The text from the most recent "Ask the President" dog-and-pony show in my old hometown, Beaverton, OR.
Transcripts from other Bush Softball lob-a-thons.
You want to come off looking strong and relaxed, so what do you do? Well, of course, silly...you surround yourself with a group of drooling sycophants who live to do little beyond gently lobbing softball questions at you. Now THIS is a political campaign, y'all...or at least it is in George Bush's world, where nary is heard a discouraging word. His staffers will make certain of that.
The press corps appears to have had about enough of those hokey "Ask President Bush" events.
Instead of taking questions from reporters, President Bush has become increasingly partial to playing talk-show host to an audience of sycophantic fans.
There were four "Ask President Bush" events last week and in each case, after a long speech and staged interviews with prepped guests, Bush opened the floor to some incredible softballs.
The format allows the president to come off as very smooth....
There's never a nasty question, never a heckler, nothing but love. That makes for great imagery and great soundbytes.
But now the press is pulling back the curtain.
Bill Plante did a long report on the CBS Evening News on Friday, showing video of campaign wranglers trying to pump up the hand-picked crowd.
"The art of TV-friendly political stragecraft reaches new levels in this campaign," Plante says. "This tight control means that hecklers . . . are almost never seen at Bush events. . . .
"At events like these, it's all about getting the message without any distraction, and making sure that there's no public argument to spoil the party."
Oh, Lord...Heaven FORBID that there sure be any actual honest-to-God debating of issues. When all you play to are carefully hand-picked and screened crowds of sycophants, what are you really accomplishing except preaching to the faithful? How does this sterile, risk-free form of campaigning do ANYTHING to convince undecided voters?
The short version is that it cannot. When you shield yourself from those who may not agree with your leadership or your policies, you also deny yourself the opportunity to sway those votes. Those rabid, religious, Red Meat Conservatives in Bush's audiences are going to vote for him regardless. How does preaching to the choir do anything to help his cause?
Are Bush's handlers afraid to allow their man to deal with the uncertainties of unscripted campaign stops? Are they so afraid of what might come of out Bush's mouth that they refuse to risk letting him freelance?
In the end, this may well be an even better Democratic strategy than anything the Kerry-Edwards braintrust could possibly come up with. While Kerry and Edwards crisscross the country meeting people where they live, Bush continues his hermetically-sealed campaign, safe from all those nasty unintended consequences that campaigns so often bring. Of course, he's not going to reach a lot of undecided voters if he continues as he is. For Democrats, that's probably better than anything they could have hoped for.
