Ye shall know us by our photo ops

Ezra is hopping up and down about the following passage in this Time article:

Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

Say it with me, brothers and sisters: "Because the appearance of doing something is way more important than actually doing something." It's like he's a summer hire in August whose supervisor has run out of things for him to do. Not that I ever had that experience, mind you.

I'm actually more amused by this bit from earlier in that same paragraph:

Many Bush allies are trying to push up the return of the President's longtime aide Karen Hughes from her semi-retirement in Austin, Texas, to restore the balance in Bush's world between Rove's political instincts, which lean toward tending the party's base, and her more "Mom-in-the-kitchen sense of the country," as an adviser described it. "There is a necessary push-pull between the two of them that can't happen on the phone," says a Bush official. Another puts it more darkly: "The longer they wait for her to get back, the less it will matter." On the other hand, Hughes has already been intimately involved in many of Bush's most controversial moves. She helped craft the poorly received State of the Union address, then closely advised on the much criticized campaign ads that used images of 9/11.

Keep it up, Karen! You're doing great.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 16, 2004 to The making of the President | TrackBack