politics

Catching Bush Between the Flip and the Flop

June 3, 2004

President Bush is off to France this weekend for the 60th anniversary (Sunday) of D-Day, and to hear him tell it, he never met a Frenchman he didn’t like.

Kudos to Elaine Sciolino of The New York Times, reporting from Paris, who today systematically compares what the president is saying and doing now with what he said and did last year, when France and Germany withheld support for military action in Iraq. “His remarks [in an Oval Office interview with the weekly magazine Paris Match],” writes Sciolino, “seem calculated to rewrite the tortured history of almost two years that has been marked by the most serious divide between the United States and Europe in decades.”

Sciolino begins by telling us that in an effort to repair the rift with France over Iraq, Bush is describing himself and France President Jacques Chirac as “friends” who agreed to disagree about the war. “I’ve never been angry at the French,” Bush told Paris Match, apparently with a straight face. “France has been a longtime ally.” Bush even assured the magazine that Chirac was welcome to his ranch outside Crawford, Texas.

That, Sciolino notes, is a far cry from “his anger that built up last year, leading Mr. Bush to say that Mr. Chirac would not be a guest at the ranch soon” — not to mention the punitive measures that both the White House and the Pentagon sought to employ against France. Sciolino notes that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called France and Germany part of “an old Europe” that did not matter any more, and further that French companies were explicitly excluded from reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Now that “Bush needs the help of Europeans, both in rebuilding Iraq and in remaking his image … as a president who has not alienated some of America’s most important allies,” she writes, he’s practically shopping for berets and reaching for the steak frites.

Sciolino also quotes conciliatory remarks from Chirac, but notes that he “has told some European counterparts in recent weeks that Mr. Bush and his aides refuse to listen to anyone” and notes that Chirac is harshly critical of the administration’s handling of the Palestinian crisis. “But,” she writes, “Chirac is well aware that Mr. Bush may be re-elected and that they may have to coexist for another four years.”

By most measures, this isn’t extraordinary reporting — pointing out that what a politician says now is the polar opposite of what he said not long ago — but it’s refreshing at a time when so many reporters just regurgitate talking points from both the Republican and Democratic camps.

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–Steve Lovelady

Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.