 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
White House hopes to focus blurry message
©New York Times, WASHINGTON -- At the end of his roughest week so far in the war at home and abroad, President Bush had some sharp words for those who complain that the Pentagon's best-case scenarios for Afghanistan have evaporated, and that the war at home has descended into muddled, often contradictory messages about anthrax and other new terrors. "This is not an instant gratification war," Bush sternly reminded a reporter in a Rose Garden appearance on Friday. And on Saturday morning, in his radio address from Camp David, he stopped just short of acknowledging that the White House had underestimated the threat to ordinary Americans two weeks ago, when it listened to experts who believed that anthrax could not escape from sealed envelopes. "We now know differently," he said. Those twin messages -- one testy, one rueful -- seemed to underscore the administration's troubles hitting the right tone and developing a clear message that instills confidence both here and abroad nearly eight weeks after America's terrorist horrors began. Bush and his advisers clearly sense that something has gone awry in their communications strategy. In the next few days, in a flurry of presidential appearances and speeches, they hope to turn it around. On Tuesday, Bush plans to address the progress in Afghanistan in a speech, delivered by satellite, to European leaders gathered in Warsaw, Poland. The next day he will make the case that many more nations are joining the effort to cut off the cash that the al-Qaida terrorist network needs to wreak havoc around the world -- even though some, like Indonesia, the world's most populous Islamic nation, are clearly backing away from early promises of support. On Thursday, Bush plans to travel to a yet-undisclosed city to deliver a speech on homeland defense, advertised by the White House as a primer in "how we live as a nation at war." That will be followed by an address to the United Nations on Saturday. But Bush's biggest task may be to reconcile the often contradictory messages that have emanated from his top advisers -- not only about the airborne habits of anthrax spores, but about the mood of the nation. Bush and his aides make the point -- quite accurately -- that until two months ago there had never been a major foreign terrorist attack on the United States, and that medical professionals knew very little about anthrax. They were the kind of events no one could plan for, much less design a communications strategy that had any hope of holding up. Bush has been relentlessly upbeat, repeating almost daily, as he did again on Friday, that "we're making very good progress" on both fronts, at home and abroad. He has left to others the more complicated messages -- that the Taliban show no sign of cracking, that no one knows how a New York City woman who died last week contracted anthrax, that investigators are no closer to solving the mystery of whether the deadly powder is being sent by Osama bin Laden's followers, Iraq or domestic terrorists. Getting the message right -- and setting the optimal tone -- has been a problem for the Bush White House since Sept. 11. There was the early explanation that Bush stayed out of the capital because of a specific threat to blow up the president's plane, made more chilling by the caller's use of the code word for Air Force One. It turned out later that the call had been a crank, and the caller had never used the code word. Then came the White House insistence that it was impossible to release a scrubbed, declassified description of the evidence against bin Laden in the Sept. 11 attacks, an argument that fell apart when Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain issued one a few days later. Then came the secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson, and the postmaster general, John Potter, telling the public that there was nothing particularly dangerous about the anthrax-laced letter sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the majority leader. The post office that processed the letter was kept open after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no danger to anyone who was not actually present when the envelope was opened. Health officials discovered that their early confidence was wrong, and by the time the White House's warning caught up with the medical realities, two postal workers were dead. "It's true we've had a crisper message on the war in Afghanistan than the war here," said Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications director, who has been deeply involved in the strategy. "But the military action is offensive in nature, it's all under one roof at the Pentagon, and we control it. The bioterrorism is a defensive war, it crosses many jurisdictional lines, including state and local governments, and we don't control when new facts come to light." Bartlett argues that the Washington press corps has been far less sympathetic to the trials of managing a bioterror attack than the public has been -- and many agree. "Everybody's a rookie at this, that's the key story," said Steve Smith, the former editor of U.S. News and World Report who now works at a strategic communications firm in Washington that advises companies on how to handle crises. "People understand pretty well that this war on terrorism is one improvisation after another. And they are cutting the government some slack -- more slack than I would have cut the government if I was still sitting in my journalism seat." The journalists see the interdepartmental rivalries that are the staple of Washington life and an impediment to crisis response. In the last few days, there was a tussle at the White House over whether to issue a second warning that a terrorist attack might happen someplace, sometime, with a weapon yet to be determined. Then it became the White House officials' turn to be stunned. The new director of the Office of Homeland Defense, Tom Ridge, watched in amazement on Thursday when Gov. Gray Davis of California, who has already clashed with Bush on energy policy, declared that he had been told of "credible, specific" threats to several suspension bridges in California and called out the National Guard. Ridge says the information was "uncorroborated," and made it clear he did not support the public release of the information, which his office had kept secret. This will hardly be the end of such debates. New threats will be detected each week. Ridge -- who coordinates everything but controls nothing, a dangerous place to be in Washington -- will have to decide when to warn the public and when warnings threaten to become so routine that they lose their punch.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
