Nobody cares that Bush can't speak

A Chicago Tribune columnist says the press is unduly protecting Bush by not revealing how inarticulate and "mangled" his speeches and statements are. Here's a nice long excerpt from the column, for those too irritated to fill out one more damn site registration form:

You don't believe it's happening? Well, then, tell me about the furor over W's speech last week to a joint meeting in Washington of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America.

You didn't hear about it?

That's the proof.

If the press were not protecting Bush, you'd have read in your Chicago Tribune--or Washington Post or New York Times or Wall Street Journal or USA Today--that he delivered one of the most confusing, inarticulate public addresses since ... well, some people would say since his press conference a week earlier.

As it was, those hopelessly biased reporters who cover Bush overlooked the mangled syntax, penetrated the rhetorical fog and extracted some usable lines from the dross and manufactured stories that had the president sounding, if not quite statesmanlike, then at least intelligible.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller led with Bush's response to a poll that showed the majority of Americans expect another terrorist attack in the U.S. before the November election. "Well, I understand why they think they're going to get hit again," Bush was quoted as saying. "This is a hard country to defend."

The Washington Post focused on his remarks about Iran's effort to acquire nukes. "The Iranians need to feel the pressure from the world that any nuclear weapons program will be uniformly condemned--it's essential that they hear that message," the president was quoted.

Neither The Wall Street Journal nor the Tribune carried a story about the speech per se, although the Tribune carried an Associated Press story that wove one quote from the speech into a story on the unexpectedly high costs of the Iraqi excursion. "The Iraqi people are looking at Americans and saying, `Are we going to cut and run again?'" the quote ran. "And we're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office."

I can't prove it, but I would bet that most of the editors and publishers went away from the speech wondering why Bush, who long ago proved that he is no extemporaneous speaker, hadn't ordered up an address for the occasion from his stable of White House speechwriters. I heard more than one of those in attendance say the same thing: "He wasted an opportunity."

But you didn't read about any of that, because the reporters, trained to seek meaning and the meaningful in any utterance by the president, focused on what could be understood.

Bush has benefited from this journalistic professionalism throughout his presidency. In a column almost two years ago, in July 2002, I quoted the complaint of a reader who claimed we had misquoted the president's statement in a press conference denying any "`malfeasance' in his business dealings prior to becoming president."

"The word that he actually used ... sounded to me something like `misfeance'--something which is not a word in any dictionary I've ever seen," the reader, Sean Barnawell of Chicago, wrote. "I feel the Tribune should not be in the business of `cleansing' what the president says in order to make him sound more articulate than he is."

Yes, we all know Bush is a fumblemouth. And we all know there's a vast gap the size of the Grand Canyon between the right wing's description of the press as the "liberal media" and the left wing's impression that the mainstream media is merely the mouthpiece of corporate interests.

But I think I know why Bush and Co. are not worried about the president's inability to spreak Engrish. It's because they know voters have already made their choices. There's a 48-48 split, and nobody in either camp is going to change their minds based on something Bush or Kerry say. People are already set in stone. There's a tiny group in the middle who can't decide whether to vote for Nader, Kerry or nobody at all. And while they may decide the election, they're not paying attention to Bush either. So Bush can go up to the microphone and speak Martian and not even Karl Rove will care.