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Latimer has Bush pegged. This is a key passage:

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Assigned to write a “Captive Nations Week” speech for Bush, Latimer relates how White House staffers Ed Gillespie and Barry Jackson were on a different frequency than Reagan or Latimer: they were tuned precisely to the Bush channel. This from Speech-less:

Traditionally Captive Nations Week was marked to remember dissidents around the world still trapped in captivity. It gained special prominence during the Cold War when Ronald Reagan used the occasion to give speeches condemning the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Reagan publicly celebrated the anniversary over the strong objections of his State Department, which warned about offending the Soviets. I thought the speech would be right up President Bush’s alley — another dusting off of his Freedom Agenda and a condemnation of dictatorships across the world.

But Ed Gillespie and Barry Jackson — the man who wanted to compare Bush to Thomas Jefferson — had another revelation. They’d looked at a series of polls and decided to “rebrand” the Freedom Agenda. They even held meetings in the EEOB about it, complete with PowerPoint presentations and colorful slides. To their apparent surprise, it turned out that all that stuff the President had been talking about — standing up to dictators and encouraging democracy around the world — was unpopular with the American people. The war in Iraq was even more unpopular. (Again, these are the conclusions that were being drawn in 2008.)

By contrast, fighting hunger and disease in places like Africa and Latin America was viewed by Americans as a good thing. So it turned out that fighting river blindness and elephantitis and who knows what else was really what the President’s Freedom Agenda had been about all along. (Wink.) As for the President’s inaugural address — the one supporting democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq and calling for an end to global tyranny? Uh, never mind. Now assistance to Africa, our one popular initiatives, was infiltrating our national security and foreign policies. The speechwriters were told to argue that battling HIV and malaria on a continent thousands of miles away was central, indeed essential, to America’s national security. Rebranding the Freedom Agenda was our version of “New Coke.”

So Latimer went ahead drafting the speech to land somewhere between Reagan’s beliefs and Bush’s White House. The president didn’t like the first cut, or the second. As Latimer found to his discomfort:

Now grossly dissatisfied with two drafts of the speech, the President finally told us what he wanted: a speech that recognized the freedom agenda as freedom from disease, freedom from poverty, freedom from despair. Oh, and freedom from tyranny too, if you could fit it in. It was true: the President really did want the freedom agenda to be about fighting river blindness in Botswana. I couldn’t believe it. All the big talk about standing up for democracy around the world, well, that was clearly over.
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