April 26, 2004

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James Moore, Author of "Bush's War For Reelection: Iraq, The White House, And The People"

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

"It's always 'kill off the messenger' for these guys. It's never about the message."

We admire this book so much, there's a quote of praise from BuzzFlash on the back cover:

"James Moore masterfully details how Bush's war for reelection has real victims: the families of soldiers who have died in Iraq and American citizens who have dared to tell the truth. This exhaustively researched book exposes the dishonest underside of an administration that claims integrity as its calling card. Real young men and women are paying the price for Bush's follies with their lives, Moore reveals, while the man in the White House has used elitist connections to avoid ever risking anything."

Moore was co-author of the insightful, revealing book about Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain," and he writes occasionally for BuzzFlash.com.

A long-time Texan, Moore first tangled with the Bush Cartel when he dared to ask a question about Bush's National Guard duty when Bush first ran for governor in 1994. For that Moore earned the wrath of Karen Hughes. It was a sign of things to come: a pattern of bullying and intimidating any journalist who dares to question Bush's credibility.

In "Bush's War for Re-election," Moore begins and ends where one should, with American soldiers who died fighting in a war that didn't have to happen. Within the book he covers a wide swath of territory, including Bush's National Guard service, Judith Miller's reporting, and electronic voting. He weaves his insights about the dark underbelly of the Bush Cartel into a tight fabric of cloth, whose threads, when joined together, reveal the word "Betrayal."

Moore is a thinking, thorough reporter with a deep heart. As he explores the corrupt side of Bush's political initiatives, you can tell his mind and emotions keep going back to the families who have lost a relative in the Iraq War -- and that, appropriately, is where he ends his book.

Moore wrote a mea culpa for BuzzFlash last year, confessing that he had voted for Bush and hoping that he would be forgiven for his error in judgment. This book, in many ways, is his attempt at absolution. You can feel the burden he carries as he describes the emotional toll on those Americans who are still grieving at their losses, soldiers dead in a self-serving war that Bush sent them out to die in.

His exposé of Bush's fraudulent motives and election campaign rise above penance. "Bush's War for Reelection" feels the pain as much as it reveals the betrayal.

After reading the book, we feel we owe James Moore more than he owes us.

We conducted this interview with James Moore during the publication period of Richard Clarke's book.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Bush's War for Reelection is based on insights you gleaned working on your prior book with Wayne Slater, Bush's Brain. Richard Clarke is now in the news, and we're seeing what the Chicago Tribune called a blistering counter-attack by the Bush administration, where they're trying to belittle Clarke. Is the Rove-inspired character assassination at work once again?

James Moore: Absolutely. It's always "kill off the messenger" for these guys. It's never about the message. You notice that they have done their best to not address any of the questions or the issues that have been raised by Mr. Clarke. They have consistently talked about the fact that they believe all he's doing is selling books, that he was spiteful and jealous, that he wasn't allowed into particular meetings. They're just trying to portray him as a sour-grapes guy instead of addressing the fact that the President had an agenda and he wasn't going to be deterred from his agenda on Iraq.

BuzzFlash: That's now corroborated by Paul O'Neill. Statements made by White House staff at different times are often quite contradictory. But if you just pick up some of their statements and patch them together, you have confirmation -- I think it was in Newsweek or Time -- that Rumsfeld said immediately after 9/11, let's go after Saddam.

James Moore: Well, there's also that memo that is quoted in my book that CBS News obtained -- the notes from the meeting with Rumsfeld at 2:00 in the afternoon on Sept. 11, which said: Go massive. Sweep it all up. Go after Osama. Include Iraq.

The opening scene in the second chapter of my book also corroborates this story, which is information that I got about the exit interview between Bush and Clinton, where Clinton listed off the five priorities that he had in his office, and he put Osama at the top of the list. He also talked about Pakistan and India, with their nukes pointing at each other. He talked about the MidEast, he talked about North Korea, and he talked about Saddam and Osama, and he put Osama at the top of his list.

And Bush shook his hand and he said, "Thanks for your advice, Mr. President, but I think you've got your priorities wrong. I'm putting Saddam at the top of the list." This is the day George W. Bush was inaugurated, for God's sake.

BuzzFlash: So we have more than enough information by people who had personal encounters with the Bush administration. After all, the prima facie evidence is that the people most involved in the Iraq War, from Elliot Abrams, Dick Cheney, through Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, are signers of the PNAC letter to Clinton that Iraq should be invaded. It's kind of a moot point to even argue this any more, and yet the mainstream press seems to still let the Bush administration have their day by attacking the credibility of someone like Clarke who's really only now, at this point, corroborating, what's already been out there. Do you have any comments about the way the press is handling this?

James Moore: It's the way they handle everything. It's not thoughtful, and it boils down to the same old silliness of "he said/she said," just in the interest of saying they're being fair. Remember that the White House, of course, is the largest megaphone in the world, and nobody knows how to use the bully pulpit better than Karl Rove and the Bush administration, and so they're using it against Clarke. They're fighting the media on this, and the media is being its usual timid self.

It may be a tortured analogy, but I've argued this over and over and over, and I did so again last night at a book signing in Washington - that journalism is compelled to get both sides of any story, but sometimes there is only one set of facts. It's irresponsible to act as if there is a different, contradictory bit of information. It's like somebody sending out a Journalism 101 student to write about the sky being blue, and the kid running around, looking for someone who says the sky is actually orange. In this case, the White House is suggesting that the sky is orange. The facts are there; they're undisputed by everyone involved except for the White House. So they have launched their attack machine against Clarke, and they will continue to launch it against anybody who suggests that there's anything relevant to the launch of the war that is contradictory to what the President has said.

BuzzFlash: Going back to Bush's National Guard experience, which you discuss in Bush's War, when you brought up in the 1994 campaign a question about his National Guard experience, afterwards Karen Hughes sort of jumped all over you, and kind of--

James Moore: It was Karen leading the charge, but Karl was there with her as well.

BuzzFlash: Are they just so brazen that they get away with this? Or is it combined with the state of modern journalism, which has a nanosecond of memory -- so that when someone like Richard Clarke recalls his experiences, and they match up with O'Neill's experiences, and with the accounts in your books, and with disclosures coming, periodically, when people like Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld are kind of honest for a moment, that the press doesn't go back and say, well, this corroborates previous information. Instead, they go and they follow the White House line that Clarke's trying to sell books -- that he's partisan. There seems to be no historical context nowadays when someone recalls something like this.

James Moore: He wrote about what actually happened. Let me just say this: this has been their approach from the beginning, and they know how it works. They know that certain reporters can be intimidated. When, way back in the campaign, when Karl jumped all over Wayne Slater on the airport tarmac in Manchester for writing a story about Karl driving the smear campaign against John McCain, Karl jumped all over Wayne--

BuzzFlash: This was in 2000.

James Moore: Yes. He jumped all over Wayne in 2000 for writing that story ran in the Dallas Morning News, and he made a point of doing it in the middle of a crowd of about 40 reporters who were just off the press plane, awaiting the arrival of Governor Bush. Karl wanted everybody to see what they were going to face if they messed with him. Of course, there is the other issue of the access game. You're a White House reporter. You may be making $100K a year working for the Washington Post or whomever. You confront them on various issues, and the next thing you know, nobody's leaking you anything. You have no access to administration sources on or off the record, and you can't write stories. Well, your job is jeopardized. They know how to play that game better than anyone else.

But the other thing you touched upon is the attention span of the media, and the let's-move-on-to-the-next-news-cycle-of-the-day kind of issue. I think the National Guard thing is entirely sort of exemplary of what you suggested. The National Guard issue is not resolved. Those records off of the microfiche in St. Louis were shipped to General Danny James in Washington. They were all printed out and vetted by General James' office. Then they were sent to the White House, and they were vetted by the White House. And then they did the Friday evening document dump on the reporters.

The reporters have accepted that as though it were the end of the issue. Even though they haven't seen all the documents, they haven't brought it up again. When anyone such as Dave Moniz at USA Today, who is consistently pursuing this story -- when he brings it up any more, he's told, "We've dealt with that issue, and we're not answering questions about it." Reporters, in this particular instance, ought to be saying, "Mr. President, we still haven't seen everything. Why don't you authorize a complete release of your microfiche, just like John McCain did, and we can put this issue to rest?"

The reason the President won't do that is because there's damning information within the microfiche printed documents. Yet reporters have decided that that news cycle is over. That story has gone away and they've moved on.

BuzzFlash: You deal once again with the AWOL issue in your book, Bush's War. But I want to start discussing that book by asking you why you chose to begin and end it with profiles of families who have lost soldiers to the war in Iraq? It's called Bush's War for Reelection, but the bookends are about Americans who have faced personal losses because their relatives were killed in Iraq. Why did you choose that?

James Moore: Well, because I think that that's one of the great failings of American journalism is that reporters consistently fail to connect political and policy decisions with human consequences. You watch these talk shows on cable TV -- I call them the "old fart jubilee," because these guys sit around in the beltway, and they wag on about the political subtleties, and the context, and the implications, and the nuances of these decisions by the White House and Congress. But nobody ever actually connects. Now there are some good profiles and reporting in some of the national newspapers on some of these families and what's happened to them. But these decisions should never be disconnected from the human toll. I wanted to make that connection for readers. I wanted to write about the White House and its decisions, and the national discourse over this war.

The second level of that was the media filter through which all this information passes, and how that performs, and then the everyday people -- guys like you and me, family members, people who have kids -- the people who are having to deal with this stuff in their lives. Most of the writing, I think, that's gone on in terms of daily journalism doesn't get to that, and in terms of books, it doesn't get to that. I think that that's the most important question. There are families whose lives have been ruined by the President's decision to attack Iraq. And because that was unnecessary, these families are even more shattered by it. They try and try to believe that their child died for something important, but they're struggling to do that now. And in some of the cases, these families have been split apart in the same way that the Civil War split families apart.

BuzzFlash: Split apart for what reason?

James Moore: Because of the politics. There are some families where there's a belief that they did this and they did it right, and they believe in what the President is doing. And there are people within the same family saying: my child died for no reason at all.

BuzzFlash: You eloquently bookend this with the stories of people who are really impacted, rather than an abstract discussion of the war in Iraq. It's ironic though, that this is an administration that goes to great lengths to avoid recognizing those who have died, to the point that they won't allow return of the caskets to be photographed. The President doesn't attend any funerals. The Vice President doesn't attend any funerals. The President is always around soldiers who are about to go to Iraq or National Guard. But they go to great lengths to avoid pointing any attention toward those who have died or have been injured. And yet you focus on them, which is very moving, because we don't have an administration that cares about remembering them very much.

James Moore: I think that the White House doesn't want us to have any accurate way to measure the costs of the war, so they've turned it into an abstraction. They want us to be about Congressional budgets. And they know that there's an ocean between us and what's going on over there -- as long as we can't see the bodies coming off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base, as long as we don't see the President at a funeral, crying as Taps are played, and as long as all of his meetings with the bereaved family members are behind closed doors, which is true in each of the cases I've just cited, it's going to be hard for us to measure what this war is doing to us in terms of loss of life.

The White House has, in a very calculated fashion, made the decision that they're going to keep us from doing that. That's one of the lessons that they've learned from Vietnam. I think it is horrendous. It's horrific. It's absurd. It's cynical. And it's mean and manipulative in the worst kind of ways for them to suggest that we don't want to know this. Of course we want to know it. It elevates our discussions about it. It elevates our decision-making process to have to confront us with the loss of life. But they've taken that away from us.

BuzzFlash: Now your book, "Bush's War for Reelection," moves back and forth quite a bit, and covers a lot of territory. But one of the most fascinating themes is how you kind of interweave the issue of military service. And you have the father of one of the soldiers in Iraq who lost his life. The father was a sheriff -- is it in Colorado?

James Moore: In Nevada.

BuzzFlash: In Nevada, who served in Vietnam, and then you're contrasting this, of course, to Bush's absence of service in Vietnam and his choice to avoid service in Vietnam, while appearing to be this high-testosterone leader of the military. It's a very persuasive book because you really see that this is all showmanship as far as Bush being the kind of manly military leader, because he avoided service and has never really seen the impact of people dying; he doesn't even acknowledge it.

James Moore: I think that I wanted to do something that hasn't been done. I think everything relevant to the Bush administration has been lacking context, and that's what I wanted to provide in my book. I think if anybody's opinion on war matters, it's a warrior's. And particularly, in this case, Sheriff Wade Lieseke, who was a door gunner for two tours in Vietnam and admitted to killing hundreds of people on a daily basis -- just gunning them down from the door of a helicopter. Now he's lost his son in Iraq in what he views as an absolutely meaningless war. A handsome, intelligent, accomplished young man, at 31 years of age, who died like four or five days before his birthday -- and for a cause that his dad thinks is absurd.

As I said, this is an opinion that should be listened to, because this is a man who knows something about war. And the people who hate war the most are warriors. If we had a real person who had this experience in the White House, they wouldn't be making these almost -- in my estimation -- capricious decisions to send our sons and daughters into combat. But the White House has decided that Mr. Bush is doing the right thing. He's decided he's doing the right thing. And everything about him has been about privilege, and has completely lacked the essential context to say, well, while you were using your position of privilege to skip out on your National Guard duty, there were other kids who were over there who were dying. And those people are the ones who should judge you.

BuzzFlash: You have a section in your book called "The Ghost Soldier" about the infamous period of Bush's National Guard service or lack thereof. And you have a number of documents in here. Do you just want to maybe discuss in general what these documents are?

James Moore: These are documents from the original Freedom of Information file that begin to create a timeline and a trail of his behavior. They sort of corroborate the fact that he went off the grid without permission, he asked for a transfer that was turned down by commanders in Denver, and then he asked for another transfer that was finally approved because he lost his flight status.

They couldn't put him in an air wing anymore, so they let him go into this tactical recon doing groundwork. But he never showed up. You know, Master Sergeant Daniel Harkness in one of these documents wants to know why this pilot wasn't rated. Another document shows that his commanders wrote back and said, he was not rated because he wasn't here.

And yet the administration continues to argue over and over that young Lieutenant Bush actually did serve somewhere in Alabama, when in fact there's no one to this day who can say that he did. Even this Bob Calhoun guy who said he saw Bush every day -- his timeline contradicts the White House's own timeline. The White House first said Bush served one day in Alabama, on Nov. 29. That's what they told us during the campaign in 2000. And then on the Friday night document dump, it turns out that that 29th was Oct. 29. But they've never claimed he's served any other day other than that one day to make up his lost weekends. But Mr. Calhoun went on national TV and said that he saw Lieutenant Bush there several days, for the entire summer, even though neither Mr. Bush nor the White House has ever said that he was there. So I think it was important to put the documents into the book to show the reader that there is a body of evidence that sort of corroborates and proves Mr. Bush's behavior.

BuzzFlash: You have a section where you discuss how the media covered the war, particularly focusing on The New York Times and the very hotly debated coverage of Judith Miller, in which you seem to be remarkably fair to her.

James Moore: Other people have said I've savaged her -- that I buried her, I dug her up, and I drove the stake through her heart and then buried her again.

BuzzFlash: I thought you were remarkably fair. You give her her say, and you give the other side their say. And it seemed to be a pretty fair report, considering our own bias where we believe she was just a conduit for government information. But that aside, let me ask a question regarding Kerry, and their attempt to paint him as a waffler and using the Rove machine to do so. Now they're focusing on whether he attended some meeting in the early 1970s, where there were some so-called "radical" veterans. And the media goes along with this minutia, focusing on the most trivial of matters about Democrats. Isn't it the responsibility of the papers that are supposed to be the leading papers -- The New York Times, The Washington Post -- to send a reporter back to maybe look at Bush's record a second time?

James Moore: I think it is, though you have to understand how difficult this is. As somebody who's tried to do these things for major broadcasting outlets and networks, I know how difficult that is. When the White House says they aren't answering questions, they aren't answering questions. And if you can't get to documents with independent sources, it's very hard to write these stories. I know of one national publication right now that has at least one source that has damning information about George W. Bush and the National Guard, and they can't write the story because they cannot get a second document or a second source on it. And it would have a huge impact on this campaign. So a lot of people actually are trying.

But what happens is, within the daily cycle of news, they get caught up in the day-to-day, the back-and-forth. They have got to fill up the paper, and the reporters want to have headlines. And most of these reporters, if you give them the option of: I can do a daily story and be on the front page, or I can do a daily story and be the lead story on "NBC Nightly News," I'm going to do that. And that's where the energy flows, and it doesn't flow to the serious investigative work any more, because the problem is that we've sort of all turned into journalistic versions of McDonald's -- shorter stories, briefer attention span -- and the guy who goes out and does the 3- or 4,000-word story knows that the chances are pretty good, unless it's huge, it's not going to be on the front page, and nobody's going to read all the way through it.

BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about a couple of specific chapters. Again, you weave so much together here. But here are some quick thoughts about the way that the Bush cartel has dealt with Joe Wilson and his wife. This was shocking even for Rove to undertake, although in "Bush's Brain," you talk about Rove's dalliance with an FBI agent that probably led to the defeat of Jim Hightower and the emergence of big-hair Rick Perry. But this is lowering the bar even further, where we're outing a CIA operative who, by the way, specializes in tracking illicit trade of weapons of mass destruction.

What do you make of this? There seems to be such a betrayal of the nation, and yet it's just business as usual for the Bush administration. Bush himself has done everything possible to stifle any serious investigation. We don't know what's going on with the Justice Department. But Bush has certainly just given lip service to cooperation.

James Moore: It's hilarious, to me, that they would even have the chutzpah to actually deny that they were involved with this thing in any way. This is a standard pattern of behavior by Karl and Bush administration operatives, and that is to go after your enemies and silence them as quickly as possible. And it's clear that that's exactly what happened. Karl's been doing this forever and ever. I mean, he was fired in 1992 by the George H. W. Bush for President Campaign in Texas for a leak to Robert Novak.

BuzzFlash: What was the leak?

James Moore: Well, Karl was running around to all of us, talking about how the campaign was in a state of disarray, telling us that it was a mess. Rob Mosbacher, Jr. was running the campaign. Karl didn't particularly like that. But what he really didn't like was that Mosbacher had a million dollars in the budget for direct mail. Karl was a big direct-mail guy, and Mosbacher only gave Karl $250,000 of the budget, and he spent $750,000 with someone else, because he thought that they were better. All of a sudden, Karl starts talking to all of us in the Texas press corps about how bad things are, wanting us all to write this story about the campaign in disarray. We knew what was going on. We knew Karl's jealousy and everything else. So none of us ever did anything.

The next thing you know, there's a column written by Robert Novak about the Texas campaign being an absolute mess. And it was a story we had all ignored. And Novak wrote about a meeting in Dallas between Phil Graham and the party chair, Fred Meyer, and Karl and Rob Mosbacher, and George H.W. Bush, and how they're trying to get the mess straightened out, et cetera. It was a few days after that that President Bush and Mosbacher and Meyer sat down and Mosbacher said, "Look, Mr. Bush, there's only one person who had any motivation to leak this story, and he's the person who knows Robert Novak. And I think we should fire him." And H.W. Bush agreed and they fired Karl for leaking that story to Robert Novak. It's a long-standing relationship. It's a history of behavior. And it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to connect the dots on Karl's behavior.

And in the case of what happened to Valerie Plame and Ambassador Wilson, it's astonishing. It's astonishing in its meanness, and for an administration that wraps itself in the flag and wants the National Anthem playing in the background every time it opens its mouth, it's astonishing to me that it's willing to allow someone to frankly commit treason.

BuzzFlash: To a person like myself, above and beyond being editor of BuzzFlash, this is simply incomprehensible. It's treason, it's outing a person who is a specialist in tracking the weapons that you claim are why you went to war with Iraq, to make sure that a bad guy wouldn't be able to use them.

Is the only thing that matters to him some sort of Darwinian win at all costs? Does he have any attachment to the United States? What drives this guy to do something like this, to betray the nation and betray the very reason that the Bush administration said they went to war?

James Moore: Karl is very good at rationalization and compartmentalizing. I also think he's pathological. I think that there is a reality that he perceives that, in many ways, is disconnected from the real world. Karl thinks that anything he does to advance the cause of his party and the policies that he and his party perceive are good for the USA, any means that effectuate those ends are good and are acceptable. If there are some casualties, just as in the war in Iraq, that has to be lived with to accomplish the end game, and to make a particular policy or goal happen. Eliminating Joe Wilson's dissent and causing him grief was a pure act of vengeance, and an effort to both silence him and send a message -- just as when he was chewing out Wayne Slater on the tarmac in Manchester. It sends a message to everybody else: Don't mess with us. We're in charge, and we're going to do it the way we think is best. And if you mess with us, this could happen to you. Party first. His party's first in this case.

BuzzFlash: You show the contradictions in the Bush administration where you have people who evaded service in Vietnam and let others die in their place running a war where other people's children are dying. In the 2002 Senate campaign in Georgia, when Senator Max Cleland ran against Saxby Chambliss, and another man who evaded service in Vietnam and yet supported the war -- I think he claimed a bad knee from football or something -- they went after Cleland, in clearly a typical Republican campaign with Rovian overtones, for being "allegedly" weak on defense.

Here you had a guy who lost three limbs in Vietnam and yet he seemed to be sucker-punched and not recover in time to counter this blistering attack on him as some sort of a wimp on defense. Whereas the guy who eventually won, Saxby Chambliss, is a chicken-hawk who runs around and does these Bush-like photo-op appearances at bases in Georgia and declares himself a champion of defense.

James Moore: I think a part of the failure of that campaign actually falls on Senator Cleland. I think he realizes in retrospect that he should have been stronger. I think that he realizes that he didn't fight back hard enough. And so I'm confident that he acknowledges his own failing in that regard because he should have expressed righteous indignation. I spent a great deal of time with him in Washington, and in my conversations with him, it was that he just didn't believe that people would listen to that stuff. He didn't believe that anyone would think that he could be associated or affiliated with any of these kinds of allegations that they were making against him. And so he didn't think that the electorate was going to say that this had any impact. And he completely miscalculated.

Now the morality of what was done to him is beyond comprehension to me, because he did leave three limbs in Vietnam, and he had the second highest military decoration this country offers for actions about four or five days prior to the incident where he was injured. He's decorated numerous times. He spent virtually every day of his adult life in service to this country. And yet he was compared to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He was compared by George W. Bush, who didn't serve. He was compared by Saxby Chambliss, who didn't serve, and Karl Rove, who didn't serve. All of these people who are saying Max Cleland dropped the ball are people who ran away when it came their time to stand up.

I understand not wanting to go into combat and not wanting to get killed. But how in God's name do you find it in your heart to make these kinds of claims against someone who has given so much? Yet there's no indignation. There's no outrage. The American public wants to believe that that campaign was lost over the stars and bars of the Confederacy being taken off the Georgia flag by Roy Barnes. But I think it happened because, when Paul Wellstone's plane went down, there was more money for Karl to spend in Georgia. And they brought in 300 busloads of people to go door to door, and they savaged a brave and honorable American.

BuzzFlash: Democrats don't seem to understand the impact of the character issue. They tend to be dismissive and say it won't affect people. But the Republicans have shown again and again it will. The power of television is such that if you use media attack ads to define your opponent, even though the public says they don't like attack ads, they're influenced by them. The rule of politics seems to be, if you drive up the negatives of your opponent, you're halfway to victory. And the Republicans are fantastic at driving up negatives for their opponents. Yet the Democrats don't seem to realize until too late, most often, what's going on.

James Moore: The problem is that Democrats, although they have made some compromises and are starting to play the same sorts of games that Karl is willing to play, they still have faith in the process and the intellect of the electorate to make these distinctions and these judgments. What Karl relies on is the American public's busy-ness with their personal lives. The whole MO of Rovian Republican politics is that he knows we're all too busy to read deeply into the 3,000-word page story in the front page of The New York Times. He knows we're all too busy getting our kids to school, or paying our mortgages, or worrying about health care. So if he hits us with the right images and the right messages, then we're going to get his message because the Democrats are too busy worrying about context and nuance, and telling the truth, while he's busy out there creating his alternative reality.

And it wins over and over and over, because we're all so easily distracted. The truth is that people get their information for their political decisions precisely the way Karl says they do -- from images. That's why one of the big images in the first go-round was George W. Bush on that aircraft carrier. And it's why he plays this game. As you may recall from the first book, in an interview he said, "Run your campaign as if people are watching television with the sound turned down." And that's what they do. And if somebody walking past their television sees Max Cleland on camera morphing into Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, they're going to remember that. And they're not going to be angry about that happening. They're just going to remember that imagery, and they're going to go: Ah, I can't vote for that guy. Somehow, some way, he must be associated with Osama.

And it's working. It's working to our detriment and their positive effect.

BuzzFlash: What Rove also knows on a corollary is that, in the print media, all that really matters is the headline. So if you have the blaring headline in the paper, plus an image in the newspaper of Bush walking on the aircraft carrier, which came from the television and the visual coverage, it all reinforces that image. I personally think that the Democrats sort of have contempt for mass media, so they don't know how to use it. The Republicans, and Rove in particular, have a deep respect for the power of mass media, and they know how to use it masterfully. That's to the disadvantage of truth, because images can lie. And Rove knows that, but the Democrats keep thinking issues can triumph over image.

James Moore: There are too many media distractions now. And the issues are not triumphing, unless it's an issue of the moment. If there's an issue that may have impact, it'll be in the closing weeks of the campaign. Issues aren't the way it happens any more. Images are.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW