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Was that wrong?

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published January 23, 2005

Every politician needs a good PR team. For example, where were Ted Kennedy's handlers the other day when the Massachusetts senator decided to lecture Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales on the subject of "water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning . . ."?

When Gonzales was White House counsel, he became the Bush administration's chief apologist for harsh interrogation techniques, including so-called "water boarding," that violate the spirit of U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. So he deserved tough questioning on the subject during his confirmation hearings.

But not from Kennedy.

In fact, Gonzales should have gotten some sort of prize for keeping a straight face while Kennedy droned on about the horrors of near-drowning. A good PR team would have kept Kennedy from heading down that road.

Presidents need good public relations, too, but the Bush administration has taken its PR campaigns to unethical extremes. Employees of the Social Security Administration have been ordered to help make the case that the retirement program is on the brink of disaster. When the White House was pushing its Medicare drug card, the Department of Health and Human Services produced ads in which phony journalists claimed to "report" on the program's alleged benefits.

And speaking of phony journalists, somebody in the administration thought it was a good idea for the U.S. Education Department to sneak $240,000 to self-loathing black conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law.

That secret arrangement has produced only bad PR since it was exposed. Williams never mentioned during his repeated flacking for No Child Left Behind in his newspaper column and broadcast commentaries that the government was paying him for his services. Neither did the Education Department or the White House, until USA Today discovered the deal.

Williams has made various attempts to rationalize the secret $240,000.

First he tried the Costanza defense: "I have realized, you know what? I am part of this media elite club, and I have to be more responsible."

This technique gets its name from the Seinfeld episode in which George gets fired from his new job at Pendant Publishing for having sex in his office with the cleaning woman.

"Was that wrong?" he asks his boss. "Should I have not done that? I tell you I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon . . ."

When the Costanza defense didn't play well, Williams went to the Suze Orman card. Orman, the ubiquitous financial adviser, said it was okay for her to take money to promote a General Motors financing offer because she's a celebrity, not a journalist.

Williams offered this variation on that theme: "I'm not a journalist, I'm a pundit."

Pundits such as David Broder and Ellen Goodman must be delighted to know that's it's okay with Armstrong Williams if they take under-the-table money from the government to help make ends meet.

At least Williams seems to have learned his lesson. For now, he's leaving the Bush administration's paid cheerleading to pros such as Treasury Secretary John Snow and Secretary of State-to-be Condoleezza Rice.

Meanwhile, you haven't heard even semicontrition from Tallahassee, where Gov. Jeb Bush has seen one of his own PR efforts backfire.

Earlier this month, the governor's office hired former Florida Times-Union editorial page editor Lloyd Brown to ghostwrite speeches, letters to the editor and other material for the governor. Brown left the Jacksonville newspaper last November after an internal review found instances of plagiarism in editorials he wrote.

So, at least for a few days, Brown had achieved a certain sort of karma. He went from claiming credit for material someone else wrote to writing material for which someone else would claim credit.

But Brown had other baggage. In 1998, after then-Times-Union editorial writer Billee Bussard complained that Brown regularly viewed Internet pornography in the editorial office, Brown signed a letter saying he had sought help from "an outside counselor for his addiction to the Internet and possession of pornography." In a recent article for Jacksonville's Folio Weekly, titled Porn, Hypocrisy, Plagiarism: The Dark Side of Jacksonville's Daily, Bussard wrote that she left the editorial department in 1999 "because of my discomfort and concerns for my safety."

The timing of Brown's hiring by the governor's office struck some as curious. One day earlier, Bush had fired Terry White, head of the Department of Elder Affairs, because of allegations of sexual harassment.

But our normally priggish governor took a laissez-faire attitude toward Brown. Bush said on Jan. 11 that his staff had looked into the allegations against Brown and concluded that they "were not quite accurate." He didn't say whether it was the plagiarism part or the workplace porn part that wasn't quite accurate.

In any case, Brown "resigned" his new job on Jan. 18. But neither he nor the governor has acknowledged even the slightest misjudgment.

"Sensationalized news stories using accusations made against me years ago as a device to attack Gov. Bush have convinced me that I can better serve my family and the governor by not being a distraction from the important work he is doing on behalf of the people of Florida," Brown's resignation letter read.

Whoever wrote that letter wasn't quite accurate.

Robert Friedman can be reached at friedman@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 23, 2005, 00:14:21]