What if George W. Bush had done that?

[BingeBag]

What if Bush had done that?

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.

Snubbing the Dalai Lama.

Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.

Freezing out a TV network.

Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.

President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.

What’s remarkable is what hasn’t happened. These episodes haven’t become metaphors for Obama’s personal and political character — or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda.

It’s a sign that the media’s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news judgment, and an illustration that, in politics, context is everything.

Conservatives look on with a mix of indignation and amazement and ask: Imagine the fuss if George W. Bush had done these things?

And quickly add, with a hint of jealousy: How does Obama get away with it?

“We have a joke about it. We’re going to start a website: IfBushHadDoneThat.com,” former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie said. “The watchdogs are curled up around his feet, sleeping soundly. ... There are countless examples: some silly, some serious.”

Indeed, Bush got grief for secret meetings with the oil industry, politicizing the White House and spending too much time on his beloved bike. But it’s not just Republicans who notice. Media observers note that the president often gets kid-glove treatment from the press, fellow Democrats and, particularly, interest groups on the left — Bush’s loudest critics, Obama’s biggest backers.

But others say there’s a larger phenomenon at work — in the story line the media wrote about Obama’s presidency. For Bush, the theme was that of a Big Business Republican who rode the family name to the White House, so stories about secret energy meetings and a certain laziness, intellectual and otherwise, fit neatly into the theme, to be replayed over and over again.

Obama’s story line was more positive from the start: historic newcomer coming to shake up Washington. So the negatives that sprung up around Obama — like a sense that he was more flash than substance — track what negative coverage he’s received, captured in a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit that made fun of his lack of accomplishments in office.

“There may well be almost an unconscious effort on the part of the media to give Obama a bit more slack because he is more likable, because he is the first African-American president. That plays into it,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California.

Democrats find the complaints of Obama “getting a pass” hard to stomach in light of the way the press treated Bush — particularly on the single biggest mistake of his presidency, relying on the faulty intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. Now, Obama’s aides say, the positive coverage simply reflects the fact that their efforts are succeeding.

“As our administration makes progress on the agenda that Washington has ignored for too long, we expect we’ll get some news coverage of that progress that we like and some tough coverage that we don’t,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “It’s not unlike the New Orleans Saints, who are getting lots of good coverage of their perfect record so far — certainly better coverage than the [2-5] Redskins — but it doesn’t mean the Saints have liked every story that’s been written about them since training camp. It goes with the territory.”

There are signs the friendly tone toward Obama is ebbing. Case in point: a front-page story in The New York Times noting that Obama’s all-male basketball games drew fire from the head of the National Organization for Women, who called the games “troubling.”

But here are other stories in which Obama seems to have gotten a pass:

New Orleans

As a candidate, Obama railed against the Bush administration for abandoning and then neglecting the people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He made five campaign trips to the city.

But as president, Obama waited almost nine months before visiting the Big Easy, spent less than four hours on the ground there and then jetted to San Francisco for a $3 million Democratic fundraiser.

“Don’t judge anybody on the amount of time that they’ve spent there. Judge only what this administration promised that they would do, what they’ve done every day and what they’re continuing to work on,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said, pointing to positive reviews of the federal government’s efforts under Obama.

For their part, Democrats can’t see how Bush officials can muster much umbrage over anything related to New Orleans, given how the Republican administration handled the initial response to Katrina.

Managing the press

When the Obama administration moved in recent weeks to isolate and disparage Fox News as a wing of the Republican Party, there were few immediate howls of outrage — even from Fox’s fellow journalists in the media.

Press defenders and First Amendment advocates who jumped on the Bush administration for using military analysts to shape war coverage reacted with a yawn to the White House’s announcement that it had deemed Fox to be not a “legitimate news organization.”

“Had I said about MSNBC what the Obama White House said about Fox, the media uproar would still be going on,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as Bush’s press secretary until 2003. “I instinctively would have known ... the media would have leapt to their feet to defend them. I’m shocked it’s not happening now.”

One press veteran agreed. “If George Bush had taken on MSNBC, what would have happened?” said Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s one place you can point to a real difference in how I’d imagine Bush would be treated.”

Politicizing the White House

Throughout the Bush administration, liberal critics warned that the hand of Bush political adviser Karl Rove was spreading politics into all corners of government. Reporters were on alert for any sign that politics was infecting the work of federal agencies. One top appointee got in hot water for allegedly asking agency officials to work to “help our candidates” across the country.

So some Bush aides went nearly apoplectic earlier this month when they spotted Gibbs and Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, in photos of a Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan policy.

“Oh, the howling and screaming that would have happened if Karl Rove was sitting in on even a deputies-level meeting where strategy was being hammered out. People would have just gone ballistic,” said Peter Feaver, a former White House aide for both Bush and Bill Clinton.

Also, in about nine months, Obama has already attended more than two dozen fundraising events, while Bush did only six in his first year in office, according to a tally by CBS’s Mark Knoller.

Gibbs said Obama had to do more to raise a similar amount of money, since the kinds of soft-money fundraisers Bush did early on were banned. “This president ... doesn’t accept money from PACs or lobbyists and doesn’t allow lobbyists to give at fundraisers that he’s at, as well,” Gibbs added.

Dealing with business, in secret

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney endured years of criticism and lawsuits that stretched all the way to the Supreme Court over secret meetings Cheney’s Energy Task Force held with oil and gas companies. When the policy emerged, critics said Cheney was carrying water for the industry.

Obama pledged to hash out health care reform live on C-SPAN and excoriated Bush for kowtowing to the drug industry. But aides signed off on the drug industry’s agreement to find $80 billion in savings to support reform. However, Obama aides didn’t disclose that the agreement involved the White House promising that current health legislation wouldn’t include further cuts or give the government the right to negotiate over drug prices.

Toning down human rights

During the campaign, Obama talked tough on China. While candidate Obama pushed Bush to take a hard line, President Obama hasn’t. Hoping to win China’s help on Iran and North Korea, Obama skipped a meeting with the Dalai Lama and said little when China undertook a violent crackdown in its largely Muslim Xinjiang region. The White House has pledged to meet with the Dalai Lama later.

And while candidate Obama warned Bush against a “reckless and cynical initiative [that] would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments,” President Obama’s envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, seemed to lay out a similar incentive-driven approach.

“We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,” said Gration. “Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.” The White House backed away from Gration’s characterization of the strategy but did recently lay out a strategy of engaging with the Sudanese regime.

Traveling and recreating

In his campaign and as president, Bush was mocked for a lack of interest in all things foreign — seven minutes touring the Kremlin, 25 minutes at the Great Wall of China, before declaring, “Let’s go home.”

During a trip to Europe in June, Obama chastised German and French reporters for suggesting that he was snubbing those countries by making only brief stops in each. “There are only 24 hours in the day. And so there’s nothing to any of that speculation beyond us just trying to fit in what we could do on such a short trip,” he told reporters in Germany.

But after taking his wife out for an attention-grabbing date night, Obama promptly jetted back to Washington. Within about 90 minutes of arriving at the White House, the tightly scheduled president was on the move again — headed to Andrews Air Force Base to play nine holes of golf.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28764.html

The page has links to a lot of stories buried in the content, like the golf etc. etc.

Even from the most hardcore liberals in attendance.. one has to admit there is truth to this. We have a pretty large double standard going on here. I'd like to say that I am pretty neutral on a lot of the issues in this country. I don't fit into either parties agenda.

[Dave Gray]

Most of the criticism of Bush came later, after he'd been in office for a while, and it was piling on after several huge debacles.  So, if he'd done some of that stuff, I'm sure liberals would have spun it poorly.  But as is, I don't think the criticism is warranted.

[bsmooth]

How long did it take Bush to get there? I do not think it is as big of a deal that Obama has not camped out in New Orleans more.
It is way to early to start comparing administrations as Obama is just over halfway into his first year. If you want to compare, then compare Bush's 8 years to Clinton's.

[Buddhagirl]

I love that we're now comparing being fed up with Bush after 8 years of continuous fuck ups and plenty of lives lost to Obama not visiting New Orleans or the Dalai Lama and pissing off FOX News. Yeah. Same level.

This just comes across as more pathetic whining by Republicans. Let me know when there is something worth being upset about.

[MaineDolFan]

I love a couple things here -

It's "troublesome" that Obama plays basketball with a bunch of men.  Has it ever occurred to anyone that there aren't any women that want to play?  My company has a basketball court in the building, we play pick up a couple times a week at lunch.  There are sign up sheets.  Not one time has one woman signed up to play.  And I work with three or four that played hoops in college.

The New Orleans thing.  What exactly is the guy supposed to do?  Go to Mardi Gras and beg for beads?  Roll up his sleeves and build a house?  Move the White House to the 9th district and do business from that area of town?

By all means...let's compare the governments response to Katrina in the same breath as Obama visiting the city four years later.  That is close in nature.

People slay me.

[Sunstroke]

Wow...that's some pretty ridiculously slanted journalism...personal editorial there.

[JVides]

Bush bashing started the instant he became President.  Let's not kid ourselves.  He was labeled an idiot immediately.  I remember Jon Stewart making fun of him a few weeks after September 11th, and the audience did not laugh.  He looked at them and said something like "so 9/11 happens and we can't call the President dumb anymore?".  Bush had only been in office as of January 20, 2001, or nearly 8 months, and Stewart's comments indicated how commonplace it was to bash him, even that early in his presidency, for things like going away to his Texas ranch for weeks at a time.

The difference, I think, is that Bush was elected by the electoral college (yes, they all are, but I mean he lost the popular vote).  It was a contentious election.  Much of the country was in the mood to pick on him, so the Democratic machine, in its wisdom, piled on.  Obama rode in pretty solidly.  He was elected not only by Democrats turning out in record numbers, but also by conservatives that desired a change in approach.  He is universally adored by the outside world.  The country, and the world, are not in the mood to pile on.  The Republican machine, in its wisdom, is choosing not to pile on because the time is wrong.  They will be seen as petty if they draw too many comparisons.  They know the country is in no mood for them to act like children and complain about minutiae.

[Dave Gray]

The Republican machine, in its wisdom, is choosing not to pile on because the time is wrong.  They will be seen as petty if they draw too many comparisons.  They know the country is in no mood for them to act like children and complain about minutiae.

I disagree with most of what you're saying, but especially this statement.

I think that Republicans do (and will) pile on at any possible time.  It's just that they're in such disarray right now that they don't have the means, and the political leaders are getting outshined by the talk-radio base.  But even then, you're seeing all this "tea-party" stuff.  It goes both ways.

As for Bush getting hounded, people thinking he was dumb came from his lack of ability to speak, way back from his campaign.  The gripe with him (yet) wasn't on issues of substance.  The only thing I remember being upset with Bush about in the first year or two was his promise to rule from the middle and unite the parties.  Bush got a free pass long past 9/11 from the general population.

[JVides]

^^^By "most" what do you mean?

1-That Bush-bashing was commonplace before 9/11?
2-That he entered office on Jan 20, 2001?
3-That Jon Stewart made a joke that fell flat and said something similar to what I wrote?
4-That Bush lost the popular vote in the 2000 election?
5-That the Democrats attacked him because they knew they could without much outcry from the general public (which, by the way, is something both parties do.  I wasn't implying any malfeasance on their part), as Bush was unpopular pretty much the instant he took office?
6-That Obama won the election rather convincingly?
7-That the world in genral adores Obama?
8-That the Republican party is smart enough to know that picking on Obama for stupid stuff when the country (and world) isn't in the mood to hear it is spitting into a headwind?

Dave, all but points 5 and 8 are facts.  Points 5 and 8 are logical assumptions dealing with how spin doctors work.  They have to gauge how well a ploy will work before using it, much as advertisers gauge how well an ad campaign will work.  The same science goes into both.  And, of course they'll pile on the second they can!  They're just not stupid.  They're not going to come out and make wild accusations!  They'll wait for perception to start to change, and then, they'll fan the flames until they can change/magnify that perception to something they can use to their advantage.  I never said they wouldn't.  I just said they're smart enough to know that NOW isn't the time.   What exactly don't you agree with here?

As for Bush being labeled stupid because of his public speaking deficiencies: well, yeah, but are you so far in the blue corner that you think the Democratic machine didn't take full advantage of that fledgling perception and tried to grow it?  Nurture it?  Make appearances reality?  C'mon, Dave.  That's how politics work.  That's why McCain was successfully made into "George Jr." during the election even though he has a ridiculously strong record of bipartisanship.  The machine did its job.

[Dave Gray]

By most, I mean that I disagree with your conclusions.  John Stewart is one person with a comedy show who made a joke.  I don't think that the general landscape of the country was pissed at Bush prior to 9/11.

I know I'm labeled "so far in the blue", but I'm really not.  I'm liberal minded, but I don't like the Democratic machine.  I recognize politics for politics, and of course the Dems take advantage wherever possible, but it doesn't always work.  They painted Bush as a moron, but it didn't really matter to the general public.  ...sort of like how Obama is being painted as a Socialist...but it not really mattering.

Bush (and Obama) are getting ribbed by the opposition base, but Bush got bashed bigtime based on his performance, well after September 11.  That's my point.  Obama will get torn up by the public as well, if he does similar stuff down the line.

But the things listed in the original post are pretty meaningless gripes, not major policy problems, like with Bush.  If Afghanistan continues to be a problem, the healthcare thing falls through, the economy falls into further collapse, etc. -- you'll see Obama take a similar slaying.

[JVides]

OK, that's fine.  I remember the landscape very differently in 2001, but then again it wasn't so much pissed as open mockery.  I was just clarifying because my post was not condoning the griping, it was just attempting to explain that the climate was right for Bush bashing in 2000, and again starting in 2003, but not for Obama, not right now.

[Dave Gray]

I think you brushed on a point earlier, too: Obama has it pretty tough right now.  When things are bad, people are less likely to sweat the small stuff.  By and large, prior to 9/11, things were pretty quiet.  Economy was good, we weren't at war -- people were able to focus on the "stem cell research" issues of the time.

Obama's first year involves two wars, an economic collapse, and a potential game-changing healthcare policy.

...so, maybe that's it.  When someone brings up snubbing the Dalai Lama -- who gives a shit?

[bsmooth]

So your evidence of open mockery by the media is as comedian on a show with limited viewership on a alternate channel?
Please tell me you have more than that.
Bush was rightly mocked because he did sound like an absolute moron when he spoke on our behalf both here and abroad, and that reflected on us as a society for putting someone into office twice who could lose a spelling bee to Mushmouth from Fat Ablert.

[BingeBag]

I think you brushed on a point earlier, too: Obama has it pretty tough right now.  When things are bad, people are less likely to sweat the small stuff.  By and large, prior to 9/11, things were pretty quiet.  Economy was good, we weren't at war -- people were able to focus on the "stem cell research" issues of the time.

Obama's first year involves two wars, an economic collapse, and a potential game-changing healthcare policy.

...so, maybe that's it.  When someone brings up snubbing the Dalai Lama -- who gives a shit?

I'm not sure that I really see trying to kick out of one of the major news networks when they don't fit into the liberal ideology (ala MSNBC) as a soft issue. You have repeatedly skipped over the strong points in the article and attacked filler. I know I sure as hell could care less considering anything to do with the Dalai Lama. But had say George Bush tried to kick out MSNBC from covering a pool event at any part during his term (including the day after 9/11) the entire media would be talking about it for months. What about the golf point? Are we kidding ourselves for a second to think that Bush didn't get completely hounded by countless personalities for going out and playing golf? Tell me you don't remember the part in Micheal Moore's movie where he lampoons him with how he cuts the footage.

He is universally adored by the outside world.

That's absolutely not true at all. I'm not sure where you get this opinion. Their are plenty of countries that didn't like America before Bush was in office, and their are plenty that still do not like us.




By the way, I posted this because I figured it would be a good topic to debate from both sides. I really like to hear Dave's and Buddah's take on alot of this stuff even though I don't agree politically.

[Dave Gray]

I stand by my statement that none of the things in the original post are important policy issues.  I used the Dalai Lama exampe, because it's the most glaring....but they're all the same.

I don't consider FOX to be a serious news organization.  I think they're an editorial show, a spin organization.