Bush and Company Stick to Their Scripts

I swore I heard something strange coming out of my TV Thursday night. A commotion. ABC’s Peter Jennings cut into President Bush’s speech. A live moment was indeed happening, he confirmed, even if it was largely off-camera.

“One and perhaps two people have taken exception to what the president is saying and from the best of our knowledge [have] been removed very rapidly,” Jennings said.

Sure enough, the dissent -- distracting the crowd, which began shouting, “Four more years!” at a place in the speech where it didn’t belong -- was squelched before the cameras could figure out what was up. Phew. We now rejoin this scripted evening already in progress.

The way these conventions play on television nowadays, I knew what President Bush would say before he said it, I knew what to feel as he said it, and I knew what to think about the speech almost as soon as it was over.

“President Bush will say: ‘I am running for president with a clear and positive plan to build a safer world and a more hopeful America,’ ” the news crawl told me Thursday afternoon. “President Bush will say: ‘I am running with a compassionate conservative philosophy, that government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives.’ ” “President Bush will say.... “

Now we only had to wait for the speech itself, for the stagecraft of the moment.

“You and I are sitting 50 yards away from the most secure place in the world,” ABC’s Ted Koppel had said earlier in the day on CNN. He was talking about the security apparatus that had gone into protecting the stage at Madison Square Garden, but the comment extended to the imagery around the moment.

The news networks aren’t beholden to a pool camera, but, as at the Democratic convention in Boston, they usually obey the uplift, cutting to on-message imagery with each applause line (Bush says, in Spanish, “We will leave no child behind,” and the camera dutifully finds a Latino delegate chanting “Viva Bush.” Bush says, “I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes,” and the camera cuts to New York City cops.)

Leaders get a lot of credit just for showing up. President Bush was dubbed heroic for going to ground zero and standing atop the rubble after Sept. 11, although it’s hard to imagine a president not appearing on the scene.

Bush showed up in New York again. From the infectious Republicanism of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the ire of Zell Miller, Bush’s moment was prepped by much 9/11 harrumphing and Kerry-bashing.

The tougher emotional shades of the GOP message had been filled in by others. So Bush did his speech. He said, “I am running for president with a clear and positive plan to build a safer world and a more hopeful America,” just as the news crawl had told me he would. NBC reporter Norah O’Donnell had said Bush’s staff feels that “the president is less natural in front of the podium.” The campaign had Bush deliver his speech “in the round,” the podium from which he spoke not in the direct eye of the camera. The device aired out the stage, a mosaic of American flags behind the president, the delegates at his front and sides.

Having Bush in the round also cut off the potential for unfortunate camera angles, such as the one during his speech Sunday in Wheeling, W.Va., which was broadcast on CSPAN. Bush was standing before a lectern with the presidential seal attached, but the camera cut off some of the letters, so that his title became the less impressive “Resident of the Unit.”

Bush mentioned Saddam Hussein several times but never the bad guy who was presumably behind Sept. 11. (Humorist and politico Al Franken had joked on MSNBC that the person interpreting convention speeches for the deaf was relieved because she probably wouldn’t have to sign “Osama bin Laden” all week.)

“It didn’t lag -- well, maybe it lagged a little bit at the beginning,” Fox News commentator Fred Barnes said of the speech.

“The Republicans had a good convention,” Tim Russert said on MSNBC.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer referenced some protests outside the Garden. But “basically,” he said, in a description that aptly captured the entire week on TV, “the situation is under control.”