US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld recently said at a news conference ;

"I just don't happen to believe that America is what's wrong with the world. And I know that's a fact," he said. "And these terrorists have been determined to dishearten the American people, and we simply must not let that happen."

Nice piece of conflation.

Particularly ironic when he is quoted earlier in the piece;

"This is the first war that's been conducted in the 21st century with all the new media realities of 24-hour talk radio and Sony cams and digital cameras and news constantly on television," Secretary Rumsfeld. "But the American people have a pretty good center of gravity.

"They've got a good inner gyroscope," he said. "And it may be disorienting for a time; it may blow us off course somewhat, but we tend to re-center."

America's wars always have had critics, but the difference in this war is the prevalence of the media, Secretary Rumsfeld said. Terrorists recognize the influence the media has, so they use their own media committees to determine how best to manipulate the American public through the media, he said.

The terrorists plan their attacks to deliberately dishearten the American people and make them think the cause isn't right or that America makes terrorism worse, Secretary Rumsfeld said.

This presumes the individual is entirely at the mercy and influence of the media, and that individuals should instead take their media from a source they can trust - like their government.

That is a statist view of the world.

David Kuo in his book, Tempting Faith , writes;

Our White House [Bush] understood both the news cycle and America's short attention span. It realised the latter was short and the former manic.

The American public has a notoriously brief attention span even for major news. Within weeks even a tsunami can become old news. When it comes to politics, the vast majority of people look at headlines, watch a thirty-second story, and then more on to think about American Idol, dinner, or just about anything else more captivating.

The media markets make it worse, not better. The twenty-four-hour news cycle must be fed constantly with new stuff, and there are more and more outlets for it. There are internet bloggers and news Web sites, the network news, cable news, weekly and monthly magazines, and daily newspapers - and that's just some of the categories.

Each category is broken down into incomprehensible niches. For instance our media shop produced a thirty-six page spreadsheet of just the top Hispanic news outlets in American. The White House has similar lists of every conceivable group.

...

Unless a news story is a major one, the media churns through it quickly, keeping the public entertained with ever newer stories. The rush for new stories makes it harder for reporters to dig down deep into a story. So they are easily fooled.

The White House understood this. Everything it did catered for it.

...

Keeping the media busy was easier. They were fed a constant barrage of little announcements with big ones sprinkled in. The big ones were then quickly followed up by more little announcements. There wasn't any letup. Also, because the communications shop kept reporters at arms' length, the reporters didn't get inside information or tips to give them heads up for what was coming next. Already struggling reporters were always behind.

Kuo notes that the reporters knew what was happening but were unable to do anything about it.

This approach allowed the White House to make grand announcements and then do nothing to implement them with impunity.

I am reading David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith . It is an entertaining read. Kuo is up and down like a dunny seat - running from radicalisation to disappointment to radicalisation again and then back to disappointment - but he is a good writer. It is also rare in that it is one of the first-person insider books to come out of the Administration. Paul O'Neill's book was written by Ron Suskind and was disembodied for it.

Kuo writes in his book of the "message meetings";

... but before I [David Kuo] could she [Juleanna Glover-Weiss] whispered, "Well, you are sitting in the most important meeting the White House holds."

"What is it?" I asked quietly.

"It is the 'message meeting'. Every decision is based on the message. Watch, you'll see."

There has been some reporting on message meetings. In the run up to the Iraq War, Australian and British aides consulted in Washington, DC so that all three leaders would be 'on message'. It has also been reported that every Wednesday in DC, aides from representatives, thinktanks, and conservative writers, such as Robert Novak, would meet to ensure they were all 'on message'.

David Kuo describes the White House message meetings in detail. This is the first time I have seen the Administration's media management in detail;

"'Message' as it was called in White House parlance, was all about the White House's public face. The White House was intent on driving the news. It wanted to dictate what everyone was talking about an in what terms.

If the White House wanted to focus on education, for instance, the day's first events might be at a suburban school to highlight how students' test scores have improved because of a focus on basics like writing or arithmetic. The president might sit down with the students and help them with their classwork.

By doing this, the White House tried to ensure that news coverage would be not only about education in general but about teaching fundamentals in particular.

The White House communications shop would email a synopsis of the event to media outlets, along with a small fact sheet. They would also send talking points to friendly pundits, policy makers, lobbyists, and congressmen and their staffers, so thet they would be saying the right things in the right way if they were interviewed.

None of this is really new knowledge. The talking points being spread and disseminated widely had been known for a while. The difference is the White House's ability to incorporate some many influential media makers and speakers into this program - including the Prime Minister of Australia.

Kuo continues;

The message meeting was aimed at co-ordinating all of this, and the main tool was a five-week strategic calendar.

Part of the Administration's inability to respond to catastrophe may have been structural due to the rigidity of the message calendar. 911 and Katrina were big issues for them and their response was pretty woeful in the early stages. By katrina they had largely lost the American population, and 911 required several days before the White House knew how to respond in a meaningful way in the media. This highly procedural and structural manner of the White House's manner may well have been a reason behind their inability to govern in the face of disaster.

Each page showed a week running Sunday through Saturday, with each day's public events laid out. There could be as many as seven or eight events per day though typically there were three to five. Each day, one event was usually highlighted and coordinated with the 'message of the day', which was shown in a special box. One week, for instance, might include two days devoted to the economy, one day on homeland security, another on energy, and one on education.

This proactive media strategy was ingenious - unless it was derailed by something unexpected such as Senator Jefford's defection (Kuo is detailing his presence in the meeting in 2000). When those things occurred, the debate was between those who believed the message of the day still trump something happening on the outside and those who believed the message needed to be scrapped and outside issues addressed.

That is significant; and may point to an arrogance in the belief of being able to control the media despite outside news or media happenings intruding on the news cycle.

One senior West Wing friend said to me early on that it was 'policy for the media, not media on the policy.' In many areas - particularly in domestic policy - this White House didn't exist to advance a certain philosophicl agenda. It existed to advance a positive public perception of the president and itself.

It wasn't putting the cart before the horse, it was making sure the cart and horse were under television lights, gleaming, happy, and smiling.

In Suskind's book detailing O'Neill's experiences in the Administration, O'Neill professed horror at the policy formulating process. In previous Administrations that O'Neill had served in, the normal process was to create public policy, then determine how to sell it politically. O'Neill told Suskind that the Bush Administration did it the other way around, making policy fit the electoral sell. This may also be the influence of the 'message meeting' in that even public policy has to fit the message.

x-posted at clubtroppo

Mitt Romney is a slick political operator who changes his political stripes with ease to suit the constituent's demands of the time. There is nothing really wrong with that, representatives are supposed to barter their electorate's demands in the legislative or executive under the boundaries of constitutionally limited government. It does cause voters to shy away though is it gives the impression of the politician being a phony. Not to mention the concern they are as morally and ethically malleable as they are politically. American evangelical voters need to take a hard look at themselves and what their pursuit of political power is achieving and doing.

David Kuo in Tempting Faith, summarises the issues quite succintly:

Since the mid-1970s an with ever increasing passion, Christians like me have looked to politics to save America. We though that the right president, the right congress, and the right judge or justice would stop abortions, strengthen marriage, create a safer country for children, and ensure that religious faith was respected.

Politics and governance often uses the tool of coercion. Especially when a minority is in governance and seeks to establish its agenda through legislation and executive force. The purpose of republicanism is to protect the rights of individuals from such legislative and executive intrusion by making rights inalienable. Evangelicals have sought to create a political monopoly through the US Republican Party in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial to enact their agenda. Despite their political success they have ultimately failed. The policies they sought to be enacted have not changed the underlying social system one iota.

Kuo continues:

Our motivations were good ones. We wanted to save lives, homes, and our country. We saw ourselves as heirs to the Christian political tradition that fought against slavery and for women's right to vote. We had every right to be in the political fight.

Unfortunately the evangelical view of a utopian society is a myopic one that is often hostile to competing lifestyles. Liberty is a miasma and ends in maximum heterogeniety, not legislatively informed homogeniety. Like any larger political movement it will come up against the wall of people doing what they want to do.

Now, however, it is time to take stock both politically and spiritually. Has our political focus produced the desired results? By 2008, we will have had a good conservative Republican in the Oval Office for twenty of the past twenty-eight years. Republicans have had outright control of both houses of Congress for most of the last twelve years.

Republican Presidents have appointed the vast majority of American judges and seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. In short, we've had almost everything we wanted politically.

But things are hardly better. Social statistics are largely unchanged. Divorces are rampant and more and more children are growing up in a home with one parent. Nearly a million and a half abortions are performed every year. There are more children in poverty today than there were twenty years ago. A great percentage of Americans lack health care than ever before. Educational achievement is hardly soaring. Millions of Americans live in what seems like utterly intractable poverty.

We have had great political success and marginal political success.

I would argue one of the problems with evangelical voting patterns is its lack of liberalism. Evangelicals, and especially their leaders, choose or back candidates based on the candidates confessional purity - not merit. Evangelicals helped elect one of the most incompetent Presidents in American history, not once, but twice. They also helped elect one of the most incompetent Congress' in American history as well. If they chose, supported and backed candidates based on merit they might have more chance of having some of their social policies enacted competently.

Kuo continues:

There there is the spiritual side of things. As one prominent pastor has written, "What we've done is turn a mission field into a battlefield." What he means is that by so passionately pursuing politics, Christians have alienated everyone on the other side, many of them good people with genuine policy differences.

People of goodwill of all faiths can disagree about tax cuts, health care policies, or the ware in Iraq. Yet the disagreements can prevent relationships, fellowship, and the chance to share Jesus.

In countless discussions I have had with people across the country and around the neighbourhood, the name 'Jesus' doesn't bring to mind the things he said he wanted associated with his followers - love for one another; love for the poor, sick and imprisoned; self-denial and devotion to God.

It is associated with antiabortion activities, opposition to gay rights, the Republican Party, and tax cuts.

It isn't just the politics, the evangelicals and US Republican Party have pursued politics in a Schmittian manner redefining liberal debate, deliberation and consensus into friend enemy relationships where political disagreements become treason; where disagreement with the executive's authority makes one an enemy of the state; where politically weak minorities becomes foes of the nation.

The repugnance for that type of politics in a liberal democracy cannot be understated.

Radly Balko of Reason magazine writes:

The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it's given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending--even on items not related to war or national security--has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that's supposed to be "free market" nationalizes huge chunks of the economy's financial sector.

Ironically, David Kuo makes the same argument from the evangelical constituents point of view in his book Tempting Faith:

By 2008, we will have had a good conservative Republican in the Oval Office for twenty of the past twenty-eight years. Republicans have had outright control of both houses of Congress for most of the last twelve years.

Republican Presidents have appointed the vast majority of American judges and seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. In short, we've had almost everything we wanted politically.

But things are hardly better. Social statistics are largely unchanged. Divorces are rampant and more and more children are growing up in a home with one parent. Nearly a million and a half abortions are performed every year. There are more children in poverty today than there were twenty years ago. A great percentage of Americans lack health care than ever before. Educational achievement is hardly soaring. Millions of Americans live in what seems like utterly intractable poverty.

It is hard to find a constituency that the Republican Party has not alienated during their short time in power at the national level. It may be that the factions in the Republican Party lead to incompatible policy, which is true to an extent, but I don't think that is the main issue. Policy has been ad-hoc and the main goal has been re-election through media management. I suspect if governance was not so bad these refrains from the differing factions would not be so public. Yet the demographic for the Republican Party has changed and is non-urban, it may be that the factions that have given it democratic majorities in the past is no longer tenable.