A Bad Time to Work on Bush's Act

By: Robert Reno

The last thing President George W. Bush needs is any hint that it takes an effort for him to be coherent.

He had enough of these unkind suggestions during the campaign when his enemies variously portrayed him as an unserious frat boy unused to heavy lifting and a man challenged to complete coherent sentences who couldn't name world leaders or differentiate the Greeks from the Grecian.

By now we all know that Bush can perform splendidly on carefully scripted occasions, does adequately when he is extemporaneous and that his speeches usually make sense. It would be amazing otherwise. With vast White House resources at his command, professional speechwriters to invent his eloquence, input from every department of government and the support of a vast bureaucracy, making Bush look coherently presidential in a time of national emergency has come off with few hitches.

In some cases, it was as easy as his learning not to call the war on terror a "crusade". For a while, of course, even Gerald Ford looked masterful at the healing process necessary after Richard Nixon trashed the presidency.

Then Ford's own presidency self-destructed from lack of coherence.

Ronald Reagan managed to get through eight full years in the White House without serious anxieties about his coherence. The career of President Bush's father was truncated when his was widely questioned.

I'm reminded of the indiscrete observations of Reagan's biographer, handpicked by Reagan and his wife to define his presidency. In 1991, Edmund Morris found Reagan incoherent and said, "He is the most mysterious man I have ever met. It is impossible to understand him". Morris added, "He's large, he's slabby and he's cold".

With such lack of enthusiasm for his subject, no wonder Morris' subsequent biography of Reagan, finally published in 1999, was so watery and unsatisfying to both Reagan's worshipers and critics. Nor is there any mystery why his book laid an egg for its publishers.

Anyway, The New York Times last week portentously declared - not in an editorial but a news article - that Bush administration officials are terribly concerned about their "muddled effort to project a coherent, convincing message to Americans about the war in Afghanistan and their safety at home". The Times assured us that "President Bush is planning several major speeches to counteract" such anxieties.

It all sounds suspiciously like we're being set up for a White House coherence offensive, a spin operation that will make us dizzy if not nauseated, as if we'd been stuffed in a clothes dryer set to run for an hour.

Whether Bush's speeches will include pointless balloon drops or just an attempt to orchestrate a crescendo of praise for the president, it smells like a lack of confidence in the White House's ability to control its own coherence. Presumably these efforts will include separate campaigns to portray Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson as a walking expert on anthrax and homeland security czar Tom Ridge as the risen Sherlock Holmes.

Call it incoherence or call it hysteria, the White House's disposition to cover its own fanny is unseemly at a time when Americans are desperately confused about how to cover theirs.