The administration’s latest defense of warrantless wiretapping isn’t really about President Bush or the broader public. It’s about boxing in congressional critics. Plus, the art of Karl Rove.
Jan. 25, 2006 - It was billed as a “media blitz”—at least by the media itself. But the Bush administration’s focus on the domestic eavesdropping program doesn’t really work as a PR exercise. Nor is it intended to. At the risk of disappointing journalists and bloggers (both of whom suffer from an unhealthy obsession with the media), this isn’t a campaign that is directed at newspapers or TV.
The giveaway is President Bush himself. If this were a media blitz, the president might have delivered a targeted speech. Instead his first foray into the NSA affair this week consisted almost entirely of his everyday stump speech, followed by a set of random questions from his audience about everything from the pressures of his job to the movie “Brokeback Mountain.” On the subject of the day, Bush’s argument amounted to this: a rebranding of the program as “terrorist surveillance,” a brief legal discussion about his war powers and a one-line putdown about whether he broke the law. “If I wanted to break the law,” he quipped, “why was I briefing Congress?”
As a legal defense, that’s surprisingly weak. It’s as if Bill Clinton had said “If I wanted to have an affair, why would I lie about it to a grand jury?” It doesn’t really matter whether the White House briefed some members of Congress or not. It also doesn’t matter whether Bush believed it was legal or not. That kind of argument takes him perilously close to Al Gore’s “no controlling legal authority” line about fund-raising in 1996.
But then, this week isn’t really about President Bush or the broader public. It’s about Congress. “I’m just astonished by the polling,” said one senior Bush aide. “It makes it sound like [the administration is listening to] Aunt Sally’s conversations with Beatrice. This is enemy surveillance when communication flows to a known Al Qaeda suspect or affiliate. We’re going to shape this debate right up to and through the hearings in February.”
That explains why the meat was delivered by Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence at the White House, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The shaping of this debate is a technical process as much as a political one.
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