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Bush meets the press in Oval Office

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Times Staff Writer

In a corridor near the Oval Office are 10 black-and-white photos of presidents and their press secretaries talking with reporters, some of them showing informal gatherings around the presidential desk.

On Thursday, President Bush -- a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower chatting with reporters around his desk in mind -- revived that time-honored communications tactic. He invited a small group into the Oval Office to preview a speech on terrorism and took a few questions.

In his campaign to win the public relations battle with the Democratic Congress, Bush has every reason to try something new -- or old. Thursday’s effort was one of several recent steps he has taken to amplify his message as he wrestles with his lame-duck status, low approval ratings and increasingly independent congressional Republicans.

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On Monday, the president spent an hour with 14 reporters in an off-the-record session -- meaning what he said could not be reported -- to offer those assigned to the White House a rare look at his thinking on a variety of issues. He did the same in September, speaking aboard Air Force One with reporters while traveling to Sydney, Australia, from Iraq’s Anbar Province.

After Thursday’s nine-minute on-the-record but off-camera session, Press Secretary Dana Perino said Bush told her, “That was good.”

Perino said the new outreach efforts were driven not so much by a specific need as Bush seeks traction in his final year in office, as by “a desire to be creative to try to provide some access to the president” short of full-blown news conferences.

“It was just a new tool we’d like to have in our toolbox,” she said.

In this case, the president hammered at a common theme of his recent speeches, as he previewed his midday address: “There are some who have lost sight of the fact that we’re at war with extremists and radicals who want to attack us again.”

The idea, said Ed Gillespie, Bush’s new counselor, was “to help highlight some of the key aspects of the speech.”

The speech itself, delivered to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, was a forcefully presented presidential tour of the administration’s efforts against terrorism. He stressed the need to remain vigilant against a potential attack and his differences with Congress about a broad swath of national security issues, including his budget request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Warning that the passage of time may have tempted some to think that the threats that became apparent on Sept. 11, 2001, “have grown distant as well,” he said emphatically: “They have not. The terrorists who struck America that September morning intend to strike us again.”

Bush said that in the early 1900s, the world ignored Lenin as he presented his plans for communist revolution, and in the 1920s it ignored Hitler.

“Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is: Will we listen?” Bush said.

Most of the speech trod already hard-packed rhetorical ground, but, as he often does, he included a newly minted attack on Congress, one that drew a rousing standing ovation from the audience of conservative scholars.

“When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters,” the president said.

For Bush, the themes have been the foundation of his presidency for more than six years, and he is encountering greater challenges by the week as he tries to draw new attention to them as 9/11 grows more distant and the campaign to replace him grows more intense.

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Among the president’s senior staff, reaching back to a 1950s-era communications model was tagged as “throwback jersey day,” after the occasional sports-team promotions in which the players wear old-time uniforms.

Close observers of the presidency and presidential communications question whether any of the options -- including the new approach Bush tried Thursday -- will suffice.

“This is a small tactical step but not something that fundamentally changes the dynamic of the Bush administration and the agenda they are pushing,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who was chief of staff in the final six months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and part of the team that pulled the White House out of the mire of the Iran-Contra weapons-trading scandal.

Diana B. Carlin, a University of Kansas professor of communications studies, said Bush “doesn’t have a lot of time to salvage his administration, and the media is the conduit for how the rest of us view him.”

By previewing the speech to White House reporters, she said, Bush was able to emphasize the rationale behind it, and provide “an explanation for why it’s ‘stay the course.’ ”

Besides, she said, with no television cameras recording him, it was less formal than a news conference -- the relaxed setting in which the president excels.

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“It’s on his turf,” Carlin said.

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james.gerstenzang@ latimes.com

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