President Bush is rapidly assembling a domestic policy team to help push through changes in Social Security, federal income taxes and personal-injury litigation, the Washington Post‘s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote Friday.
The game plan is simple:
To build public support and circumvent critics in Congress and the media, the president will travel the country and warn of the disastrous consequences of inaction, as he did to sell his Iraq and terrorism policies during the first term, White House officials said. He is also enlisting well-funded conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation to help build the case for change — or “reform,” in the words of the White House — through ads and commentary on television and in targeted publications, the aides said.
The administration’s case for war went largely unchallenged by the news media, subsequently producing a rash of extraordinary mea culpas from the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others. In fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction; most of the media got snookered because nobody bothered to ask questions.
Now, as the fight for public support moves to the home front, the administration is just as serious in its desire to circumvent the people who get paid nice salaries to be skeptical, and go straight to the American public with a well-rehearsed message.
Bruised by the WMD debacle, will the media step to the plate this time and subject the president’s agenda to tough questioning and analysis?
Early returns are coming in. Don’t hold your breath.
Consider a segment on Social Security by CNN Washington correspondent Bruce Morton that aired Thursday on “Inside Politics” with Judy Woodruff.
“Social Security is in trouble,” Morton told viewers. “Politicians like South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham know it.”
Morton neglects to tell his viewers, however, that Lindsay Graham also happens to be an ardent supporter of Mr. Bush’s stated desire to create private investment accounts, and thus may not be an objective source to assess Social Security’s health. (The New York Times’ Edmund L. Andrews provided that important context on Graham in his Friday report.)
Morton discredited himself even further with his two other “experts” — representatives of the conservative Concord Coalition and Cato Institute, both advocates of creating private accounts.
Over at CBS News, the reporting by John Roberts wasn’t any better, as Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly observed. Morton’s voice of doom in a Thursday report was a 28-year-old by the name of Tad DeHaven, who proclaimed, “I don’t expect to get anything from Social Security. I don’t consider it in terms of my long term planning. It’s not going to be there.” As Drum discovered with a few keystrokes, however, Tad DeHaven isn’t just any worried 20-something. He happens to work for the National Taxpayers Union, a supporter of privatizing Social Security.
As the Bush public relations machine gears up to promote its overhaul of Social Security, the news media can roll over or it can stand up and raise questions. And thanks to the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, we have an excellent primer on what they should be asking.
— Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.