While indictment fever gripped the Washington press corps,
the president’s spin doctor was incapacitated. An ailing Karl Rove could
not help the Republican search for a media cure. With
temperature rising, the political physician was in no position to
cure himself or anyone else.
Now, a media siege is underway at the White House. A dramatic
convergence of legal proceedings and presidential politics has forced the
Bush administration into a fundamentally defensive crouch.
A year ago, when President Bush hailed him as the political
strategist who made a second term possible, Rove was the toast of
Washington. Now -- even though he hasn’t been indicted -- it seems he’s
toast.
In Washington, where nothing succeeds like political success, an
election victory is widely seen as proof of justification. Strip away the
razzle-dazzle, and you’re left with a rather simple precept:
Whatever works.
And, for almost five years, the Rove media operation worked. From
maximal exploitation of 9/11 for political gain to the “Swift
Boating” of John Kerry, the presidential spin machinery wrapped
George W. Bush in the flag and threw plenty of mud at opponents.
This is a classic real-life tale of personal and global overreach.
Riding high with power and media clout, those at Washington’s
pinnacle saw no reason to be bound by political niceties or
reality-based policies. If you want to fix the wagon of a critic who has
the temerity to expose the falsity of a claim about Iraq seeking enriched
uranium, let the knives fly behind a screen of source
confidentiality. If you want to invade Iraq, just keep insisting that
weapons of mass destruction in that country are beyond any reasonable
doubt.
These days some very negative coverage for Karl Rove and I. Lewis
Libby, the vice president’s (now former) chief of staff, is coming from
many of the same journalists who avoided publicly criticizing them while
they ran amok behind the scenes. But, to the
self-fulfilling political cliche that “perception is reality,” add this
caveat: Sometimes the ultimate smart guys end up outsmarting
themselves.
In this real-time Shakespearean drama, Rove and Libby are more than
bit players -- but they’re certainly not the lead characters. Serving the
GOP’s top two elected officials, Rove and Libby are no rogue
elephants.
News stories and commentaries should begin to explore this scandal
with questions about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that echo the
Watergate era: What did they know and when did they know it? Was
there a coordinated coverup -- and, if so, how high did it go?
Media coverage of the White House will be at least a little more
adversarial in the months ahead. Yet we shouldn’t expect the
president’s PR aides to become less evasive. Karl Rove did not invent
audacious media spin, and there’s no reason to believe that the
sidelining of Rove augurs well for candor from the White House.
The “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent was an attempt to damage
her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, after he challenged the
validity of the administration’s pre-invasion claims about WMDs in Iraq.
The smokescreen effort to hide the source of the leak occurred in the
context of a series of deceptions related to the war.
Future media coverage of this huge story will be meaningful to the
extent that news outlets look beyond the individuals in this scandal and
consider the historic chain of events that allowed the president to spin
the country into war. If the reporting treats the leak of
Plame’s name as an isolated incident, the frame for the media picture will
be confining. But if the journalistic scope includes the
sequence of events that led to the leak, the coverage has the
potential to be illuminating.
The war in Iraq is a horrific consequence of President Bush’s
determination to launch an invasion. That determination repeatedly led to
false claims about Iraq -- claims that Bush insisted were
certainties. Now, media coverage should clearly explain how the
scandal engulfing the White House has its origins in a propaganda
campaign for war.
____________________________________________________
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com