In part, he does it by being comfortable with himself. Bush may appear goofy and inarticulate at times, but he seems genuine, at least in informal settings. Before he gained the White House, Bush seemed to have the tense, strained air of a polite, wellbred man trying, rather unsuccessfully, to disguise his ambition. Having attained his life’s goal, he seems more relaxed. Bush has even developed a knack for letting voters in on the charade. When he’s insincere, he slyly lets on with small jokes and body language, as if to say, Aw, heck, you know and I know this is all bull, but gee, it’s only politics. The White House can’t gloat over the check-bouncing scandal bedeviling the Democratic-controlled Congress. But when Bush was asked last week at a press conference to comment on the scandal, he winked broadly and declared, “I am afraid anything I say on that would be considered political. You know how I’m trying to avoid that.” The reporters chuckled.
If the winking and guffawing seems a little cynical, it sometimes is. Last week Bush disingenuously insisted that he seemed to focus most of his energy on foreign policy because reporters kept asking him about it. He made this claim during a press conference dominated by domestic-policy questions. The press is sometimes willing to be used by Bush. Last weekend, ABC aired “The Heroes of Desert Storm,” a docudrama featuring Bush six times without once showing Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf or Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell. Bush’s top TV adviser, Dorrance Smith, who recently came to the White House from ABC, clearly understands how to exploit commercial television.
As the campaign arrives, Bush is testing new methods of manipulating the press. Reporters and photographers may be Bush’s joking buddies, but they can also ask unpleasant questions and take unflattering pictures. So Bush’s men have cooked up stratagems for eliminating them when need be. At taxpayer expense, a fully equipped television studio has been built in the Old Executive Office Building. Bush can teleconference with ad executives in Nashville and a meeting of public-television station chiefs in Orlando, as he did this summer, in less than 30 minutes.
Ronald Reagan’s handlers were once famed for setting up “photo opportunities” that encouraged photographers to shoot the president in heroic guises. But last week the White House skipped the pretense of staging a news event and offered the financially strapped networks a completely prepackaged photo op. At a cost of $26,000 (more taxpayer expense), the Department of Education hired an independent company to tape Bush talking to Washington junior-high students about the virtues of education. The networks ran snippets, and CNN and PBS covered the event live, There was no mention that the children had been told to wear soft-soled shoes so they would not noisily was reading remarks off a TelePrompTer at the back of the room.
The show-and-tell on education, like an earlier photo op in which Bush used the Grand Canyon as a backdrop to talk about the environment, was aimed to show that the president is “doing something” about problems at home. The fact that he isn’t really doing very much has often been cited as a potential political liability. It will certainly be a theme song of the Democrats, But even in the domestic arena, Bush is allowed a certain amount of winking and nodding. Most Americans don’t have faith in government’s ability to solve great social problems. If Bush appears to lack boldness to many voters, to the average middle-class taxpayer he merely seems pragmatic.
With his horseplay and sometimes blue-collar tastes (country music, Tex-Mex food), Bush manages to come across as a regular guy. He isn’t, of course. Most ordinary taxpayers don’t own a spectacular vacation “cottage” in Maine. Richard Nixon recently advised Bush not to be pictured so much at play. “The average guy is not on the golf course, the tennis court or in the speedboat because he doesn’t have one,” Nixon cautioned. But Nixon fails to understand the patrician streak in American politics that made Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy so popular. Voters don’t mind a touch of noblesse oblige in their leaders, as long as it’s the real thing. Likewise, voters don’t mind when Bush gripes when his manic recreation is interrupted by world crises. They have no doubt that he’s in charge, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. By being confident and natural in a profession known for phonies, Bush has amassed a still sizable store of credibility with the American public. Now all he has to do is use it to level with voters about the hard choices at home.
