If there was doubt that the story of Bush's smirking, snarling, grimacing reaction shots was going to have legs, we have the WaPo's Dana Milbank to thank for wiping those doubts away, and for pointing the story in an especially helpful direction.
Milbank, who has been the frequent target of White House abuse and ostracization for actually daring to occasionally question the shiny, happy media narrative the White House imposes on most of the rest of the press corps, takes his revenge today in a tasty little piece called "Reaction Shots May Tell Tale of Debate: Bush's Scowls Compared to Gore's Sighs".
What's good about the piece, apart from the fact that it cements the story as one that will last into (and, with luck, beyond) the weekend gabfests, is the way it points the rest of the press to connect Bush's debate behavior with the crappy way he's treated the press themselves during his imperious reign. He quietly but powerfully points out that the petulant Bush that 60 million Americans saw for the first time on Thursday night is the same obnoxious Bush that the press has had to deal with for 3 and a half years--rude, dismissive, and contemptuous of those who would dare to question him...
(more in extended copy)
Here are the relevant quotes, buried--as is typical of Milbank's habit of slipping the dagger in between otherwise inoffensive paragraphs--rather deep into the story:
Bush has flashed such expressions -- and worse -- at reporters when they ask him hostile questions. But the public has generally not seen the president's more petulant side, in part because he is rarely challenged in a public venue. He has fewer news conferences than any modern predecessor, the Congress in his party's control, and a famously loyal staff. In rare instances when Bush has been vigorously challenged -- most recently in interviews with an Irish television journalist and a French magazine -- he has reacted with similar indignation.
And,
As with the Gore sighs of 2000, the Bush scowls were at first overlooked by many of the people covering the event. In the press room at the debate site at the University of Miami, the direct television feed of the debate did not have the telltale split-screens and reaction shots that most Americans saw at home.
Milbank is, in effect, spoonfeeding the rest of the media a ready-made theme that it might even run with. The personal foibles and mannerisms of politicos become news when the press (and/or the public) find those little details to be suggestive of a broader thematic (and easily digestible) narrative. Hence, Gore's sighs fit into the (unfair) prevailing media narrative of Gore's snooty elitism, Dean's "scream" fit the already defined narrative of Dean as "too angry," etc, so the press went to town on them and beat them to death. The potential problem with the Bush scowls, from a Dem-partisan perspective, is that a huge chunk of the voting public still (inexplicably) thinks of Bush as an appealing, pleasant, regular-guy personality (I know, I know...), so there isn't an obvious existing narrative into which Americans can fit Bush's unpleasant debate antics. They seem like an aberration, rather than a defining characteristic, and are thus in danger of being discounted by undecided-types as an atypical fluke that can be explained away by exhaustion (which was the excuse Drudge tried to float late last night) or something else.
But Milbank gives his colleagues a clear and tidy narrative that even the dullest of them will recognize, and, because it plays on their own insider-hood, will probably flatter them into pursuing: Bush has always been this way, but we (i.e the press) are the only ones who have actually seen this side of him. Bush's public behavior does fit an existing narrative, but it's one that the press hasn't felt able to report on, or didn't think was sufficiently newsworthy (that's the charitable spin). Until now. Now Bush's meanness and anger is the story, and they have loads of personal anecdotal evidence to fill it in with and keep the story growing. With luck, the Bush grimace story could take a turn toward a rather unexpected--but long overdue--place: Bush's contemptuous treatment of the press and, by extension, the American public.