No More Mister Nice Guy

David White, an editor for American Enterprise and former administration speechwriter at HUD, today wrote an op-ed for the New York Sun, “The White House Wakes Up,” (available here, instead of at the Sun’s site due to its blockage on non-subscribers) that is the most cogent summary of the frustrating White House non-communications strategylessness during the past year.

As White points out:

“[T]he president and his team finally may have realized that they have been a punching bag for far too long, and they actually have a case to make. Over the past few years, the hardest thing for any conservative journalist to admit is that the White House has been entirely unhelpful….If it weren’t for FOX News, talk radio, conservative magazines, and the blogosphere, it’s doubtful that any good news would be heard over the chorus of the administration’s critics.”

I may be one of those White refers to who has not been willing to admit the feebleness of Bush’s communications. He and I have argued about it, as I have with several other experienced journalists. I took the position that a President cannot be always combative, as it becomes strident, that there are values – civil and practical – in always trying to give the benefit of the doubt and try to engage in polite discourse, and Americans appreciate that, that this President is not always a hard conservative and deserves leeway, and that there are arguments better left to others at times (i.e., the Swiftees’ deracination of Kerry’s false self-hagiography).

Nonetheless, although I still maintain those beliefs, White is correct that the White House had drifted far too far away from sustaining the commitments to which it pledged itself, the nation, and the administration’s most willing supporters.

It is now all too evident, even to me, that the adamant and vicious, meanspirited and mealy-mouthed, underhanded and mendacious opposition by the Democrat leadership and its many camp-followers in the mainstream media is unrelenting regardless of the issue, its factual basis, or the prosperity and national security of America. In short, the left has waged a vicious communications war on a largely undefended battlefield before now.

As White concludes:

”With the 2006 elections just around the corner, today’s Democrats are poised to launch their third consecutive antiwar campaign. If the White House is serious about once again engaging with the mainstream press and the American people, then 2006 may actually turn out well. Because as long as the Deaniacs control the Democratic Party, it’ll be like watching Groundhog Day over and over again.”

At this point in the administration, in the delicate balance of accomplishment in the MidEast, in the serious erosion of our economic future promised by runaway spending and entitlements, the stakes for the next generation – here and abroad – are too high not to blast off the communications battlefield the Democrats' dangerous pretensions to actually caring.