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The Communications Operation of President George W. Bush Prior to his inauguration, George W. Bush and his advisers spent a substantial amount of time considering how they would organize their staff. Karen Hughes, the designated senior communications adviser, worked through possible ways of organizing the communications operation well before January 2001, settled on how she wanted to set it up, and then staffed it. Other parts of the White House were composed similarly, so they were ready to go as well. In fact, they were so intent on coming in prepared that the senior White House staff staged mock senior staff meetings in the month prior to the inauguration. Not only did Clinton and Bush differ in how they planned out their White House organizations, they also set up systems emphasizing different functions. In the communications area, the Clinton operation was characterized by its flexibility and adaptability in handling unanticipated events and issues, especially where defending the president was involved. Damage control was their strong suit. Their operation was quick to discover and assess problems and to respond when they were confronted with trouble or with opportunity. Other than the State of the Union address , they were less successful in planning events and policies in advance . Their timeline was closer to a week than two or three months ahead. Advocating for the president was often done on the fly because so many plans were interrupted by unanticipated issues, particularly the Monica Lewinsky and impeachment episodes, which took up the better part of twelve months. The communications operation of George W. Bush was strong where the Clinton one was weak and weak where Clinton excelled. The Bush operation did a good job planning ahead on policy and establishing a disciplined White House staff that held presidential information very closely. 3 72 Managing the President’s Message Bush’s staff thought through how to develop publicity for the issues he wanted to discuss and focus on what they thought was important. The communications staff emphasized the issues they thought crucial and avoided discussing what was on the minds of others. Considerable effort went into prioritizing issues, creating events to emphasize a limited number of priorities, and rounding up people to talk about them. Where the Bush team proved less responsive was in listening to others, including members of Congress, and developing a communications operation that could adjust to changing circumstances. While they changed personnel over the years, as the administration began its sixth year, the shape of the White House organization remained similar to what they had set up in the first days. The challenges they faced in 2006 were quite different than the ones they faced in early 2001, but the organization was not. The Bush operation did not prove adept at taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities and dealing with unexpected problems. When information crises arose, it often took weeks for the White House staff to get the matter off of the front pages of the newspapers and off the evening news programs. Protracted problems arose, for example, from President Bush having said in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from the state of Niger, which the administration later admitted was not the case. Their efforts to handle and then correct his earlier statements brought in all of the senior staff and the president himself, taking approximately six months in 2003 to get it under control. Even then, the issue resurfaced in 2005, 2006, and 2007, in part because the staff sought to avoid correcting their errors in the first instance. In the second term, the communications team experienced a great deal of political difficulty because of the ebbing public support for the president’s Iraq policy and the lack of support of the president’s signature issues, such as the addition of personal retirement accounts to the Social Security program and the guest worker program as part of the proposed immigration bill. With criticism coming from members of the president’s own party in Congress as well as from the Democrats, the communications team was under fire, as was much of the White House staff. In April 2006, as his job approval standings in public opinion polls reached the 30s in all of the major national polls, the president replaced his chief of staff and his press secretary. The president and his staff also made an effort to turn things around by trying a strategy not associated with this administration...

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