Our Weekly Dose of Frank Rich

It's interesting that Frank Rich used to hold the very influential post of theater columnist for The New York Times. I'm not sure it's true anymore, but it was once the reality of Broadway life that the Times critic had the power to make or break a production, and that was certainly the case during Rich's tenure. But after a number of years of writing about the theater, Rich wanted to move on to broader cultural topics, and so he did. He wrote about culture for a while, but then he found more and more that his subjects tended to fall into the political arena, so for a fair amount of time, now, he's been writing about that. But as his column today--"From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You 'Axis of Evil'"--makes clear, he's really gone back to the subject matter he started with. After providing the by now familiar litany of the Prez's foreign policy failures, Rich continues:

But for all the administration's setbacks, its core belief in P.R. remains unshaken. Or at least its faith in domestic P.R. (It has never cared about the destruction of America's image abroad by our countenance of torture.) That marketing imperative, not policy, was once again the driving vision behind the latest Iraq offensive: the joint selling of the killing of Zarqawi, the formation of the new Maliki government, the surprise presidential trip to the Green Zone and the rollout of Operation Together Forward to secure Baghdad more than three years after its liberation from Saddam.

Operation Together Forward is just the latest model of the Axis of Evil gimmick. In his Rose Garden press conference last month, Mr. Bush promised that this juggernaut of crack Iraqi troops and American minders would "increase the number of checkpoints, enforce a curfew and implement a strict weapons ban across the Iraqi capital." It's been predictably downhill ever since. After two weeks of bloodshed, Col. Jeffrey Snow of the Army explained that the operation was a success even if the patient, Iraq, was dying, because "we expected that there would be an increase in the number of attacks." Last week, the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, allowed that there would be "adjustments" to the plan and that the next six months (why is it always six months?) would be critical. Gen. George Casey spoke of tossing more American troops into the Baghdad shooting gallery to stave off disaster.

So what's the latest White House strategy to distract from the escalating mayhem? Yet another P.R. scheme, in this case drawn from the playbook of fall 2003, when the president countered news of the growing Iraq insurgency by going around the media "filter" to speak to the people through softball interviews with regional media outlets. Thus the past two weeks have brought the spectacle of Mr. Bush yukking it up at Graceland, flattering immigrant workers at a Dunkin' Donuts, patronizing a children's lemonade stand in Raleigh, N.C., and meeting the press in such comfy settings as an outside-the-filter press conference (in Chicago) and "Larry King Live." The people, surely, are feeling better already about all that nasty business abroad.

Or not. The bounce in the polls that once reliably followed these stunts is no more. As Americans contemplate the tragedy of Iraq, the triumph of Islamic jihadists in "democracies" we promoted for the Middle East, and the unimpeded power plays of Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they see reality for what it is. Gone are the days when "Mission Accomplished" would fly. Barring a miracle, one legacy of the Bush Iraq-centric foreign policy will be the mess that those who come next will have to clean up.

It's never been a surprise that politics has elements of showbiz, but it's a bit disheartening when it becomes nothing but. And not very good showbiz, at that. (Thanks this week to donkey o.d. for the link.)