Given the potential of the Walter Reed scandal to wreak havoc with the GOP's pro-soldier image (see post below), the Bush administration was probably hoping today that some hot story would come along to dominate the news cycle. Something fresh for the cable news vultures to feast upon. Something to change the subject and distract the public.
Hey, how about this one: Dick Cheney's former top aide convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.
That's probably not what the White House had in mind, so maybe there's something else out there...
OK, how about this one: Federal prosecutors fired by the Bush administration claim they were pushed out for partisan political reasons.
That's the other big one today, courtesy of congressional hearings. Again, not the ideal distraction, from the Bush team's point of view, but symptomatic of the president's woes at this point in his lame-duck tenure. Surely there must be a fresh angle in the Anna Nicole Smith saga.
The Scooter Libby perjury conviction, by itself, is not a major story to average Americans living their lives outside the Washington Beltway. I would bet that there aren't more than a relative handful of citizens who can recite exactly who Libby spoke to and when, and what it was that he conveniently misremembered. But the details don't matter. What counts is the shorthand: that the vice president's top guy got nailed in court for a scheme to discredit a critic of the unpopular Iraq war. What counts is the war, and, for a lot of Americans, this court conviction is merely further evidence of how - from inception to execution - it has gone wrong.
Next up: Will Bush pardon the guy? Some conservatives are already pushing for a pardon, but will elected Republicans nervous about 2008 join that particularly crusade?
Indeed, when you stack the Libby conviction with all the other headaches that have occurred since Bush's re-election - Katrina, Harriet Miers, the Dubai ports episode, and now Walter Reed and the rapidly growing federal prosecutors story - it's no wonder that Republicans are a tad anxious about the mood of swing voters in advance of the '08 elections.
But don't take it from me. Let conservative commentator Jim Geraghty pose the rhetorical question: "Even if you like this president, even if you’re pulling for him, even if you think his heart is in the right place...is there any way this presidency doesn't look pretty disastrous at this moment?"
About Me
- Dick Polman
- Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. This online column is cited by The Washington Post as one of the top five mainstream political blogs in the country, and is touted by former "Hardball" TV producer Howard Mortman as "the immediately must-read political blog." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns. In his 22 years at the Inquirer, he has also been a foreign correspondent based in London; a baseball writer covering the Philadelphia Phillies; a general-assignment writer in the feature section; and a longtime Sunday magazine contributor. In the early '80s, he wrote three metro columns a week for the Hartford Courant. A graduate of George Washington University, today Dick is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence."