President Chooses a Serene Spot to Frame His Message

The set piece was in sharp contrast to the backdrop that TV reporters and anchors have been using in the last few weeks, their dispatches filed from the edge of floodwaters and ruined homes, from shelters where lives had been turned upside down.

President Bush’s address Thursday night, by contrast, was held in a Jackson Square lighted up like Disneyland, the president framed before the statue of Andrew Jackson and St. Louis Cathedral in the background.

It was Bush striking a new note, one that Americans could be excused for finding strange. We have been seeing only devastation on our screens, access to a fresh hell giving TV personalities and journalists instant dramatic heft.

It’s where we’ve been seeing Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America,” Oprah on “Oprah” and Anderson Cooper on CNN. Several weeks of news organizations hunting for misery and devastation left the president searching for a counter-image.

So the spooky placidity of Jackson Square, on what conveyed an otherwise peaceful evening in New Orleans, seemed an oddly appropriate choice for a president who throughout this crisis has been unable to halt the image of a leader who has been neither here nor there.

The speech seemed to float in the same kind of limbo that the setting provided -- was the point to allay our fears or take responsibility for the federal government’s stumbling response?

Introducing the president, ABC News’ Ted Koppel noted dryly that the White House was supplying the electricity used to light the stage. Of Bush’s previous visits to the region, some via fly-overs, Koppel said: “It struck some people as literally and figuratively a little too removed from what was happening on the ground.”

To be sure, “You really have to be here” has been the overarching theme of a rehabilitated television news business, anchors confessing to getting up-close-and-personal with the story, which has been another way of saying they’re up-close-and-personal with Americans’ pain.

“When I’m not there, I think about it. When I’m there, I’m consumed by it. I’ll admit that ... I plan to commute back and forth to this story for the foreseeable future,” NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams told the Philadelphia Inquirer this week.

Bush, you thought, could have given this speech from the Oval Office, but he came to stake his own version of being there. And he chose the only kind of postcard left on the racks -- the impossibly serene one.

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Paul Brownfield is a Times TV critic.