Highly placed D.C. Democrats accept Bush's public image [as a down-home decent man] as a fait accompli — a kind of semiotic unilateral disarmament. So they don't even bother to case the weapons in their arsenal. I remind [Democratic consultant Jeff] Shesol of the NBC report last spring — never effectively rebutted by the White House — that revealed the most Orwellian face of the administration imaginable: that "before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out" the terrorist operations of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but didn't because it "feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam."
"Wow," Shesol responds, with a breath of surprise. George Bush sold out our security in order to pull off a sales job; that, certainly, is not an "elite" message. That's not a "process" story. So why don't we hear it?
"I—don't—know," Jeff Shesol answers. He sounds defeated, as if Republican traducing of democratic deliberation was something like the weather, beyond anyone's power to change. "How is it that a month's worth of airtime is sucked up by the Swift Boat Veterans?" he asks, bewilderment in his voice. "How is it that a month of our national attention is consumed by this, and not some of these other questions, is a very difficult thing to explain. And until we can really understand how that happens, I don't know that we can effectively respond to it."
Now you do.
