On Message   

George W. Bush has been a schmoozer par excellence with the reporters who have covered him regularly. He's also a disciplined politician determined to control the media agenda.

FOR FOUR MONTHS, There was a moment, long after George W. Bush had become the button-down candidate, when he reverted to the old George Bush, the irreverent and approachable politician the Texas media had long known as governor. It was during December's Christmas party at the Governor's Mansion. By then, Bush was president-elect, and his demeanor reflected that newfound status. Standing in the parlor, erect and presidential, he made small talk about the enormous job that lay before him, speaking in dignified and measured tones befitting a man about to move into the White House.
Then, abruptly, he turned to a Texas reporter and screwed up his face in a silly grin.
"You know," he said out of the corner of his mouth, "this is, like, a really big deal."
That's the George W. Bush familiar to the Texas press, open, sometimes goofy and self-effacing, forever pursuing their favor with an unpretentiousness that became his signature style in Austin. Long before national reporters on the campaign trail encountered the charm offensive, Bush had spent six years learning how to cultivate the media in Texas. And in many ways, the style and structure of media relations that Bush and his senior staff developed in Texas carried over to the national campaign‹sometimes to his advantage, sometimes not. Now, in the White House, his penchant for control has taken over.
As governor, Bush seemed to enjoy engaging reporters in banter at news conferences. When reporters called his press shop seeking comment for a story, he sometimes returned the phone calls himself and, typically, would linger on the line awhile to swap political gossip. He invited reporters to his Capitol office to see his immense autographed baseball collection. He'd poke his head out the window of his car in downtown Austin, yelling a greeting at a startled reporter on the sidewalk. He used the tools that prominent sources so often use: flattery and attention and a dollop of inside information.
"Watching how Bush worked the press parties at the Governor's Mansion was remarkable," says Harvey Kronberg, editor of the Quorum Report, a political newsletter. "He'd remember the reporters' kids, who were soccer players the year before, who was in the band or whatever it might be. It was so totally disarming. Whatever your politics or your editorial predisposition might be, you couldn't help but have personal affection for the guy, because he was reaching so far beyond in being able to retain those kind of details."
When a local television producer, who was married to a political columnist, died of cancer, Bush attended the funeral. When a Capitol correspondent found himself out of work after his Houston newspaper went out of business, Bush called to commiserate and to offer him a job. When the son of a reporter wanted to film the governor as part of a class project on UFOs, Bush obliged, sitting with mock seriousness at his desk and acknowledging--on video--evidence that aliens could be walking the Earth.
But there was more to the Bush Method than attention and an aggressive bonhomie, say those who watched the governor's tenure in Texas. There was control. Karen Hughes, the governor's press secretary and now counselor to the president, imposed a strict discipline inside the office aimed at shaping the message--a precursor of the new White House press office. Calls to the governor's division directors and even some state agency heads were redirected to the press office. Leaks were rare. Whenever the governor found himself straining for a point, it was not uncommon for Hughes to step in and begin fielding the questions herself.
Once, when a reporter began quizzing the governor about campaign contributions at a news conference about faith-based organizations, Hughes stepped forward from the side of the room and, her voice booming, took over. All heads turned to her. The governor, long accustomed to this, stopped talking. Standing next to Bush was author and ethics maven William Bennett, whose face reflected a bemused fascination not only with Hughes, who handled the prickly questions and steered the conversation back on message, but also with the fact that everyone in the room seemed to consider this so ordinary.
"Karen ran an extremely tight ship," says Mark McKinnon, a longtime Texas media consultant who produced Bush's presidential campaign commercials. "They were relatively leak-free and, to the extent you can control information, they did about as good a job as they could."

I T DIDN'T START OUT that way. Despite his background as first son of a politically astute family, George W. struggled in his own early dealings with the Texas media.
In November 1993, after announcing he would challenge Democratic incumbent Ann Richards, the fledgling gubernatorial candidate traveled to San Antonio to speak to a group of suburban school administrators. Bush announced that education would be his top priority. He denounced Richards' handling of public schools. He said the state's education agency under Richards had piled on paperwork requirements, and he vowed to change that. But his big idea was a plan to shift the funding of public schools away from local property taxes. The idea was complicated and fraught with legal, constitutional and fiscal questions.
Bush made his pitch to the school administrators at the Menger Hotel adjacent to the Alamo, then wandered out into the hotel's ornate courtyard, festooned with tropical plants. He moved with a breezy confidence, smiling, shaking hands.
A reporter approached and asked about the education plan. Bush resurrected some sentences from his speech.
Exactly how would his finance plan modify the current school-finance formula? the reporter asked. He didn't know.
How much would it cost? Again, he demurred, saying details had to be worked out.
"Will voters know how much money would be involved before the election?" he was asked.
Bush shifted from foot to foot. "Probably not," he said.
It was clear Bush needed more seasoning. Chief political consultant Karl Rove dispatched the would-be nominee on the small-town Rotary circuit, away from reporters in the Capitol press with their pesky questions. For several months, Bush went to small communities where he honed his campaign speech and did interviews with reporters at small newspapers and radio stations. At the same time, the one-time oilman and baseball team executive immersed himself in private tutoring sessions with an ad-hoc policy team on the gears and levers of state government. Hughes, then executive director of the Texas Republican Party, was hired as press secretary and helped guide a careful, scripted campaign that beat Richards.
"Those first press interfaces were, I thought, pretty awkward and defensive and protective," says Kronberg. "But by the end of his first legislative session in 1995, I thought he was pretty relaxed about us."
There were negative stories: policy initiatives that rewarded big campaign contributors, associates who appeared to benefit financially from state government contracts, the failure of his most substantive tax-cut proposal, a blowup over comments about whether Jews could go to heaven.
From the beginning, Hughes' style was to try to head off negative stories by smothering a reporter prior to publication with a flurry of facts and spin. But once a story ran, she rarely called to complain, unless directed to do so by Bush. In one such case, Bush was so agitated about a Dallas Morning News story at the end of his first legislative session that he directed Hughes to make an early-morning call to the reporter. The flaw, in Bush's eyes, was not that the story had some facts wrong, but that it failed to express how much he was sharing credit with Democrats for legislative successes. It was a theme--bipartisan cooperation in Texas--that Bush wanted in the public record from his early days in office, a theme he would emphasize five years later in his presidential race.
Bush brought to the governor's office a reputation for being thin-skinned, a reputation earned years earlier when he served as an informal adviser to his father in the White House. The word from Washington was that the younger Bush had been overly defensive and sometimes abusive in taking reporters to task for negative stories. But Texas reporters rarely saw that side of Bush. He would occasionally acknowledge an unflattering story, usually with a good-natured jibe. "Pathetic," he offered as a critique of stories about wealthy donors and campaign finance. "Nobody cares."
But if Bush was unhappy with a story, there was never evidence of retribution.
"After some of the negative stuff I wrote about Bush, he was kind of personally chilly for quite some time, but on a professional level, there was never any effort to make sure I was any more out of the loop than any other reporter was being kept out of the loop," says R.G. Ratcliffe of the Houston Chronicle.
For reporters in the Texas Statehouse, there is a high level of competition. At least seven newspapers have full-time staffs in Austin, covering the governor, the Legislature and public policy. The governor's news conferences, like those in other large states, are heavily attended by a battery of TV cameras and about a dozen regular print reporters. Bush made himself available for regular give-and-takes with the media. If he had nothing on his public schedule on a particular day, a reporter could usually catch him on the horseshoe driveway in front of the Capitol at noon when he departed, every day like clockwork, for an hour of exercise at the University of Texas nearby.
"He was the governor of Texas during the most ideal time to be governor of Texas," says Ratcliffe. "There were no major crises that create the kind of furor that normally goes on between the press and a governor. The Texas TV stations had lost an interest in covering government and politics.... Even if the print media did negative stories on Bush, they had no legs because TV didn't pick them up. So his relationship with the Texas press was good because there wasn't anything to make it bad."

A S HE PREPARED TO CAMPAIGN for president, Bush considered how well his serendipitous run in Austin would translate to his dealings with a larger, more voracious circle of media. "It was a new jungle and new animals," says McKinnon.
The first test would come early, in June 1999, on his maiden trip to Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign arranged a news conference under a white tent against the backdrop of New England's coastline in the picture-postcard community of New Castle, New Hampshire.
Thick fog had settled over the coast, obscuring the lighthouse nearby. Every national newspaper, magazine and network had sent reporters. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times sat in the front row. Chris Matthews of MSNBC stood among the cluster of camera crews.
"This was his debut on the national stage, the big moment. And you could smell fear in the air," says McKinnon. "You could sense the press just ready to put him through his paces and see if he was ready. He was up there on the high wire for the first time without a net and some of us in the campaign were very nervous. And I think he was, too."
Although Bush assumed a veneer of confidence as he stepped onto the platform, his body language telegraphed apprehension. He offered stiff answers to the first volley of questions.
"It was almost like one of those Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where all the dials in his brain were surveying the room and downloading information. 'Danger! Danger! Heat-seeking here! Friendly fire over there!' " says McKinnon.
Then, about five minutes into the news conference, McKinnon says, Bush's shoulders started to relax and his arms fell easily at his side. He stepped back and rolled his shoulders slightly, like a quarterback grown comfortable with the turn and spiral of the ball.
"Matthews," Bush said, singling him out in the crowd. "It's good to see the larger personalities are starting to show up."
The fear in the Bush camp began to dissipate. "I remember literally seeing the moment when he physically changed and was saying, 'I can do this,' " McKinnon says.
In the months that followed, Bush sought to cultivate the national press in much the way he had done in Austin--through attention and flattery and by giving reporters the impression they were seeing in his informality a glimpse of the inner man. He gave reporters nicknames and asked about their families. He would emerge nuzzling a Mini-Me doll from the second Austin Powers movie and doing impressions of Dr. Evil. "Zip it!" he said, moving around the campaign plane.
Early on, he was comfortable joking, even about the campaign's dark moments. When his appearance at Bob Jones University in South Carolina threatened his support among Catholics in Michigan, Bush prepared a letter to then-Cardinal John O'Connor, saying he regretted that he had not spoken out against the school's anti-Catholic bias and a rule barring interracial dating. He read the letter solemnly to reporters at the airport in Austin, then climbed aboard the campaign plane.
On board, Bush sought out a couple of Texas reporters. "I can't believe anybody would think I'm an anti-Catholic bigot," he said. When the reporters questioned his judgment for going to Bob Jones at all, Bush pulled out a penknife and, in a self-dramatizing gesture, held it as if to slit his own throat. "What do you want?" he said. "I just ate crow on national TV."
"You just ate Jim Crow, I believe," Ken Herman of the Austin American-Statesman fired back. Bush laughed and, garnering no sympathy, put the knife away.
Inevitably, his efforts at camaraderie would go awry. When Tucker Carlson quoted Bush in Talk magazine using the f-word and insensitively mimicking death-row inmate Karla Fay Tucker, his spokeswoman challenged the account. But Texas journalists weren't surprised by the story. They had heard Bush occasionally use such language in the past, but always in situations that were clearly off the record. However, the rules seemed to be shifting. Stories describing Bush's breezy style gave way to stories about his lack of substance. As governor, Bush had read everything, even the bad stories in the Texas press. Now, the swelling media corps had become so big, its coverage so expansive, it was impossible to read and see everything, so he didn't even try. (See "Ignorance is Bliss")
"What's the purpose?" Bush said one day on the plane. "You're not going to change your stories, and I'm not going to change my ways."
When someone mentioned how a particular television personality had been harsh on him in an appearance on Comedy Central, Bush vigorously shook his head. "No, no, don't tell me." When a reporter offered to read from a piece in the New York Times by liberal columnist Anthony Lewis, Bush recoiled as if struck by lightning. "No way!" he said.
By the end of the campaign, Bush had largely curtailed press access. Worried the media would hijack his message by writing about subjects he didn't want to talk about, Bush stopped holding news conferences. He stopped schmoozing with reporters in the back of the plane. A month before Election Day, he showed up briefly at the doorway separating the campaign staff from the press and led everyone in singing "Happy Birthday" to a television producer who had turned 30.
"That's my news conference of the day," he said, waved and went back to his cabin.
For the Texas reporters, the campaign had evolved in a curious way. There were still the elements of their earliest days covering Bush--his force of personality and a penchant for control. Only now, the balance had tipped toward control.

D URING HIS FIRST MONTH in office, the new president gave every sign that access would be limited.
He embarked on an issue-of-the-week strategy, sometimes at public events beyond the Beltway where he rolled out his agenda in an orderly fashion. As if to bypass the White House press corps, the administration offered local television stations three-minute satellite interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney to sell its $1.6 trillion tax-cut plan. Bush gave his first formal interview not to the New York Times or Washington Post, but to journalists from newspapers in Tennessee, New Mexico and Oregon, among others.
When reporters did see Bush, it was more often in circumscribed settings where he greeted reporters by nickname and sometimes engaged in brief banter.
"It's very, very controlled," says a network producer who followed Bush throughout the campaign. "The advisers and aides who spoke to us during the campaign are always directing you to the press office now.... The actual time you get with him, the time he's in the public eye, is 15 minutes a day."
For the reporters in Texas, Bush's easy access and informality in office provided a window into understanding the man they were covering. With the beginning of the presidential campaign, they wondered aloud to each other when that window might close to them. By the end of the new administration's first month, the indications were it might have closed for everybody.