Some new developments this week in the continuing story of how the press was overawed by the Administration of George W. Bush.
Boston Globe Reporter Charlie Savage actually supplied at TPM Cafe the missing master narrative for the Bush years: "The agenda of concentrating more unchecked power in the White House." This was confirmed by the testimony of a former insider, Jack Goldsmith, who is out with a book about doing battle with the Bush forces inside the terror presidency.
In one of the first posts I wrote when I started blogging (Sep. 2003), I adapted the term master narrative to mean, in press coverage, "the story that produces all the other stories." Think of campaign news on the horse race model. There, the basic narrative is winning; what it takes to win the race is the "master" from which thousands of copies--the horse race stories themselves--get made.
My thought was: change the master, come up with a better one, and it changes the coverage. Well, Savage came up with a better one. The drive to concentrate unchecked power in the White House, commanded by Cheney, backed by Bush, centered in the Office of the Vice President, a radical project in governance that was mostly--but not entirely--hidden from view.
Now that's not a "new" story but a thread for connecting lots of stories and piecing together better explanations. The Maximal Executive was the narrative the press needed to get itself back in the game after being gamed by the executive branch in the build-up to the war in Iraq. The story that produces lots of other stories should have been the hellbent expansion of executive power, and the go-it-alone politics that followed from it.
Savage is planning a five-week tour around the country. You should try to catch him. But first catch what he's saying. For if we can't get the presidential candidates of both parties on record about steps to reverse this agenda, if we can't make a proper issue out of it in 2008, we're probably screwed. The issue is unbuilding the Bush Presidency in the next Administration. Does your candidate support that? Which parts? And if you don't know which parts, isn't that a case of: Iowa, we have a problem?
Pattern recognition
Huff Post readers would know Charlie Savage as the Globe reporter in Washington who figured out that Bush's signing statements were part of a pattern. He put some of the pieces together and got a Pulitzer for it, which was just.
I thought his new book, Takeover, was going to be the fuller story of signing statements, but no. It's about the Bush administration's "very broad view of executive power," and the effort to put that view into practice by overcoming all constraints. Savage began calling it the Cheney project because Dick Cheney had "articulated a vision of nearly limitless commander-in-chief power two decades earlier."
In 2005, Savage followed the fight over John McCain's efforts to get a ban on torture by Congress. "We all thought the story was over when Bush signed the bill into law." Victory for McCain! But then the missing narrative kicked in. "The president issued a signing statement telling interrogators that he could authorize them to ignore the law." It happened again with oversight provisions in the Patriot Act. Bush signed the billl, and said he didn't have to obey them. Savage reported on both actions for the Globe. "Those two stories got a huge response, and so after that my bureau chief relieved me of daily reporting responsibilities for a month to go find and decipher all the other signing statements Bush had issued since taking office."
(I've said since 2005 that bloggers vs. journalists is a stupid fight and should be declared over, in part because the two "sides" of the online press are already part of one news system. A large portion of that "huge" response he got was the blogosphere roaring its approval for the digging and synthesizing Charlie Savage did, which influenced the Globe bureau chief to spend the manpower on more stories like that. The big response online amplified the Globe's voice in the national conversation, expanding the circle of people who care about the newspaper's reporting. See? One system.)
An episodic view won't reveal
Savage learned that the president had challenged more laws than all previous presidents combined. The owner of the policy was Bush. Its originator was Cheney. The enforcer was David Addington (see Jane Mayer's profile), a man who does not speak to the press. The policy predated September 11, after which the attacks became the spectacular (and bottomless) justification for the Maximal version of executive power.
Savage put it this way in the Boston Globe (Nov. 26, 2006): "Over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president's hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast 'inherent' powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress."
A theme for Savage is the inadequacy of a string of episodes. "Like many reporters, I had been focused in on a close-up of one or two controversies, but had been missing the broader context," he writes. In fact, journalists have to decide not only what "the broader context" is, but whether there is a broader context building up, a thread connecting all these things. Or is it just a series of news stories, episodes that are worth a few cycles, then make way for other episodes?
Savage decided. When the "full panorama" came into view, it changed what he saw in incidents that had earlier made news. (My italics...)
Suddenly, what the Bush administration had been doing across a huge range of issues made much more sense - not just the 9/11-related controversies, but Cheney's fight to keep his energy task force papers a secret, the attacks on open-government laws such as FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, the use of executive orders instead of legislation to push the faith-based initiative, the decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without consulting the Senate, the choices for Supreme Court nominations, unprecedented efforts to impose greater White House control over Justice Department lawyers and other executive branch bureaucrats, and many other things. These disparate controversies were all connected. The administration, from its very beginning, had set out to set precedents and take actions that would permanently expand presidential power for the long-term, even when such tactics brought them extra short-term difficulties. A quiet but sweeping constitutional revolution was well underway.
So you see why master narratives matter.
Giving away the president's power
While Savage develops his argument for what was going on, Jack Goldsmith's testimony has been unfolding at Slate. They complete each other, clashing only on one point: their view of how presidential power works.
Appreciate that Goldsmith, a conservative, a Republican, and a Bush Administration insider--head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, until he resigned because of the Cheney project--has the same narrative that Charlie Savage has, except he brings us into meetings where powers maximal were asserted.
"Why don't we just go to Congress and get it to sign off on the whole detention program?" Goldsmith asked at one sit down. "Why are you trying to give away the president's power?" Addington replied. This comeback is the heart of his book, which is a work of dissent from deep within the Bush camp.
Presidential candidates will think twice about "giving away the president's power," Charlie Savage believes. Once they are successfully asserted, new presidential prerogatives are hard to get rid of. Which is why he thinks Bush and Cheney have largely won. "The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush- Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history -- not controversies, but facts."
Even if the victor in the 2008 presidential election declines to make use of the aggrandized executive powers established by the Bush- Cheney administration, in the long run such forbearance might make little difference. The accretion of presidential power, history has shown, often acts like a one-way ratchet: It can be increased far more easily than it can be reduced.
In a statement that struck some people as strange, Savage said "I do not think that presidential power is a partisan issue." After all, "future Democratic presidents will be able to invoke the same novel powers that the Bush administration has pioneered in order to unilaterally impose their own agendas." They will be able to, but are they as likely to? Savage says it doesn't matter; the powers are there.
Hard vs. soft power
When Goldsmith suggested going to Congress, he thought he was expanding White House power by adding hugely to its legitimacy without sacrificing much maneuvering space at all. But this is where the radical part in the Cheney project emerged. The very act of seeking broader legitimacy diminished the president's power, according to Cheney and Addington. What a claim! Goldsmith is good on this:
Addington once expressed his general attitude toward accommodation when he said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint. These men believed that the president would be best equipped to identify and defeat the uncertain, shifting, and lethal new enemy by eliminating all hurdles to the exercise of his power. They had no sense of trading constraint for power. It seemed never to occur to them that it might be possible to increase the president's strength and effectiveness by accepting small limits on his prerogatives in order to secure more significant support from Congress, the courts, or allies.
Goldsmith calls it a "truism among political scientists and historians who study the American presidency," that presidential authority today is not the "hard power found in the Constitution, statutes, and precedents," but the ability to command the stage and communicate directly with the public. The president as national protagonist has huge advantages in winning society over to his point of view. Goldsmith points out how great a departure was made under this president.
The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.
It has been a truism among Washington journalists that the Bush White House was "good" at politics. (It had discipline, it had Rove, it won twice: case closed.) Goldsmith shows how thin this view was. The Bush White House declined to participate in normal politics, but this is not something it ever told the country it was going to do. Likewise, expanding executive power is not a conservative idea, yet the conservatives thought they had elected Bush.
You can't run a press system that assumes the President feels a need to explain himself to the nation when the White House is running a system in which no such need is felt. Why explain the agenda? You only give away the President's power to act without explanation. By declining to develop a more savage narrative the press failed to figure out what was happening to itself under Bush.
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I'm sorry, but I didn't know this was news. I thought it was common knowledge, even if under-covered.
I believe Mr. Rosen is a bit optimistic when he says that future Democratic presidents will have the same overreaching powers as Cheney/Bush.
I don't think Dick's going to allow anyone other than a Republican to be elected to the WH, and if it looks like that's not going to happen, he's going to pull the plug -- stage a coup, say, in the name of national defence, because of some emergency, like the need to invade Iran, or some phoney terrorist threat.
The press and the MSM have come to the party too late to do anything about Cheney's grab for power. We're now a de facto dictatorship, and Bush's speech about continuing the war as long as he wants to, is proof of that.
What he was really saying was, "Try and stop me, if you think you can."
Just remember, tho, Cheney's got his Blackwater army, while we have a brokendown shell of one, thanks to this regime's determination to run everything in government into the ground.
Why has been so difficult for Congress or the judiciary to reverse this power grab by the administration?
Another great blog Prof. Rosen.
However, we need to dig deeper here. The reason presidents (long before Bush) have been able to spectacularly expand their power is the expansion of the military. It's the imperial presidency. Bush has pushed it to the limit, but the military-industrial-political complex will remain firmly in place.
The military as means? I don't know about that. Militaristic "war on terror" has been the -excuse- for this expansion of power, not so much the means, the means I think has been more like or most effectively an undermining, manipulation of and co-optation of mass media.
Military as means to that end perhaps if you're meaning 'PR', like those uncredited white house 'news segments', psyops type stuff being directed at American audiences now (which is supposed to be illegal) and maybe even surveillance type military 'arms'.
But yes the awareness of 'all that' along with the existence of detention centers & legalized torture has an effect. So much of what has passed in this "war on terror" has created a climate of fear, fear of openness & the expression of dissent. We don't like to think this fear maybe extends to the experience of Representatives in Congress and Senators, but it has crossed out minds that it may have.
Then there's the hopelessness & apathy effect; "Well there were two million of us protesting on the street and there has been absolutely no news coverage of it."
The media, access to information and awareness of real public sentiment and dialog is a more powerful and effective means of control than artillery. Guns we duck and run. Manipulate our minds and we let you eat us alive with a smile on our faces.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm
I suspect impeachment has been taken off the table because, being politicians, the members of Congress understand only too well what Bush and Cheney have accomplished. Once the presidency sets the people adrift, as this one has, there's nothing left standing between Congress and the president's wrath. After all, the relationship between the people and their elected representatives, in a democracy, is a two-way street: Congress protects our interests, but we also protect Congress from being simply disbanded and sent home by the president. Bush is the first president in our nation's history who simply doesn't give a hoot what the people think; we have no leverage, no way to persuade him to give in a little bit or to meet Congress halfway. That's why the polls mean absolutely nothing to him: we the people mean absolutely nothing to him. He's gotten what he wanted from us; he doesn't need us for anything. Oh, he'll give little pep talks now and again; but he can't possibly think we're paying attention to him any longer - and he could care less. Therefore, we're not a barrier standing between him and Congress. And they know it.
I have a question no one has answered yet:
Does this president's signing statement empower the president who follows him to ignore the
law this president signed?
As in, signing statements don't make sense if for no other reason that if one is to follow the 'logic' of them, a president can only create one to 'protect' himself from the consequences of defying laws if he happens to be the president when that law is passed?
Future presidents can cite the signing statement as precedent. Therefore, they are free to ignore the law to the point that the signing statement allows. Because of weak congresses, Bush has assumed that power for the executive.
However, the power of signing statements is not given to the president in the constitution. It is a power Bush has grabbed and abused. Therefore, a congress with some backbone (which we may someday see again--we can hope!) can challenge the president over the whole signing statement issue. In the end, they can impeach a president who ignores the laws based on unconstitutional signing statements.
Bush should have already been impeached on this issue alone. Even if conviction in the Senate was not possible, impeachment is absolutely necessary over signing statements.
If Congress declines to object, then, while it doesn't have the weight of legislation, it does imply that Congress has given its consent to a new distribution of power. Congress then has to take action to undo the damage - either legislation spelling out that the president does not have the power, or, better yet, impeach the criminals who violated the constitution in the first place.
' Addington once expressed his general attitude toward accommodation when he said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." '
And they will not like that larger force that is coming. Neither will the American people.
Congress has the authority, on paper at least, to end the war, to impeach Bush and Cheney, and do a multitude of other things besides sit there, and sign checks under pressure. Will they assert that authority, though? Bush and friends are betting that they won't...
can't say Penta$cam without the $$$$$$$$$$$$$..............
Let's look at the "horse race" analogy: the last big race recently was the Travers, and many of the stories-- about the leading contenders (Rags to Riches, et al.), trainers, jockeys, and the Saratoga venue --stemmed from that. But some reporters see The Travers as only one race-- with along with the Triple Crown races-- in the larger pursuit for The Breeders' Cup. And still others see an even bigger story: who will get to control thoroughbred racing in New York? Will it be NYRA (which is Gov. Spitzer's choice) or profit-making groups, one of which was the NY Yankees organization, who are straining at the bit over casino-type gambling concessions at the two NYC tracks. So the horse race model could be not so much a large circle with co-centric smaller circles inside but something on the order of a Venn diagram, with overlapping circles.
The latter schemata the only way I can look at the Bush Administration's power grab ploys. We had the FEMA and Walter Reed Hospital debacles, which may be part of a ploy to "privatize" federal programs. The roughshod ride over the Bill of Rights is just one of many questions remaining unanswered about the blatant exploitation of the Sept 11 tragedy, and the 800 pound gorilla in America's living room is the half-baked causis belli and abysmal failures concerning the War in Iraq. If the expansion of the President's powers is behind or above all this, what is the motivation? What does Bush and Cheney have to gain by such? More profits for the oil industry? For Halliburton?
Just like the horse racing industry, the cloud overhead is $$$. And money, lots of it, may be the REAL "master narrative."
It all goes back to the press buying the Govt spin on the news. The Big Story right now is that Bush might lower troop levels next year, if things are still going well, not the reality that he's continuing the surge for another eight months. And he doesn't have to reduce troop levels next year; he can always extend tours as he's done in the past.
George Bush and Dick Cheney have had a very successful presidency. That's what Bush said he would get if he could be seen as the Commander-In-Chief. I have, since this presidency began, to understand the end game. I also came to the same conclusion as this writer about two years age. For example, Bush couldn't get his way on Social Security, but, with all the US expenditures on this war and occupation and his stealing from the SS Trust Fund, Social Security will probably go the way as the dodo bird. We are in deep do-do. Our Constitution has been shredded; our civil liberties abolished; our respect for others denied; and on and on and on. I don't know if we can ever get it back. However, I will stay hopeful. Each of you must demand that the presidential candidates pledge to resore our democracy to at the very least pre-Bush.
NO ONE,not Democrat or Republican will give back ONE IOTA of presidential power. AAMF, if whoever gets elected does not try to GRAB MORE POWER by breaking and ignoring laws, I'll eat my own shorts. EVERY ONE of these candidates sees themselves as the 'benevelent dictator' to the ignorant masses. What Bush has started in this country is destined to end with bloody revolution. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And the planet will quiver.
"The very act of seeking broader legitimacy diminished the president's power, according to Cheney and Addington."
Of course, lost in this is the real source of the power of the Presidency -- the support of the American citizenry. Or, as the Founders referred to it, "the consent of the governed." Thus, the obvious contempt with which they view the people of this nation fits quite neatly into the Master Narrative.
As does their curious notion of "public service", and their apparent belief that the public is supposed to serve them
Super post.
I'm not sure I buy the power of the master narrative, however; there are so many news outlets with such a diversity of approaches that I think a responsible citizen should have no trouble finding the truth.
The problem is that there are too few responsible citizens...instead, we have FoxNews addicts and MoveOn kool-aid drinkers who get ALL their news from one biased source.
http://www.newsprism.com
Corporatocracy is the Master Narrative
The overarching Master Narrative is the ascendancy of the Corporatocracy. Consolidating power in the executive is a component of the actual Master Narrative.
America is no longer a democracy. Power does not reside in the people or their representatives. Power resides in the Corporatocracy that now operates America for its own benefit, not for the benefit of citizens. The Corporatocracy comprises Big Oil, Big Energy, Big Finance, Big Media, Big Ag, Big Pharm, Big Military, and Big Politics (meaning the two political parties). These entities care only about their own survival. Citizens are mere consuming units.
I agree with this. Formerly, the working class was a commodity, but now we have been
"downsized" into mere "consumers."
Thank you for writing this all important post. I think no issue is more important than the overreach of presidential powers. It puts into context the war, DOJ, NASA, Global warming, the Supreme Court, etc, etc. Since early this year I have submitted the question what the presidential candidates would do with these newly acquired powers, in various forums (including the CNN debate at St. Anselm in NH and a house party with Sen. Durbin in Nashua.) A Clinton supporter told me he is looking forward to Hillary being able to wield this power. I am sure she is. Impeachment is so critically important so that it will send a message to the candidates and the nation that we stood up to these powers, even when the impeachment process is not brought to a satisfactory conclusion. At least we will be on record to support the Constitution.
From the moment the Bush Administration took office they sent a collective, arrogant, smirking f#@k you to the American people.
They had finally been given carte blanche to do whatever damnfool thing they wanted. The opportunity to begin the descent into the Hell the world finds itself in now came on Sept 11, 2001.
Up until then having an appointed President was only angering, not frightening beyond imagination. He would, the country thought, be a face that would occasionally be seen on television, repeating the words of his speechwriters and life would go on much the same as it always has, regardless of who was President.
Then, September 11, 2001 happened, and as the President is fond of saying, "everything changed."
Suddenly the world had the most militarily powerful nation with a fool at the controls.
I say a fool, not an idiot deliberatly.
George W. Bush is not stupid, but he is locked into a simple view of a situation that, if it were simple, it would have been resolved by now.
Because he won't acknowledge that his approach, bombing and killing and lying, is not the way to peace, the dying will continue.
The side benefit to him is that being a "war President" takes up all his time, so he needn't even think about a domestic agenda.
The mess he has created will remain, long after he has gone from his safe bubble as President to his other safe bubble, retirement with Secret Service protection for life.
Would that those ordinary people who have been affected by his decisions could just go back to their lives. Unfortunately thousands of them are dead.
Pitiful excuse for a President.
To use an old curse, may he live forever to see what he has done, never being forgiven.
Excellent. Love to read blogs that are as potent and intelligent as this one. Thanks for writing it, I'll be back to read it over and over.
edited version of bbuc comment:
Jay, thank you for helping Charley Savage expose Dick Cheney's traitorous power grab.
Vice President Cheney's plan to redefine executive power may be what some feel is a needed adaptation within our government to changing world circumstances, and it may be a clever exploit of a legislative loophole, but it is also a naked power grab... a cynical attempt to circumvent our rule of law and flies in the face of the hallowed concept of America being a country of Laws not men.
This tawdry power grab is justified by people who don't understand or believe in the idea of democracy. They don't trust it. It doesn't look or sound or smell like them and it scares the hell out of them. They don't like America, don't 'get' it, and are trying to change it... just like some religious extremists would, or Hitler or Stalin wanted to do.
Since it is happening from within, and is costing the country many lives and great treasure I'd say it comes very close to treason.
More Americans need to start saying it and acting on it.
This tawdry power grab is justified by people who don't understand or believe in the idea of democracy. They don't trust it. It doesn't look or sound or smell like them and it scares the hell out of them. They don't like America, don't 'get' it, and are trying to change it... just like some religious extremists would, or Hitler or Stalin wanted to do.
It's not about democracy- it's about $$$ and being the superpower of the world. Cheney and Rove's plan for unilateral world domination. Democracy means checks and balances and that is contrary to all they have accomplished. Look at the absolute absurdity of signing a law into effect with a statement that says "this is the law but if I say so you can break it". All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others, eh?
Thanks Jay.
"In a statement that struck some people as strange, Savage said "I do not think that presidential power is a partisan issue." After all, "future Democratic presidents will be able to invoke the same novel powers that the Bush administration has pioneered in order to unilaterally impose their own agendas." They will be able to, but are they as likely to?"
Good question. Loaded question.
Have we, really, been left with a situation in which the only way to exorcise those 'privileges' is to exercise them? Do you think? Do you wanna think?
Your question is worth closer examination, and not just through a superficial black & white filter contrasting theoretical partisan politics & propensities.
Yes, how, in practice, historically, have democratic principles or "liberal" priorities been advanced in American government?
Have 'executive privileges' lent themselves well to that, or has it been via other dynamics of american democracy through which this has managed to occur? Do these 'powers' and 'privileges' lend themselves to that at all, or abysmally not, implicitly, by design?
I think to a great extent you are missing the reality. A democratic president will still be facing a "press" that will support the fundamental assumptions of the right. The effective press is now primarily the electronic media which is a regulated forum. to the extent there is a printed press it is no longer in the hands of many it is concentrated in the hands of a few. If a Pres. Biden or Obama or Edwards or Clinton tried the same sort of tactics Limbaugh would be on his usual 15 hours a week, Hannity his etc decrying to the heavens the dictatorial actions. the papers would cover it as that story. Remember Monica. this is not really a two way street. It runs only to the right.
Face it! The press are like the Neocons trying to blame someone else for their support of an Administation that has been totally wrong about EVERYTHING!
The MSM is a disgusting,lying bunch of so called reporters and commentators that think they are in Berlin and it's 1937
This is why we MUST impeach. Declaring the tyranny illegal is only way to "unbuild" this Frankenstein.
Impeachment is not going to happen. Dodd said that his first act as President would be to restore the constitution. That means giving up some accrued presidential power.
Will Hillary and Obama take that pledge? Rudy, btw, would make Bush look downright moderate (I am a New Yorker).
There will have to be impeachment and accountability or there will be revolution. Such is history. The abuses being visited on the USA are very similar to the reason the founders told George I to go stuff it.
231 years later, it has not been forgotten. We the People did it once before, we can do it again.
More chilling insight to ponder as this slow motion train wreck approaches its' inevitable conclusion. Your comment, "Bush and Cheney won" is the most liberating of any i've seen for six years. They won everything they set out to win and they're gleefully passing the baton on to the next controllers. It was a rout.
"Lucky" next controllers.
To take control of a spent, corrupted, over mortgaged, diseased, wreck of a country.
Hope they say "thank you."
(Just me, I"D keep the deposit if I were the landlord.)
Posted September 12, 2007 | 11:22 PM (EST)