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Adviser: Bush Must Attack Critics
A close adviser to President George Bush says the administration must keep up its attacks on critics of the Iraq war. Mark McKinnon, who was Bush’s chief media adviser during the 2004 presidential election campaign, acknowledged that this strategy is dangerous because it keeps alive debate over whether the administration manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war. But in a speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, he insisted it’s vital because Bush can’t afford damage to what McKinnon called his key appeal: "his honesty.” Said McKinnon: "Bush is perceived as honest but the Democrats have had some success in selling that the intelligence was flawed or tampered with. He’s been a little late in pushing back but he has to and is saying we all saw the same intelligence. "There has to be an acknowledgement that the pre-war intelligence was wrong.”
Story Continues Below He added: "Things are not going well in Iraq. We have to face reality.” Vice President Dick Cheney recently stepped up the attack on administration critics, saying in Washington that the contention that the White House manipulated intelligence on Iraq was "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.” McKinnon, president of Maverick Media, also said in his address that the press is "enormously biased toward conflict.” In its perpetual quest for new angles, the media in three months will start to produce "Bush comeback stories,” he predicted. McKinnon admitted exasperation over what he called the administration’s "incredible message discipline,” according to the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for journalists. "It drive me crazy sometimes. Nobody says anything without getting clearance” and therefore sometimes the press quotes people "who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
The pundit disclosed that President Bush never reads polls and doesn’t care about newspaper headlines. McKinnon, on the other hand, tried to escape the "Beltway mentality” during the 2004 campaign by reading newspapers from 25 cities across the country.
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