SUGGESTED
QUESTIONS
FOR THE G.O.P. CANDIDATES
By Dan
Froomkin
froomkin@niemanwatchdog.org
Q. Do you approve of disapprove of the job President Bush is doing?
Q. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Bush as president?
Q. What would you consider some of Bush’s greatest successes?
Q. What would you consider some of Bush’s greatest failures?
Q. Had you been president, would you have invaded Iraq?
Q. If you had to give President Bush a grade for how he managed the war
in Iraq, would it be an A, B, C, D or F?
Q. What decisions if any would you have made differently if you had
been in charge these past seven years?
Q. How would you assess President Bush’s credibility? High? Low?
Q. Do you approve of the job Vice President Cheney is doing?
Q. Historically, the vice president has been in a more subordinate
role. Do you think Bush was overly influenced by his vice president?
Would you expect your vice president to serve a similar function?
Q. Historically, a main job of national security adviser has been to
serve as an honest broker between other parties, to make sure the
president was making decisions based on accurate information, and to
present the president with alternative options and dissenting views. By
most accounts, Condoleezza Rice was not that sort of national security
adviser. Do you think Condoleezza Rice did a good job as national
security adviser? Would you expect your national security adviser to
operate differently?
Q. Do you
feel President Bush has been operating in too much of a
bubble?
Q. President Bush rarely ventures out in public, and almost always
talks to invitation-only audiences. Historically, presidents have
appeared at events that were open to the public, at least in part to
make it clear that they had been chosen to represent the whole country,
not just those who voted for them. Would you return to this tradition?
Q. Would you continue President Bush’s practice of using signing
statements to quietly assert his right to ignore legislation passed by
Congress?
Q. President Bush’s lawyers have asserted that there are few
Constitutional checks on a wartime president. Do you agree? And would
you consider yourself a wartime president?
Q. Do you think President Bush is within his rights to assert executive
privilege to block the testimony of White House aides in the
investigation of the politically-motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys?
Would you do likewise in similar circumstances?
Q. Some critics have accused the Bush White House of being dominated by
politics, at the expense of policy. Do you think Bush got the balance
between campaigning and governing about right?
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Corn Fed
"Coming up here on C-SPAN, a discussion on the role of
Congress
in selling setting defense policy..."
Blooper - Friday, 10:00 EST - C-SPAN announcer
George W.
Bush assembled his cabinet behind him and faced the ever available
cameras. "Give our troops the funds they need to prevail," he demanded
of Congress.
I thought, prevail at what? Holding the myriad factions in their walled
compounds as a federal government of Iraq is concocted? One which can
bind Iraq's future to the foreign stakeholders in whose name this war
was waged?
Or does he mean prevail over evil? I forget the latest mission/goal
mumbo jumbo.
Prevail - if all it took were a little more time and
cash
(instead of, let's say, truth and justice), Dubbya's point wouldn't
seem so
tautological. But unless you whip the logic up to Bush's usual
Orwellian firm peaks, "prevail" rings about as quagmire-proof as "peace
with
honor." When the language gets Kissinger-esque, the slog most certainly
will be getting longer and harder.
Our soldiers are in a holding operation, with only the strangest of
alliances allowing it to work, while the mostly secretive application
of our nation's might bears down on a country barely born, and on
actors whom we could and would change out. In a heartbeat.
The press is hardly helping. Give the president the perk which
is the bully pulpit, by all means. But don't perpetuate the false
premises which somehow have the Congress caving and backing down to the
will of the White House.
These overly simple story lines inevitably come from the simpleton in
chief and his minions. It is the stuff of press releases and it is also
poppycock.
A tad more integrity of effort would focus on the political liabilities
which should be accompanying each incidence of lying to the American
people, violating the oath of office or exercise of the veto power. But
the press is scared, one must assume, of the bias label, to the point
where Dubbya mostly skates by with the framing he has invented for each
issue and his excuses for the inexcusable.
I write this against a backdrop (literally) of Dan Froomkin's excellent
suggestions for a sentient press to ask every Republican contender.
This week, campaign 2008 turned adolescent, sophomoric, and
even more demagogical (who thought it were possible?), or as the 24/7
outlets call it: rich in plot.
The so-called fake news would have been having a field day were it not
for the union action.
The White House press conferences and briefings, these days, are less
like meetings of the mind and more like a meeting of the lines between
unbridled journalism and access.
The candidates, some of them, are beyond silly. What's up with the
Giuliani cackle and almost an hour's worth of probing questions on
scandal, integrity and incompetence? (The Daily Show would have done a
two minute montage.)
Then, on the other side, a Clinton state co-chair raises a non-issue
and the campaign's
chief strategist goes over the line again and again in saying how the
campaign would never go over that line. The old mention it enough
times with a negative and eventually people will only remember the
positive construction ploy.
It's true. Behavioral scientists will tell you that if you hear that
I'm absolutely not
a pajama-wearing guitar player slacker, living in my parents' basement
enough times, it will transform into a long term memory that I indeed
am.
Dude.
Those nice, corn-fed Iowans have sure been getting an earful.
Thanks to Romney's me-too-ism, we are again faced with attacks on that
most absurd of inventions: secular humanism. Yes, that is
Tony Perkins throwing back the shower curtain of your citizenship, as
it were. This bogey of the
religious right exists as a straw man when it really is just a
statistical result. When there is zero commingling of state and church,
you get the intended order of things, not something to compare and
contrast with ridicule, give a pet name, and mobilize your armies
against. Sorry, Mr. Carrying On the Falwell Tradition Perkins.
It's as intellectually bankrupt as believing freedom of speech should
be limited to only things you want to hear and not applied universally, or that
Darwin's natural selection is a creative force in a creation story
rivaling the more accepted theologies (one of which is yours) and not a
bare bones, statistical result of natural phenomena.
Huckabee's been a real troublemaker in that regard. Folks are learning
that a Godhead and a Trinity aren't the same species, really, thanks to
two-page matrices pitting scripture against scripture in many
publications. And that's a shame, really, not that education is a
bad thing. It's just the timing and the necessity.
Listen, Romney is a slick, a practitioner of the black arts of
capitalization, and Huckabee
is a goof, though in many respects a rather pleasant person.
Giuliani might not just live like a mob boss (Guido, my lady friend
needs a ride to the pedicurist's in the Hamptons). He might actually be
a mob boss. At least of the figurative kind if not the genuine article.
How would one know?
Encouraging him to submit Kerik's name for Homeland Security seems now
to
have been one of Karl Rove's gifts to some other, more user friendly
and
as yet un-annointed candidate. (Believes in choice but would appoint
strict constructionist judges
- I don't think so.)
The petulant pundits on the 24/7 were downright disappointed
in the Democratic field for retreating into rehearsed speeches and
keeping this new and thoroughly low-brow bickering from any mention
during their last
head to head.
It's a story that wins every time in the quest for frequent rotation on
the 24/7, this let me say again
- we were in no way trying to suggest such and such bit of
doggerel. Now it has fingerprints on it and now begin the non-denial
denials. It promises to chew up beaucoup air time.
The new low for Democrats, in a tip of the hat to Atwater, Rove and the
devil, is claiming only to be bringing something up because it will
have to withstand Republican scrutiny eventually.
You know, Barack Obama once pronounced the word 'daddy' hrbllllllltt.
Turns out he was one and a half and was spitting up creamed spinach at
the time.
That shouldn't keep the Democratic nomination from him, but come the
general
election, you just don't know.
Those Republicans can be merciless in their Machiavellism.
(That's one corn-fed pile of bull, right there.)
(No look; you can tell.)
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