Voter Political Blog

It was the government’s poor reaction to the Katrina disaster that ended their ability to get anything done. The Associated Press reports on an upcoming Vanity Fair article that reports part of an oral history on the bush administration due to be distributed nationally January 6.

Staff AP News Dec 29, 2008 21:41 EST

Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government’s poor handling of the natural disaster.

“Katrina to me was the tipping point,” said Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. “The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter.”

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: “Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.” [Snip]

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.

“It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president — because, let’s face it, that’s what he was — was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire,” Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the “most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur” he’d ever met.

“He became vice president well before George Bush picked him,” Wilkerson said of Cheney. “And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.”

Wilkerson’s comment on Cheney confirms what was written about Cheney in Barton Gellman’s excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

But it was the Bush administration’s blundered reaction to the Katrina disaster that exposed its incompetence and passiveness in the similarly passive media. Once it became clear in the media that the government handling of Katrina was incompetent, it reflected back on their failure to prevent 9/11 as well as their failed occupation of Iraq and the unacknowledged rise of the Iraqi insurgency. The Bush administration’s current passiveness and failed reactions to the economic crisis simply demonstrate that the problem is inherent in the Bush administration and not a one time screw up.

Source: http://politicsplusstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/katrian-reaction-ended-bush.html

Reporting from Washington — President-elect Barack Obama’s top advisors said Sunday that they wouldn’t back away from a promise to cut taxes on the middle class and raise them for the wealthiest Americans, as they made the case for a massive new stimulus package geared toward reviving the slumping economy.

Speaking on Sunday talk shows and in a newspaper opinion piece, Obama aides stepped up a drive to build a broad political consensus behind Obama’s core economic proposals: a two-year spending package that could exceed $775 billion, coupled with tax policies weighted in favor of the middle class.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama, said, “We have to act. Every economist from left to right agrees that we have to do something big in terms of job creation, but we want to do it in a way that will leave a lasting footprint.”

Obama wants lawmakers to give him a stimulus bill to sign soon after he is sworn in Jan. 20.

Writing Sunday in the Washington Post, Lawrence H. Summers, Obama’s incoming director of the White House National Economic Council, said the bleak economic climate called for substantial new spending.

“Economic forecasts have been revised significantly downward over the past several months; today, many experts believe that unemployment could reach 10% by the end of next year,” Summers wrote. As of November, unemployment stood at 6.7%.

Summers added: “In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

Since his Nov. 4 victory, Obama has been confronted with signs that the economy is worsening: rising unemployment, sinking home values and a contracting gross domestic product. Last week there were reports of a dismal holiday shopping season. Retail sales dropped 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve, compared with a year earlier.

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-obama-stimulus29-2008dec29,0,3089511.story

Only 29 percent of Americans approve of the job Dick Cheney is doing as Vice President. In an interview with his hometown Wyoming newspaper, The Caspar Star-Tribune, Cheney expressed his bewilderment over his low approval numbers:

QUESTION: How do you explain your low approval rating?

CHENEY: I don’t have any idea. I don’t follow the polls.

My experience has been over the years that if you govern based upon poll numbers, upon trying to improve your overall poll ratings, people I’ve encountered who do that are people who won’t make tough decisions. And the job the president has and those who advise him is to make those basic fundamental decisions for the nation that nobody else is authorized or able to make.

In addition to his well-documented abuse of power and disregard for the rule of law, Cheney’s public disapproval ratings might be explained in part by his own personal disregard for the public. When told that two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Iraq war, Cheney responded “so?,” adding that he didn’t care what the American people thought.

While he says he doesn’t follow the polls, Cheney was all too proud to state shortly after the 2004 elections: “President George W. Bush won the greatest number of popular votes of any presidential candidate in history.” (That’s no longer true.)

Cheney is still holding out hope, however, that the polls will turn his way. He said recently, “I’m personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road in light of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/28/cheney-low-polls-dont-know/

The body of a Palestinian security force officer lays in the rubble after an Israeli missile strike on a building in Gaza City, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2008. AP/Fadi Adwan

On one hand, one can’t blame the Israeli government for wanting to do what it can to prevent the world from seeing the effects of its devastating Gaza air strikes that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

In 48-hours, Israel has decimated the Gaza Strip, killed more than 300 Palestinians and injured 1,400 others in a “shock and awe” air campaign.

Israeli air strikes have targeted a mosque, universities, and private homes as part of the military campaign aimed at destabilizing Hamas rulers and preventing Gaza militants from continuing to fire endless rounds of rockets into southern Israel.

But, as the BBC’s Jo Floto noted last month after Israel first barred journalists from entering Gaza, Israel has joined a notorious and small list of countries preventing reporters from doing their job.

Israel, which prides itself on being the healthiest democracy in the Middle East, joins North Korea, Zimbabwe and Burma in denying media access to a major story.

In essence, Israel has transformed the entire Gaza Strip into a closed military zone.

Reporters from every major news organization, from the BBC and CNN to The New York Times and The Washington Post to NPR and McClatchy to AP and Fox News, are being barred by Israel from going into Gaza to cover the deadliest military campaign there since Israel seized the area from Egypt in the 1967 war.

The Foreign Press Association, of which McClatchy is a part, has called the Israeli closure “insufferable” and asked the Israeli Supreme Court to take immediate action to lift the ban.

So far, Israel’s high court has been slow to act and shows no sign that it is overly concerned. Appeals for a swift decision have been repeatedly rejected and the case won’t be heard until Wednesday.

On Monday, the Israeli military went one step farther and declared the Gaza border, where tanks, artillery and troops are massing for a possible ground offensive, a closed military zone.

That drew another protest from the FPA, which denounced the closure, ostensibly being done for our own protection, “patently ridiculous.”

Israel first imposed the ban on reporters going to Gaza on Nov. 4 when its military broke the cease-fire with Hamas by sending forces in to destroy a tunnel. Since then, Israel has opened the border for reporters for only a few days.

Israeli officials argue that the closure is meant to protect its staff at the border crossing from being exposed to unnecessary risks of rocket fire. But that argument holds little weight because the Israeli workers have been routinely staffing the border crossing to allow UN officials and Palestinians in need of emergency care in-and-out of Israel.

Just today, the Israeli staff allowed two UN workers to enter Gaza. Israeli officials ignored appeals from journalists that we be allowed to enter at the same time.

Today, the FPA issued a a new statement of protest, calling the Israeli ban “unprecedented.”

“Never before have journalists been prevented from doing their work in this way,” the FPA said in the statement. “We believe that it is vital that journalists be allowed to find out for themselves what is going on in Gaza.”

Considering that Gaza is controlled by Hamas and that Israeli officials have cautioned reporters to be skeptical of the information coming out of Gaza at this time, you would think that Israel would want to allow reporters in to provide an independent view of the conflict.

If the mosque and university buildings were being used to house weapons, as Israel claims, why not let international reporters in to see?

But, in probably the most candid assessment of the situation from an Israeli official, Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said last month that they don’t particularly like the coverage that comes out of Gaza.

“Where Gaza is concerned, our image will always be bad,” Dror said. “When journalists go in it works against us, and when they don’t go in it works against us.”

The only other possible land route into Gaza is through Egypt, but the Egyptians have given no indication that they are prepared to let reporters into cover the conflict either. Egypt isn’t a bastion of press freedom, though one suspects Israel wouldn’t want to set its own benchmark for a free press by Egyptian standards.

In the meantime, the volatile conflict continues and the burden of telling the story is falling most heavily on Gaza journalists who are doing an amazing job of sending out video, photos and reports on what is happening - despite Israeli attempts to prevent reporters from covering the air strikes.

For the moment, some of the best reporting is coming from Al Jazeera English and its Gaza-based reporter, Ayman Mohyeldin. You can watch one of his most recent reports below.

Granted, the story itself is a bit old news; however, the reporters who got ditched still haven’t forgotten.  Myself, I find it childish of reporters to insist on spending every living second covering anyone, even a president.

—

The press gets in a revenge story.

Seems Obama ditched the press to be alone with his family for a while and a Politico reporter writes that Obama is “bristling.” I’d be bristling too.

News to the press: We don’t have to know what flavor of shaved ice Obama buys for his daughters or what color pants he’s wearing. It’s interesting but not a need to know kind of thing.

Politico: HONOLULU – The media glare, the constant security appendage and the sheer production that has become a morning jog or a hankering for an ice cream cone – it’s been closing in on Barack Obama for some time.

Now the president-elect appears increasingly conscious of the confines of his new position, bristling at the routine demands of press coverage and beginning to chafe at boundaries that are only going to get smaller.

Obama even took the unusual step Friday morning of leaving behind the pool of reporters assigned to follow him, taking his daughters to a nearby water park without them. It was a breach of longstanding protocol between presidents (or presidents-elect) and the media, that a gaggle of reporters representing television, print and wire services is with his motorcade at all times.

Then when reporters finally caught up with Obama at Koko Marina Paradise Deli and he acknowledged them for one of few times since arriving in Hawaii last Saturday, he sounded resigned.

Source: http://ochairball.blogspot.com/2008/12/reporters-mad-obama-ditched-them.html