[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

[swiggard at comcast.net]

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by swiggard at comcast.net.



/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

 I HEART HUCKABEES - OPENING IN SELECT CITIES OCTOBER 1

 From David O. Russell, writer and director of THREE KINGS
 and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER comes an existential comedy
 starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Hupert, Jude Law, Jason
 Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts.
 Watch the trailer now at:

 http://www.foxsearchlight.com/huckabees/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/


Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

October 10, 2004
 


 

"WE'VE never seen anything like this, even the old
Kennedy-Nixon classic great debate," said a breathless
Chris Matthews on the <object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="131090;132576">"Today" show as he
touted a poll showing that John Kerry had won presidential
debate No. 1 by as much as a 4-to-1 margin. But actually we
have seen something like this - and at that first
Kennedy-Nixon debate. The polls may have gyrated more
violently this time around, but the scenario is identical:
a campaign's seemingly mundane decision about television
theatrics has potentially changed the dynamic of a
presidential election. 

Only Election Day will reveal if Sept. 30, 2004, set off a
political chain reaction to match that of Sept. 26, 1960;
then as now the candidates soon settled down into a
post-debate statistical dead heat in the horse race
(Kennedy 49, Nixon 46, according to Gallup). But at the
very least the first Bush-Kerry debate marked the moment
that the savvy Bush-Cheney machine lost its once-invincible
grip on the all-important TV game and, just like Nixon
before it, did so because of its own blunders, not any
sorcery by the opposing J. F. K. 

As Mr. Matthews recounts the historical antecedent in his
1996 book, "Kennedy and Nixon," the debate director, Don
Hewitt, offered the haggard Nixon makeup to help bridge the
video gap with his tan and fit opponent, the junior
Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Not only did Nixon
decline but this decision was seconded by his campaign
media adviser, Ted Rogers. The world remembers the rest.
The only cosmetic aid that Nixon used - an over-the-counter
product called Lazy Shave to mask his stubble - melted in
sweat, casting an incumbent vice president in a lesser
light than his lesser known challenger. 

In the 2004 replay the Ted Rogers of the story is, of all
people, James A. Baker III, the Bush family consigliere who
so cannily gamed the 2000 count in Florida, outsmarting the
Gore forces at every turn. This may be the year he lost his
fast ball, unless you take the Freudian view that he has an
unconscious wish to prevent 43 from bettering the
re-election record of his original patron, 41. Either way,
the thoroughness with which Mr. Baker's offstage maneuvers
set his guy up for disaster on Sept. 30 may tell us more
about the state of play in the campaign than the
much-dissected style and substance of the debaters' onstage
performance. 

It was Mr. Baker's job to negotiate the 32-page debate
agreement with Vernon Jordan, representing the Kerry camp,
and by all accounts, the Bush campaign got almost
everything it wanted. Yet as we now know, every Bush
stipulation backfired, from the identically sized podiums
that made the 5-foot-11 president look as if he needed a
booster stool, to the flashing "Time's up!" lights that
emphasized Mr. Kerry's uncharacteristic brevity and Mr.
Bush's need to run out the clock by repeating stock phrases
ad infinitum and ad absurdum. 

The most revealing Baker error, though, was to insist that
the first debate be about the president's purported strong
suit, foreign affairs, instead of domestic policy. Did no
one anticipate the likelihood that Iraq might once again
explode that day, as it has on so many recent others?
Insurgent attacks have gone from a daily average of 6 in
May 2003 to as high as 87 in August. And so, as Adam
Nagourney of The Times reported, "In the hours leading up
to the debate, television images of aides to Mr. Bush and
Mr. Kerry were mixed with images of corpses and bloody
children from Baghdad," on a day when some 35 Iraqi
children were slaughtered by car bombs. With this montage
grinding away in the media mix, Mr. Kerry probably could
have gotten away with even more inconsistent positions
about the war than he did that night. 

Mr. Baker isn't responsible for the other split-screen
visuals that undid Mr. Bush on Sept. 30: the reaction shots
during the debate itself. They were forbidden by the
32-page agreement. But earlier that week, the networks,
including Fox News, publicly announced they would violate
that rule. The Bush campaign has since said that the
president knew this was coming, but if so, that makes his
lack of self-discipline seem all the more self-destructive,
or perhaps out of touch. He couldn't have provided a better
out-take promo for the DVD release of <object.title
class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="305974">"Fahrenheit
9/11" had Michael Moore been directing it himself. 

Mr. Bush could recoup by Nov. 2 for all manner of reasons,
including his showing in the subsequent debates, both yet
to come as I write. John F. Kerry is no John F. Kennedy.
But the liberal blog Daily Kos had the big picture right:
on Sept. 30, "months of meticulous image manipulation" by
the Bush-Cheney forces went "down the toilet in 90
minutes." 

That's a shocking development because until recently, that
manipulation had been meticulous and then some. The
administration has been brilliant at concocting
camera-ready video narratives that flatter if not outright
fictionalize its actions: "Saving Jessica Lynch," "Shock
and Awe," the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (a
sparsely populated, unspontaneous event, when seen in the
documentary <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="301103">"Control Room"), <object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="17166">"Mission Accomplished." Mr.
Bush has been posed by his imagineers to appear to be the
fifth head on Mount Rushmore; he has kept the coffins of
the American war dead off-screen; he has been seen in
shirtsleeves at faux-folksy Town Hall meetings that, until
his second debate with Mr. Kerry, were so firmly policed in
content and attendees that they would make a Skull and
Bones soiree look like a paragon of democracy in action.
Time reported last spring that even the Department of
Homeland Security was told to take a break from its
appointed tasks to round up one terrorism-fighting photo op
a month for the president. 

To enforce the triumphalist narrative of these cinematic
efforts, the Bush team had to cut out any skeptical press,
or, as Mr. Bush once put it, "go over the heads of the
filter and speak directly to the people" (as long as
they're pre-selected). This didn't just mean avoiding press
conferences and blackballing reporters from campaign
planes. It also required an active program to demonize "the
elite media" while feeding Fox News and its talk-radio and
on-line amen chorus at every opportunity. "I end up
spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they're
more accurate in my experience" is how Dick Cheney put it
earlier this year. Thus the first Bush-Kerry debate was
preceded by a three-installment interview with the
president by Fox's Bill O'Reilly, whose idea of
hard-hitting journalism is encapsulated in his boast that
his was "the only national TV news program" to shield its
viewers from pictures of Abu Ghraib. The highlight of his
pre-debate Bush marathon was his expression of admiration
for the president's guts in taking questions not submitted
to him in advance. This is a "free press" in the same
spirit as that championed by such Bush pals as Silvio
Berlusconi, Crown Prince Abdullah, Pervez Musharraf, Ayad
Allawi and, of course, dear old "Vladimir." 

But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you
limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging
satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci
Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate"
and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your
diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib
becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that
John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone
knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You
reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't
aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast,
that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent
more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does
on a great one (the Bush interview). 

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and
lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr.
Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is
less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was.
You could see this the week before the debate, when the
president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged
Washington appearances that were even less effective than
his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op
with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to
realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being
ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to
deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana
Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the
president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long
charade played out like a lost reel of <object.title
class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="14904;141802">"Duck
Soup." 

The Bush-Cheney campaign can console itself with the hope
that the embarrassing first debate images will be
superseded by debates No. 2 and No. 3. (Nixon aced the
third of his four matchups with Kennedy.) But it can't
suppress the pictures from an ongoing war that only Mr.
Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Allawi believe is getting better
by the day. It was back in March that the discrepancy
between the White House's narrative and the reality on the
ground was first captured in dramatic split screen: as Dick
Cheney delivered a speech at the Reagan presidential
library bashing Mr. Kerry and boasting of our progress in
Iraq, his sour certitude was paired with an especially
lethal car bombing in central Baghdad. These days the
bombings are more frequent and often more lethal, and such
tragic juxtapositions are the rule rather than the
exception. 

If anything, the first Bush-Kerry confrontation has given
split-screen television a new vogue. Having defied the
efforts of both campaigns to squelch its use on Sept. 30,
emboldened TV news organizations can run with it at will.
So we saw on the Sunday after that debate, when Condoleezza
Rice appeared on ABC's "This Week." 

There she was quizzed about the report in that morning's
Times saying that in 2002 she had hyped aluminum tubes as
evidence of Saddam's nuclear threat a year after her staff
was told that government experts had serious doubts. Ms.
Rice kept trying to talk over the soft-voiced George
Stephanopoulos's questions, but he zapped her with a
picture: a September 2002 CNN interview in which she had
not, shall we say, told the whole truth and nothing but. As
the old video played, ABC used a split screen so we could
watch Ms. Rice, <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="95019">"This Is Your Life" style, as she watched the
replay of her incriminating appearance of two years
earlier. Maybe, like Mr. Bush at the first debate, she knew
her reaction was being caught on camera. But even if she
did, the unchecked rage in her face, like that of her boss
three days earlier, revealed that her image and her story,
like the war itself, had spun completely out of her
control. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/arts/10rich.html?ex=1098147608&ei=1&en=210c569d1e207f31


---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help at nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company