ROGER SIMON COLUMN
DECEMBER 19, 2005
WASHINGTON - - It has been an exciting few days for those who watch President Bush for a living.
The president made a rare address to the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday and then held a formal press conference on Monday.
He said a whole bunch of things, but what he said didn't seem to matter that much. It was how he said it.
At least that was the media's take. The press and presidency have long been fixated on stagecraft and performance, which is why so many political stories read like theater reviews.
With his poll numbers climbing back to a still-anemic 40 percent or so, the president clearly needed a change of tone, a new performance.
While staying the course remains the fundamental principle of administration policy in Iraq, President Bush's team decided that his admitting to human frailty and the possibility of mistake would captivate his critics.
So on Sunday he admitted the war has been "more difficult than we expected" but he was only human and doing the best job he could to protect America.
Predictably, the press seized upon this. Commentator David Gergen called the president "frank and humble." The New York Times decided he was "more humble about the mistakes he has made over the past two and a half years." And the Associated Press called the speech "a high profile display of candor."
Tom Shales, the television critic of the Washington Post (in the modern era it is entirely appropriate to have a TV critic critique the President of the United States) said that Bush was "determined to sound determined."
In other words, the president did very, very well.
Why? Because when the media concentrate on how you are newly humble about your mistakes, then they are not concentrating on the mistakes themselves. Instead, they are concentrating on you and how more appealing you have become.
Americans love humility from those on high. They love the admission of error. They love redemption. (Ask Bill Clinton, whose approval ratings never dipped below 60 percent during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.)
So expect President Bush's approval ratings to rise. Even though much of what he says continues to be unchanged from the bad old days when he refused to admit to any mistakes.
Take, for instance, his flat assertion that "we are winning the war in Iraq."
When I heard that, I waited for him to give some examples, but he gave none.
Bush also continued to assert that more than 50 Iraqi army units could "take the lead" in fighting the insurgents, but he did not say how many could fight without U.S. help.
Fortunately, at least one journalist, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, pursued this point. And a very important point it is, considering the number of Iraqis that can fight without us will determine, President Bush says, when U.S. forces can leave Iraq.
The number, however, remains the same and pathetically small. As McManus wrote Monday: "Only one Iraqi battalion is currently listed at Level 1, capable of fully independent operations, officials said."
Which means that after two and a half years, only 750 Iraqis are capable of fighting for their country on their own.
McManus also found that President Bush was overly glowing about opinion polls showing how Iraqis feel about our invasion, the war and their daily lives.
According to the article: " 'A lot of the numbers throughout his speech spin reality almost out of control,' said Anthony H. Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has been generally supportive of Bush's strategy in Iraq.
" 'He's cherry-picked numbers and I think rounded them up … [he's] ignored all the negatives,' Cordesman said on National Public Radio, referring to the polling results. "
But that doesn't really matter. Not as long as President Bush is humble about it.