Weapon of Mass Communication
If not for sixteen specious words about African uranium, George W. Bush's post-war P.R. would be humming along. Instead, the man responsible for coordinating the White House media effort, 32-year-old Dan Barlett, has spent the past few months in crisis mode. Can he get the message—and the messenger—back on track?
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THE MESSAGE MACHINE BARTLETT RUNS is basically a huge, multifaceted sales pitch delivered through the megaphone of the global electronic media and designed to advance the Bush agenda. He gets to the White House every day at 6:15 in the morning, where he reads a large stack of newspapers and magazines. He has a standing morning meeting with the president, Rove, Rice, and chief of staff Andrew Card to discuss the day's events. During the day he talks not only to reporters but to top presidential advisers like Evans and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. He is rarely home before eight-thirty in the evening. He often works weekends at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland (he and his wife, Allyson, a Houstonian who works as a financial analyst, have no children), and he travels frequently with the president on Air Force One; he was flying with him, for instance, the entire day of September 11.
Bartlett's office consists of five divisions: press, which holds daily briefings on and off camera; media affairs, which deals with out-of-town press; speechwriting (the president makes more than six hundred formal public appearances each year, and most require speeches); communications, which is mainly strategic planning; and global communications, which deals with media outside the country. The rhetoric those divisions manage is complex, nuanced, and entirely driven by Bush's shifting attitudes, desires, and ambitions. Bartlett presides over it all with a management style that his former deputy Jim Wilkinson describes as "quiet but very thorough. I have never heard him yell." Bartlett is also known for his laconic e-mails: "I have had a lot of e-mails from him with one word: 'agree,' or 'disagree,'" says Wilkinson.
One of the best examples of Bartlett's message-meistering—his refining of a broad set of ideas about how and what to communicate—is the administration's push for a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Bush's plan, which was announced in early June 2002, was shrouded in such secrecy that only a handful of Bush's seniormost aides knew about it. To ensure maximum secrecy, which was necessary, Bartlett says, because early leaks would have spurred congressional committee chairs and other interested parties into self-preservation mode, they met in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bomb-proof bunker underneath the White House to which Vice President Cheney was taken after the terrorist attacks on September 11. They gathered information but told no one what they were doing. By the time the plan was ready to be announced—for a giant new agency that would subsume the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Department of Transportation and represented the most significant restructuring of the federal government since 1947—not even Cabinet secretaries had a clue.
In Washington such an information blackout was unheard of, even by the standards of an administration known for its secretive ways. "When you are trying to develop a policy that will partly or significantly affect twenty-two different agencies," Bartlett said, "there are institutional forces that are going to rev into overdrive when they hear about it. Turf battles will take place. In that context it is hard to make the sort of dramatic changes the president was trying to make." Congress would still have to vote, but at least the White House had a running start. The communications plan that Bartlett and his team sketched out involved a televised presidential address followed by other speeches around the country. "Our decision was that the president needed to talk to the public and dramatize this," he said. "So a lot of our people would spend time working on what he was going to say in making the case. We had Cabinet secretaries go out; they create an echo chamber for what the president is saying. We reached out through our legislative affairs office to our natural allies in Congress, who would also provide an echo. We did columnist outreach and worked by phone with the media."
By most accounts, Bartlett is accomplished at the latter task, which takes up 30 to 40 percent of his time on any given day. "What makes Dan Bartlett good is that he gets the game," says Time White House correspondent John Dickerson. "For Karen, this wasn't natural. Dan's relationship with the press is much better. I call him to get the real take on what is going on, and he does it without giving away stuff that will hurt him or his boss." Says Matalin, one of the smoothest operators in the world of media and politics: "Either you know how to do this or you don't. Dan is a natural at it. The idea is to give you just enough of what you need to make a story out of it without compromising the president." Bartlett can be tough, as he was when he shut off access to Talk magazine when it ran a fashion spread mocking Bush's daughters, but mostly he tries to be accommodating. He might provide a reporter with details of a meeting inside the White House, for example, that will considerably spruce up a story and give it an insider feel, which is the sort of thing editors love, all without talking about works in progress that the administration is not ready to make public.
This message discipline contrasts, to say the least, with the anarchy of Bill Clinton's fantastically porous White House, which leaked merrily from every porthole and scupper. The change has been jarring for the reporters have who covered both administrations; nearly everyone in this White House has been unwilling to play the game even a bit. When Fleischer was press secretary, he was stubbornly on-message in briefings and stubbornly on-message if you called him at nine o'clock at night. If you were a reporter and wanted to have a long, informative, off-the-record chat with a Bush administration official, then your only real options were Bartlett or Matalin—and, of course, she's no longer there. Hughes says that part of the reason for withholding information from reporters is that to do otherwise would be to play favorites: "We don't think it's fair to pick and choose your favorite reporter and pick and choose who to tell things to first. I don't think it's fair to pit reporters against each other." Of course there are exceptions to this. In July two senior administration officials divulged the name of an undercover CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak. This prompted a full-scale Justice Department investigation and created yet another media firestorm for Bartlett to handle.
But such rare indiscretions are the exceptions that prove the rule; the White House in general has been remarkably leakproof. Why? "It is mainly because there are not a lot of factions in the White House," Bartlett said. "Under Clinton, and at times under Reagan, people were litigating their policy differences in the press. We don't have a lot of that, thankfully."
IT ALL SOUNDS LIKE A NICE, neat way of doing business, but does it really work? There are clearly benefits to the regimented control of information. An April 20, 2003, headline in the often-critical New York Times read "Even Critics of War Say the White House Spun It With Skill," reflecting general admiration in the media for the way the Bush administration parceled out information. "Their communications operation is a very good one, and I am sure that it will be emulated in the future," says Towson University professor Martha Joynt Kumar, who published an exhaustive study of the Bush communications operation in the June 2003 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly. "Its main strength is coordination, not only of people but of ideas."
But the Bush message machine is far from perfect, in part because of that lockstep approach. Its obsessiveness about control has spawned an office that has, as Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz has suggested, "valued secrecy, hoarded information, and often viewed the press as hostile opposition." The consequences, Kumar says, are undeniable: "While it is good to have such tight control over when the message gets out, how it is constructed, and how it is used, it also prevents you from hearing about trouble as fast as you might otherwise have. The sixteen-word episode is an example of the problem in listening. This should have bubbled up sooner as a problem." There is also a reluctance to admit error. Says one member of the White House press corps: "The need to protect the president is so deeply burned into the DNA of these people that they just can't admit they screwed up. To some extent Bartlett bears the blame for not seeing that they should drop the righteous defense of Bush."
And then, increasingly, there is the question of whether the message itself is any good. In the months preceding the war, Bush was battered by negative stories suggesting that he was an ethically challenged businessman who knew more before September 11 than he let on about the prospects of a terrorist attack and stood a good chance of being a one-term president. This year, his approval ratings are falling because of uncertainties over Iraq, the ballooning deficit, and the sagging economy. And despite the considerable efforts of Bartlett and his cohorts, the administration has failed to persuade the Arab world that the Iraq war was one of liberation.
Bartlett appears unfazed by any of this. He says he is motivated by only one consideration: the approval and support of George W. Bush, to whom he remains profoundly loyal. "What I do is less about politics than it is about being driven by him, and liking him, and really wanting him to succeed," Bartlett said. "I have been blessed. My introduction to politics and my life in politics so far has been entirely with one very successful politician."
But what if he becomes less successful? What if Bush is defeated in his bid for reelection? What will he do then? He can't imagine working for another politician, he says, and he doesn't like the idea of working on Capitol Hill, where "it's like trying to move a glacier." He's not interested in lobbying, and he won't run for office himself. Which leaves Dan Bartlett exactly where he's been for most of his life: With no particular plan for the future.
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