Bush's Bull's-Eyes

Leadership: If you wonder why we run many of President Bush's speeches verbatim, we can think of at least three reasons — the most important of which is that most of what he says is right on the money.

With so many problems confronting the U.S., it's a shame there isn't more direct, unfettered communication between the people and their president. Maybe if the public was given a chance to hear the president out, the president wouldn't be held in such low esteem in public opinion polls.

Bush's address Friday to the Economic Club of New York (see opposite page) was only the latest in which he has spoken forcefully and authoritatively on a major issue.

The economy, we're told, suddenly tops Americans' list of concerns (now that it's doing poorly, as the media keep reminding us, and that the previous No. 1 concern, the war in Iraq, is going well, as the media are loath to report).

You’ve nailed one issue I keep pushing. A president depends upon his ability to communicate with the public to be able to lead them, but the only means he has of communicating is by way of the press.

This means, since the press is uniformly Democrat, and uniformly hostile, and uniformly unwilling to broadcast any of his speeches aside from the annual “State of the Nation”, that he is effectively silenced.

How many times has he gone on a multi-million dollar multi-city speaking tour to push one policy or other, and after all of that effort and all of that expense the result is a 5 second film clip in which the reporter does a voice-over. The president’s own words are never heard. He may have given the speach of his life, and no one will ever know it.

The same applies to Repub candidates. They can spend millions traveling around the country trying to get their views out, and nothing. They may as well be singing to themselves in the shower. How much money can they raise for their campaign? Irrelevant, spend all the money you want, no one is going to hear a word you say.

Voters are left to divine who you might be based on what you look like in a brief news-clip in which you are not even heard, and all of your philosophical views are reduced to a single sentence read again by some newscaster.

So, we get to where we are. Good men can get no traction at all, they can stand all night in a televised debate and get maybe one irrelevant question, and viewers later will say, I don’t know, he just didn’t impress me.

No kidding.

As long as Republican are dependent upon Democrat mics and Democrat printing presses they are always going to be behind the curve. They had better get serious about communications or they are a dying breed. They had better learn to do battle in the war of ideas, which necessarily is always fought in the media, and as it now stands is always fought on a battlefield bought and paid for and controlled by their enemies. Remember Reagan’s famous retort, “I paid for that mic!”...? That is almost never true. It is almost always the Repub borrowing air-time from his political enemies and then wondering why they are biased.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.