‘Mr. Malaprop’ : Poor Media Play May Be Bush’s Bane

It was supposed to be a major statement on the environment, one fraught with subtle messages about the sterling qualities of George Bush.

The vice president was breaking with the White House on the issue, hoping to appeal to Democrats and trying to define himself for the voters.

So the campaign made a production of it: a three-day swing to the Pacific Northwest, with a fishing trip and a stop at a lumberyard on Puget Sound, all crowned with the speech on the environment in Seattle.

Then it all went awry.

On the fishing trip, there was no way for television crews to get videotapes out. At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one set-up only his legs could get on camera.

Late Advance Work

An hour before the address, aides handed out an advance text. The speech did not end until 4:30 EDT, and the press had just 20 minutes beyond that before they had to leave for California. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, the texts were retrieved, not to be returned until moments before Bush went on stage. It turned out that a background information sheet was missing and some determined aide insisted the text not be delivered without it.

The result was almost no coverage. No one from the networks, wire services or any of the Eastern papers had time to file a full report.

“We should have had a Page 1 story,” said Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson. Instead, the paper ran a brief.

Over much of this decade, Ronald Reagan has raised the political martial art of managing the press to a new level, but within the Bush campaign, even his top advisers concede, handling the press is the weakest part of the organization.

Strategy Comes Second

Media strategy is frequently a secondary concern. Staging of events, at which the Reagan campaign so excelled, is often poorly designed and executed by the Bush team. Then there is the candidate himself, who has never fully mastered television.

The problem has been compounded by a press strategy aimed at local media as a way, in part, of avoiding questions about the Iran-Contra scandal. Once Bush had secured the Republican nomination, the strategy seemingly left him without a clear national message.

Taken together, the media problems may be undermining Bush’s ability to solve his most important political challenge: finding a convincing way to project strong qualities of leadership.

“Communicating is an important part of national leadership, and Bush’s projection of himself is clearly the No. 1 problem in his campaign,” Time magazine correspondent David Beckwith said.

The problems begin with the candidate. If on television Reagan is a rose, Bush, even some staffers concede, is something of a cauliflower.

Bush himself admits his discomfort.

“Somewhere between going ballistic with Dan Rather and being benign and pleasant with Ted Koppel is the real me,” Bush told reporters the morning after his appearance with Koppel earlier this month on ABC’s “Nightline” program. “I have to find the right balance there.”

Although those who know him find it endearing, Bush is given to malapropisms and Freudian slips that bring winces from his staff. The “sigh of relief” in a speech becomes “sigh of release.” A reference to the “successful Reagan White House” becomes the “sexy Reagan White House.”

Or Bush calls Ted Koppel “Dan.”

“Every day there is a moment of transcendent dorkiness,” Newsweek reporter Bill Turque said.

Norman Ornstein, political scientist for the American Enterprise Institute, said: “Bush’s penchant for saying the wrong thing has become a serious danger for him, in much the same way Gerald Ford became a bumbler and a stumbler. Bush is on the verge of being defined as Mr. Malaprop of presidential politics.”

Because Bush is prone to such mistakes, his staff tries to do whatever it can to make him comfortable and at ease. One example is their indulgence of Bush’s habit of tinkering with his speeches until the last minute.

The problem is, the tinkering makes it difficult to provide the press with advance texts, and that can cost Bush the coverage he covets.

Too Late for Coverage

When the campaign introduced the “curtain raiser” speech on the post-primary season in Houston earlier this month, for example, NBC flew correspondent Lisa Myers out to cover it. Yet because no advance text was available until moments before the address, which ended at 5:30 p.m. EDT time, NBC had no guarantee that the speech would make the news. By the time the speech was delivered, it was too late for NBC to revamp the program to get Bush on.

At other times, Bush’s campaign simply mishandles the basics.

For starters, if you want your man on TV, you get him in the picture.

Failure to Get Picture

On a visit to TRW at Redondo Beach, the campaign tried to arrange a picture to show Bush’s interest in space technology. They suited him up in a dust-free gown and led him into a chamber to view a gleaming $100-million communications satellite.

Trouble was, they put Bush on one side of the room and the satellite on the other. The two were never in the same picture. Bush, in his all-white gown in the all-white chamber, may as well have been a smiling cotton ball in a fog bank.

“I’m not making movies, I’m looking for news, but I’m just surprised that they are not more sophisticated,” said NBC producer M. L. Flynn.

“There are times when you sit up and moan, ‘where is Michael Deaver when you need him?’ ” said ABC producer Steve Hirsch, referring to the former Reagan deputy chief of staff who was legendary for his ability to stage events that made the President look good.

Take Bush’s visit to Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. The event, staged for cameras, had the vice president being briefed by company executives in a room filled with the company’s products.

The network news crews turned off their cameras rather than produce for free what was, in effect, an advertisement for Procter & Gamble.

“It was so bad they almost got negative coverage because of the absurdity of it,” said Hirsch. “Who was gonna shoot that? Even the locals (television cameras) stopped running.”

In private, Bush campaign officials not only acknowledge the problem, they often wind up kicking themselves for their mistakes.

“There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for” one senior Bush adviser said last week. “We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.”

Staff ‘Stretched Thin’

Part of the problem has been inadequate advance work. “The people here doing that are good, but they’re stretched thin,” the adviser said. “We’ve got one guy who just runs one event ahead of us. Just one day ahead, trying to make sure the basics are done.”

Another problem is a curious indifference to the theater that makes politics exciting.

As one senior aide to Bush conceded: “We do have a tendency to just stick him at a podium.”

Sometimes things go off superbly. At a San Diego air show, for instance, Bush was reunited with a crewman from his days as a Navy pilot. Bush showed up in a salesman-red blazer that looked odd in person, but on TV provided a skillful contrast to the blue cockpit of the Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber that was flown in for the occasion--and helped win Bush an enormous front-page color picture in the local paper.

Bush aides also say that too often the vice president suffers unfairly from comparisons with the Reagan Administration.

“The press is spoiled,” said one key media adviser who worked for the Reagan Administration and now works for Bush.

Pre-Primary Strategy

But others inside the top echelons of Bush’s campaign say that no amount of dazzling staging would overcome a deeper problem. After vanquishing the Republican competition so abruptly last March, the focus of media attention naturally became the fall campaign. Yet Bush’s advisers remained fixed on a message and press strategy designed only to win primaries.

His strategists were trying to stick with a successful game plan, but the game was already over. As for having a national message, “there was no gel in the pudding,” one of Bush’s closest advisers now says.

Bush’s strategy for the primaries was to grant access to local press and limit the access of the national, traveling media.

While Bush might do several sessions with local news people in a day, the traveling press corps often went a week or more without having a chance to ask him a question--other than those shouted at the candidate from behind a press area rope line.

The advantage to Bush was that the vice president dominated the local news in many towns just by coming to visit. And he heard many questions such as this one (in Ohio): “How do you like Cincinnati, Sir?”

Iran-Contra Lurks

By contrast, one top Bush aide said: “If we gave the national media the access they wanted, we could potentially destroy this campaign” because, he said, “the national story of the day during the primary was almost always Iran-Contra.”

The strategy succeeded, Bush aides believe, in keeping some of the troubles of the Reagan Administration from overwhelming Bush in key moments of the campaign.

His famed encounter with CBS anchorman Dan Rather is a case in point. The interview, in which most feel Bush got the better of the overheated Rather, had all the more impact because it was unusual for Bush to grant such time to the national press.

Once Bush had effectively secured the nomination, strategists such as campaign manager Lee Atwater decided to stick with the regional media strategy.

They reasoned that it would be unwise to start any kind of national campaign too early, because most attention was focused on the still-contested Democratic race. The impact of unveiling national programs would be wasted.

Miscalculation Seen

Many think that Bush miscalculated. After Illinois, one top aide said privately, the regional media strategy “stopped being effective . . . . There was no strong message, not even for the locals, not to mention the national press.”

In effect, the campaign ceded control of its national message to the media, which then “filled the vacuum . . . without much guidance from the Bush campaign,” according to U.S. News & World Report correspondent Ken Walsh.

“It is a good idea to pay a lot of attention to the local press, but on the other hand, it is only the national press that can cure some deep-rooted problem (for a candidate), and if you don’t deal with them the problem will only fester,” veteran Republican political consultant John Sears said.

Bush representatives say the absence of a strong national message for the last two months won’t really hurt him, and indeed, there is no evidence that Bush has received a tide of negative coverage.

“It’s now (after the primaries) that the clock starts running, and that’s why we have to get the media operation in order,” one aide said.

Moreover, many Republican strategists believe that Bush, in any case, is constrained in what he can say as vice president before the GOP convention, when he becomes the leader of the party.

Changes in Personnel

The campaign now is undergoing its first major personnel shake-up. Largely because of personality disputes, longtime communications director Peter Teeley has stepped aside and Nancy Reagan’s press aide, Sheila Tate, has been hired to replace him with the title of press secretary.

Jim Lake, a former campaign press secretary to Ronald Reagan, also will come aboard as a part-time consultant.

Yet there has been no change in one area that insiders say has made the press operation weak.

Power in the campaign is dispersed among a group of political veterans and Bush intimates. Many of these men are highly regarded for their political skills, but no one of them is considered expert in the crucial area of controlling the campaign message through the press.

Teeley’s replacement, Tate, claims to have assurances that she will have full access to the candidate, but it remains uncertain whether she will have any more success than Teeley, who had years of friendship with Bush to rely on that Tate does not.

In addition, the dispersing of power has meant that the campaign sometimes fails to communicate with itself even on important decisions.

‘Nightline’ Mistimed

When Bush decided to go on ABC’s “Nightline” earlier this month, for instance, his media consultant Roger Ailes, who, more than anyone, is credited for coaching Bush to his best television performances this year, was not consulted on the timing.

Ailes was so angry that he threatened to quit, and most people now concede that the timing of the appearance was disastrous.

It seemed ill conceived to schedule Bush for “Nightline” the same day he delivered what was perhaps his most important speech in months--the so-called “curtain raiser” for his summer campaign themes.

Indeed, the ABC interview overshadowed Bush’s speech and reintroduced issues that Bush clearly wanted to avoid. As might have been expected, Ted Koppel focused most of the questioning on the Iran-Contra scandal and Administration relations with the indicted Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega.

Bush’s media adviser Ailes has a theory about the limit to which a campaign can go in trying to package political candidates. It is outlined in his book, “You are the Message:”

Candidate Is Message

“Unless you identify yourself as a walking, talking message, you miss that critical point. The words themselves are meaningless unless the rest of you is in synchronization.”

At times, Bush seems unable to grasp this.

Take Bush’s visit to a drought-stricken farm in Illinois a few days ago:

The vice president wanted to show his feeling for suffering farmers and his ability to sympathize with the concerns of real people, an authentic sincerity and warmth that his staff says has been obscured by a country club Republican image.

For the cameras, Bush walked with farmer Raymond Poe through dusty rows of stunted corn with his sleeves rolled up and, later, with a baseball cap on his head.

Still, Bush betrayed himself. The crisp white shirt he had chosen to wear into the field looked custom-made, with a tidy GB monogrammed on the pocket.