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Banned
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Today, the presidency relies on a "brand", "September 11", or "9/11", and a "fear card":
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...080128-13.html
...On a clear September day, we saw thousands of our fellow citizens taken from us in an instant. These horrific images serve as a grim reminder: The advance of liberty is opposed by terrorists and extremists -- evil men who despise freedom, despise America, and aim to subject millions to their violent rule.
Since 9/11, we have taken the fight to these terrorists and extremists. We will stay on the offense, we will keep up the pressure, and we will deliver justice to our enemies. (Applause.)....
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20071101.html
....And I knew full well that if we were successful protecting the country that the lessons of September the 11th would become dimmer and dimmer in some people's minds. Well, I just don't have that luxury, and nor do the people that work with me to protect America, because we have not forgotten the lessons of September the 11th. And I expect, and the American people expect Congress to give us the tools necessary to protect them. ....
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0070123-2.html
...We know with certainty that the horrors of that September morning were just a glimpse of what the terrorists intend for us -- unless we stop them.....
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...060921-11.html
....The crisis constituted by the grave acts of terrorism and threats of terrorism committed by foreign terrorists, including the terrorist attacks in New York, in Pennsylvania, and against the Pentagon of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on United States nationals or the United States that led to the declaration of a national emergency on September 23, 2001, has not been resolved. These actions pose a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. For these reasons, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism, and maintain in force the comprehensive sanctions to respond to this threat.
GEORGE W. BUSH
THE WHITE HOUSE,
September 21, 2006.....
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The reason that "the faithful" still don't see the pathetic descent into "politics of fear", as that, and nothing more, and still do not see Reagan for what he was, an actor, reciting his lines in a highly manipulated, never ending PR campaign, is because they refuse to look:
Quote:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...+we+can&st=nyt
April 29, 1984
CAN THE MAGIC PREVAIL?
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
Steven R. Weisman is chief White House correspondent for The Times.
AMERICANS LIKE HIM.
Amid the whir and clank of machinery at a Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Claycomo, Mo., a few weeks ago, even the men wearing ''Mondale'' baseball caps joined in cheering Ronald Reagan. In New York City, he told Jewish leaders some things they didn't want to hear about Israel. Then he grinned and wished his audience a joyful Pesach, and they responded with appreciative laughter and applause.
When a President runs for re-election, conventional wisdom holds that he runs on his record. Across the country, voters are surely sizing up Mr. Reagan's performance on the economy and foreign policy. But Presidents must also strike a personal chord and they must embody the dreams and values of the nation. ''You cannot be a successful President unless you can project a vision about the purpose of America,'' says Thomas E. Cronin, a leading scholar of the Presidency. And it is becoming clear that this year, to a degree unmatched in modern times, the public is being swayed by these intangibles. One of the most astonishing features of Mr. Reagan's political success is that, whether or not they agree with him and his policies, Americans like him.
As a candidate, President Reagan still benefits from the public's yearning for a take-charge leader after the succession of national traumas from Watergate to the Iran hostages. His political fortunes have been helped by the expanding economy and by the vitriolic Democratic primary campaign. Yet the White House's own political experts say that Mr. Reagan's greatest political asset is his ability to project himself as a man of conviction, genial self-confidence, optimism and old-fashioned values. It has enabled the President to weather countless political storms largely unscathed.
He has committed untold public bloopers and been caught in dozens of factual mistakes and misrepresentations. He has presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression. The abortive mission in Beirut cost 265 American lives, and there has been a sharp escalation in United States military involvement in Central America. An extraordinary number of Mr. Reagan's political appointees have come under fire, with many forced to resign, because of ethical or legal conflicts. Yet he is The Man in the Teflon Suit; nothing sticks to him.
Millions of voters do approve of Mr. Reagan's conservative policies, and millions more don't concern themselves about policy issues. That is to be expected. What is extraordinary is the President's support from another quarter. Opinion polls show that he wins substantial allegiance among those very people who worry about his record-breaking deficits, who fear that his actions could lead to war and who believe that his economic program has clobbered the poor.
Says Fred I. Greenstein, professor of politics at Princeton University: <h3>''He is more successful than any recent President in establishing space between himself and his policies.''</h3>
Clearly, the creation of that space has been a major goal of the Administration. Richard B. Wirthlin, the Reagan campaign polltaker, puts it in terms of a ''social contract'' between the President and the public - ''the giving of a stewardship to a President based upon trust, confidence and congruence with a system of beliefs, rather than a congruence with a set of articulated policies.'' Mr. Reagan's unmatched skills as a communicator of basic values have been applied to achieving that end.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Mr. Reagan's magic will prevail in this election year. A series of foreign-policy setbacks might well tarnish his public image. He suffered a stunning defeat earlier this month when the Republican-controlled Senate overwhelmingly repudiated C.I.A. participation in the mining of Nicaraguan ports. A major disaster in Central America might turn the race around. And his popularity could be damaged if the economy turned sour.
Yet it seems evident that, given the success of his strategy to date, the political marketing of Mr. Reagan's personal qualities may change the nature of the 1984 campaign. To a degree unknown in recent elections, the challenger will have to meet the incumbent's personality head on, matching his style and countering his over-arching message with one of his own.
The Reagan approach may also have a more lasting effect. He has fashioned a new chemistry of image, message and personality - a Presidential persona - that could change the boundaries of the American Presidency itself.
IN HIS BOOK ''WHY NOT THE BEST?'' JIMMY Carter quotes a line from Reinhold Niebuhr that summarizes the former President's view of the world and of his trade: ''The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.''
Americans in this century have tended to elect Presidents who represented change rather than continuity. John F. Kennedy's youth and vigor were an antidote to the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jimmy Carter, like Mr. Reagan, based his appeal on his persona, offering the nation integrity in the aftermath of Watergate. But the contrasts between Mr. Carter and his successor are particularly illuminating.
Mr. Carter bore the burdens of office like a cross. He identified personally with his Administration's traumas, and told Americans that there were no simple answers. The apotheosis of his martyr Presidency came with his refusal to set out on the campaign trail in 1980 because of the Iran hostage crisis. Clinging to the Rose Garden, he succeeded in turning the White House into a kind of prison.
He also regarded the mastery of the details of his job as crucial to his leadership. During the Middle East summit meeting at Camp David, he got down on hands and knees to study maps of the Sinai. He read volumes of Russian history before meeting with Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader. He sought to educate Americans to nuances. Discerning a ''crisis of confidence'' over energy shortages, he consulted leading intellectuals on their view of the national malaise. He called on Americans to accept limits on future growth. On every count, Ronald Reagan's approach to the Presidency is dramatically different. Mr. Reagan positively enjoys the job, keeps his distance from crises, ignores details both as Chief Executive and Chief Communicator. No matter how grave things look, his attitude is invariably upbeat and reassuring. Some of the differences from Mr. Carter were inevitable, given the nature of the two men. More significantly, Mr. Reagan and his aides perceived the style of the Carter Administration as wrong-headed and doomed to fail. They had altogether new and different ideas about how to present the President to his people.
Every Administration for a generation has spent substantial time and energy seeking to make optimum use of television and the print media in the President's behalf. But as the candidate of the minority party and a President whose legislative plans represented a dramatic break with the past, Mr. Reagan had a special need. And because of the long history of Presidents driven from office or defeated for re-election, White House aides were also determined to use the media to strengthen the institution of the Presidency itself. To an unprecedented extent, Mr. Reagan and his staff have made television a major organizing principle of his Presidency. His day is planned around opportunities for TV coverage. Every effort is made to assure a constant flow of positive visual images and symbols from the White House.
In 1982, as unemployment soared and the President was accused of lacking compassion for those out of work, Mr. Reagan avoided appearing in public and before the TV camera in black tie. Instead, he showed up for events concerned with unemployed teen-agers, dock workers and others being trained for new jobs. When disaster strikes a community, Mr. Reagan doesn't stop at sending relief funds - he makes a detour, as he did to flooded-out Louisiana last year, to be photographed stacking sandbags. When a Presidential journey overseas is in the works, producers from the television networks accompany White House aides on the advance trips. The two groups jointly figure out the best photo angles of the President - staring into the demilitarized zone from South Korea, gazing grimly across the Berlin Wall. Plans for the President's trip to China were similarly television-tailored.
This Administration's exceptional ability to manipulate the media is impressive. One means of assuring that the cameras stay on the President, for example, is a White House policy that has Mr. Reagan himself making important announcements on television. For details and analysis, the news media are handed over to Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger or other top aides - <h3>but under ground rules whereby they may not be identified in news accounts. As a result, the only person who can be shown on the 7 o'clock news's coverage of such announcements is the President himself, offering broad, positive precepts.</h3>
Another goal is to keep Mr. Reagan's image as far from bad news and negative discussion as possible. Sometimes the President disappears altogether. <h3>The momentous announcement of the withdrawal of the Marines from Lebanon was made in a written statement distributed late in the day, minutes after Mr. Reagan had left for his ranch in California. There were no senior officials immediately available to the press to explain why the withdrawal was ordered.</h3>
The White House communications staff is nothing if not imaginative. Last year, former Interior Secretary James G. Watt stirred up a hornet's nest of rock-and-roll lovers after he ousted the Beach Boys from their July 4 concert on the Mall. Mr. Watt was summoned to the White House and handed a large plaster foot that had a bullet hole in it, a brilliant device for making light of the incident. Later, it was learned that David R. Gergen, director of communications at the time, had commissioned the making of the foot weeks before, with the thought that it would come in handy if someone in the Administration happened to make a gaffe.
A sense of timing showed up on a more serious topic last December when the White House learned that the Pentagon was about to release a report criticizing the Administration for alleged failures in the massacre of marines in Beirut. White House officials pre-empted the negative impact of the report by leaking Mr. Reagan's reaction to the charges the day before the report was made public.
THE MASTERY OF MEDIA TECHNIQUES HAS been placed in the service of a President with a remarkable approach to political discourse....
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Mitt was a caricature of both of these phenomena, and his "performance" was too much, even for the faithful to take, and they have an amazingly high tolerance for this sort of thing. |