White House not Invincible anymore

Bush under fire

Guardian - Sunday October 5, 2003

...The scandal has cracked the illusion that the Bush administration is invincible.

...Rove has a murky history. In the 1970s he was investigated for running 'dirty tricks' seminars for Republican activists at the time of Watergate. In 1986, while running a Texas governorship campaign, he announced that a bugging device had been found in his office. The discovery hurt Rove's Democrat opponent, who promptly lost the election. Yet it was never discovered who planted the bug and - despite his denials - it is widely believed that Rove put it in his office himself.

One man who has fallen victim to Rove is Jim Hightower, who faced off against Rove's Republican candidate in a Texan election in 1989. Rove leaked extensively to the local press that Hightower was facing an FBI investigation. The allegations decimated Hightower's polls and he went on to lose the election. Hightower was never charged, by the FBI or anyone else.

For Hightower, last week's scandal bears all the hallmarks of Rove's tactics. 'No kind of political action like this is going to be taken without Rove's office putting the stamp of approval on it,' he told The Observer. 'He may not have made the actual phone calls, but that's irrelevant.'

Critics accuse Rove of bringing such tactics into the White House. Certainly he has made the Bush administration one of the most leak-proof ever to take power in Washington. Unlike the more open - and leaky - Clinton era, speaking to reporters is seen as a punishable offence for many Bush officials. Many announcements of bad news - such as last week's poverty increase - are now released late on Friday ahead of the weekend newspapers, which are not as widely read in America as in Britain.

But there are other possible culprits. Some commentators are pointing to a growing rift between Bush and the hawkish wing of his administration in the shape of Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. While Bush has recently sought to distance his government from linking Iraq with the 11 September terrorist attacks, Cheney has persisted.

It was also members of Cheney's staff, including top aide Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who pushed the Niger uranium story long after Wilson had investigated the matter. Cheney and Libby are both said to have been furious with Wilson's decision to go public. 'I think the signal could have come from the Vice-President to go after Wilson, to make sure that no one else speaks out,' Mel Goodman said.

But whoever was responsible for the leak, it certainly came from somewhere near the top. In an operation as tightly controlled as the Bush administration, it is unthinkable that this was a junior staff member working 'freelance'.'This is not a normal leak, this is scorched-earth politics,' said Larry Haas, a White House communications aide under Bill Clinton. 'This kind of strategic decision is taken at a very senior level.'

...But the investigation of the leak has also exposed another facet of the tightly knit Bush administration - patronage. In resisting calls for a special counsel, the investigation is in the hands of Attorney-General John Ashcroft. Bush appointed Ashcroft to his job, meaning he is now effectively being asked to investigate his own boss. Rove has also worked for several of Ashcroft's campaigns in the past.

He was also influential in getting him appointed to his current post when Bush's first choice fell through. 'They will never appoint a special counsel. This shows ruthlessness gone awry,' said Joe Conason, author of Big Lies, a book on the Bush administration and its use of the media.

...'There has been a huge shift in the national atmosphere. It is no longer considered unpatriotic to ask questions, to be critical,' Conason said.

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printed from White House not Invincible anymore on 2004-05-06 08:40:27