heads a Washington law practice that specializes in legal crisis management. "Cheney took a non-story, or a minor story, and created a huge negative story because of his stubbornness and his arrogance."

Vice President Dick Cheney walks from his office in the White House to do a television interview, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Some public relations veterans suggested Cheney may need to do more.

Republican consultant Rich Galen, who was a senior adviser to both Newt Gingrich and former Vice President Dan Quayle, suggested that Cheney comes from an old school of thought dating to his days in the House in the 1980s "that you don't respond to an attack from your opponent that raises the level of the discussion."

"That entire doctrine has come and gone. Now the doctrine is you respond instantaneously, and where possible with a strong counterattack. A lot of that is because of the Internet, a lot of that is because of cable TV news," Galen said.

On Cheney's decision to leave it up to the ranch owner to tell a local paper the next day what happened, Galen said, "I'd use this as an example of how you can overthink a problem."

"If you could rewind the clock, a better idea would be to get the vice president's communications operations together with the president's communications staff, and get something out, something on the wire, right away."

Former Clinton White House spokesman Michael McCurry agreed, saying that because the story had a major human-interest component, "there's no way you can get around keeping people informed."

Davis, who has advised both Democrats and Republicans since serving as Clinton's special counsel, said the political problems for the Bush White House "are not going to go away by Cheney just being interviewed by Brit Hume."

"This is not about the hunting incident, it's not about a day's delay in getting out news of the shooting, it's about Dick Cheney," Davis said. "It's dangerous to our system of government when you have a vice president with so much power and so little accountability."

As to Bush's apparent willingness to let Cheney deal with the shooting problem himself, "There has never in American history been a White House where the president said to the vice president, `You handle the press,'" Davis said.

Never been in the history of the White House, where the president tells the vice president to handle the press. If that doesn't show the arrogance and the power that Cheney has--even over President Bush--then I don't know what does. What is even more amazing is that President Bush believes that Cheney handled the situation "just fine." Remember the Time story that I posted on yesterday:

"This is either a cover-up story or an incompetence story," said a top Republican who is close to the White House and has rarely been critical of the Administration in the past five years. "Karl was constrained, as was the entire communications operation, because the Vice President had arranged for how this was to come out."

The White House likes to play this little PR-game, where they show President Bush as a "strong, decisive leader." It is a game that Bush has relished since September 11th. We've seen the strong decisiveness, when Bush got up on top of the World Trade Center rubble to make his speech from the bullhorn. We've seen it with his terse comments on wanting Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive." We've seen it with him shifting his gaze from Afghanistan to Iraq, and his arguments for invading Iraq. We've seen it with his "Mission Accomplished" carrier landing. We've seen it in his re-election campaign by insinuating that America "shouldn't change horses in the middle of a stream," and by linking the Democrats and John Kerry as "surrendering to the terrorists." But what is amazing is that this is all for show. It is a presidential media blitz in showing George Bush as a tough-talking, Texas Ranger, who has strutted into the Oval Office to clean up this town. But when the clean up has to take place within the Oval Office, George Bush shows who he really is--a weak, indecisive, little man. He couldn't take charge in directing U.S. aid to the tsunami off Indonesia in 2004. He dawdled in his vacation as Katrina flattened New Orleans, and then dawdled before finally firing FEMA chief Michael "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown. He refuses to adapt his losing strategy for the war in Iraq. He engages in secretive spying through the illegal NSA wiretaps. And he will not reign in his even more powerful vice president, but rather claims that Cheney did "just fine."

The question I have to ask is, how long will this little charade go on?