BIRTH OF A SALESMAN:

Sales-in-Chief (Larry Kudlow, Dec 2, 2005, Townhall)

Message repetition. Without it the mainstream media will fill the void with their usual brand of pessimism. But the reality is that the economic story is an optimistic one. GDP growth is steady and significant. November jobs expanded by 215,000 (238,000 including prior revisions) and unemployment remains at a historical 5 percent low. Earlier in the week a slew of new economic reports all came in above Wall Street estimates: rising consumer confidence, strong new home sales, expanding business investment in capital goods, and continued manufacturing growth according to the Institute for Supply Management. The stock market, meanwhile, is in the midst of a big year-end rally. These are great economic signs, but Bush must get the message out again and again.

The same holds true for the Iraq war. Things are going far better in the Middle East than the mainstream media would have us believe. Bush did himself a lot of good with his Iraq speech at Annapolis this past Wednesday. It was filled with facts and figures and made the case that Iraqi-ization is moving forward. The president laid out a comprehensive and easy-to-understand strategy of “clear, hold, and build.” Bush rightly refused to schedule a withdrawal timetable that would only help the terrorists. He provided plenty of numbers, such as 120 Iraqi army and police battalions today, where there were virtually none a year ago. Eighty of these are fighting side by side with U.S. troops, while 40 others are taking the lead in various fights. Thirty Iraqi battalions are now controlling specific geographic areas. On the economic front, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects Iraq’s GDP to grow in real terms by 3.7 percent in 2005 and nearly 17 percent in 2006.

Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi essentially called Bush a liar on all this, saying “the fact that the president says it’s so doesn’t mean it’s so.” Really? Even Bush military critics like Gen. Barry McCaffrey now believe that significant progress is being made on turning the fighting over to the Iraqis.

Supposedly Bush will follow up with several more speeches on the war. If so, the new communications and marketing approach will yield high dividends -- not only for Bush’s political standing, but more importantly for the health and security of the entire United States.

All the White House has to do is think of selling the economic story like an election campaign, something at which the President and his staff have always excelled.

MORE:
Pump Up the Volume: Finally the "nonpolitical" White House gets wise. (Fred Barnes, 12/12/2005, Weekly Standard)

WE NOW KNOW WHAT WAS behind President Bush's mysterious refusal for so many months to respond to Democratic attacks on his Iraq policy--a refusal that came at great political cost to himself and to the American effort in Iraq. It wasn't that Bush was too focused on Social Security reform to bother. Nor did he believe Iraq was a drag on his presidency and should be downplayed. Rather, Bush had made a conscious decision after his reelection to be "nonpolitical" on the subject of Iraq. It is a decision he now regrets. And has reversed.

Here's how a senior White House aide explains the decision not to answer criticism of the administration's course in Iraq: "The strategic decision was to be forward-looking. The public was more interested in the future and not the past, since it was just hashed over during the election." The president didn't ignore the subject of Iraq entirely. He delivered a half-dozen speeches on Iraq and the war on terror, including an evening, prime-time address, in the first 10 months of 2005. He just didn't rebut partisan attacks.

Harm was done. "Obviously the bombardment of misleading ads and the earned media by MoveOn et al. had an impact," the Bush aide says, "and culminated during the Libby indictment and the [Democratic] stunt of the closed session of the Senate" on prewar intelligence. "That's when we pivoted."

Boy, the Beadle will write anything Karl Rove tells him to.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 3, 2005 7:28 AM