A rare, unvarnished look at the Rove spin machine.

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 11:32:47 +0900
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>, Dave Farber IP
<dave () farber net>
Subject: A rare, unvarnished look at the Rove spin machine.

Joe Conason's Journal
A rare, unvarnished look at the Rove spin machine.
http://www.salon.com/politics/conason/2002/12/02/bush/index.html

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Dec. 2, 2002  |  The Prince (of Mayberry)
In a few days, Esquire's long, extraordinary account of how national policy
is manipulated by the "Mayberry Machiavellis," otherwise known as Karl Rove
and his political staff, will arrive at your local newsstands. Author Ron
Suskind, a deceptively gentle writer whose reporting on this White House
provides an important corrective to the usual banal products of the Beltway
press corps, has once more performed an important public service. So have
his editors David Granger and Mark Warren. Buy their magazine immediately,
if only to encourage the kind of probing journalism that has become so rare
in our media culture.

While you wait, I can offer a few choice quotes from John DiIulio, former
director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives,
whose disillusioning experience is at the center of Suskind's story.

The "Mayberry Machiavellis," according to this decidedly nonliberal
academic, "consistently talked and acted as if the height of political
sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest
black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative
initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have
their predecessors in previous administrations (right and left, Democrat and
Republican), but in the Bush administration they were particularly
unfettered.

"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive
policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic
issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing
who worried at all about policy substance and analysis ... Every modern
presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the
lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing
more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who
meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from
discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political
communications, media strategy, et cetera ..."

DiIulio deplores "the remarkably slapdash character of the Office of
Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department was
needed, with the sudden, politically timed reversal in June, and with the
fact that not even that issue, the most significant reorganization of the
federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense, has
received more than talking-points-caliber deliberation ..."

DiIulio still regards himself as a Bush supporter, and as one of the few
staffers who has ever stood up to Rove, he admires the political advisor's
intelligence. But he regards Rove's overweening presence as a source of
serious problems both inside and outside the White House.

"Some in the press view Karl as some sort of prince of darkness; actually,
he is basically a nice and good-humored man. And some staff members, senior
and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. They
self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and in turn few of the
president's top people tell the president what they really think if they
think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is enormously
powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern post-Hoover
era ever to occupy a political adviser post near the Oval Office. The
Republican base constituencies, including Beltway libertarian policy elites
and religious-Right leaders, trust him to keep Bush 43 from behaving like
Bush 41 ..."

Ari Fleischer may have a little trouble knocking this story down, or
suggesting that the most salient quotes are wrong -- despite today's strange
"apology" http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2002/12/02/bush_aide/index.html
from DiIulio  (who won't be doing much typing with those broken arms). You
see, most of what he says in Suskind's article is quoted from a seven-page,
on-the-record letter, which is posted here.
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2002/021202_mfe_diiulio_1.html
[this link has the full text of the letter DiIulio sent to Esquire that has
all the claims that DiIulio "apologized" for]

<snip>

-- 
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
In Tokyo as Glocom visiting research fellow through April 2003
Cell: +81 80-3121-6128 Work: +81 3-5411-6613 http://www.glocom.ac.jp
eFax: +1-408-490-2868 rberger () ibd com http://www.ibd.com


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