Snow: I'm not sure. What often happens is that people ask these open-ended questions, "What mistakes have you made?" But that's gratuitous. The president makes mistakes. Everybody here constantly evaluates this. But when somebody asks a question like that, it's not because they want a balanced response, they want to write a gotcha piece. The president's job is not to sit around and put himself on a couch.
reason: Run through how the messaging works in this White House. If a particular story or disaster breaks, how does the White House decide what it is going to say about it?
Snow: This is not like some previous administrations where people are running around with talking points. You're not going to find—I guarantee you—people using exactly the same phrase because that's not a very convincing way to do public diplomacy. What you've got to do is allow people to speak honestly in their own words. You've just got to do it in a way that is not jarring or inconsistent with what the president is saying. The last thing you want is somebody saying, "Tony Snow said this." I once said that embryonic stem cell research is murder. That was giving my views, not the president's. And so I had to step back and say, "You know what, I gave my opinion."
reason: One of the curious things about your tenure was that you got consistently high marks on your performance from people all over the ideological map. Your approval rating, so to speak, is high. But the president's rating has remained where it was when you took office. Or worse. At various points, it's approached Nixonian levels.
Snow: People have a natural anxiety about the war and that gets visited on the president. But he does not descend into self-pity. He understands the importance of developing public support but he also understands that if, for the sake of getting a slightly better numbers in some public opinion poll, he backed away from Iraq in some dramatic way and the long-term result is that this country is less secure, nobody 25 years from now is going to care about what the public approval ratings. They're going to say, "Why didn't you do your job?"
reason: Are you saying that if a president's policies are unpopular, there's not much that a press secretary can really do to change public perception? How do you see your own contributions to the White House?
Snow: My job is to answer questions pretty much. And to try to make sure that we get the administration's view out. Consider the surge in Iraq: There has been recently some pretty significant change in the public perception about Iraq. That's because the press office has tried to communicate the good news there. But ultimately we live in the reflected glory of the president.
reason: Has press bias contributed to the negative public perception about the president and the war?
Snow: It's clearly a factor. If you went out and gave every reporter a truth serum and asked them if they were Democrat or a Republican, you'd find out that most of them are Democrats. Reporters don't deliberately try to carry the water for political parties but sometimes they don't see your side of the argument. So it's incumbent upon a press secretary to make sure that they do see your side and quite often that is a long-term project. Again, take the case of Anbar. Now it is accepted wisdom that things have changed in Anbar for the better. Four months ago it wasn't. When things started changing, you'd hear the press say that there are no guarantees. It took time, but you have to be persistent.
reason: How do you think the president's relationship with his base has changed over the last year?
Snow: I think he goes up and down. What's interesting is that a lot of people got very skittish about the war and then all of a sudden, what you've seen in the last month is this sense of reassurance because the surge has been working, and there is a sigh of relief. There was a lot of tension over immigration, but if you take a look at the numbers in terms of base Republican support, they're pretty high. If you disaggregate the data, his numbers with the base are about the same as Ronald Reagan's.
reason: The support for the president among Republicans is running at 65 percent [as of the interview]. But according to polls, fewer people identify themselves as Republicans now than before President Bush began his second term. So has the president driven people out of the Republican Party?
Snow: No. Democratic numbers have fallen, too. If you take a look at people's natural party affiliation, that's fallen off dramatically. We've had a really volatile political period where party loyalty has fallen off on both sides on the left and the right. In some ways, this is an artifact of [the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws] because what that did was it reduced the power of the national political parties. You don't have that ability to kind of create this sort of operational coherence that you used to have.
reason: You had been extremely critical of the president before you became press secretary. You made a lot of negative statements about the president, called him a "cipher" on domestic policy, a "classic dime-store Democrat." His policies haven't changed, but your estimation of him has changed quite a bit. Why?
Snow: Well, a couple of things. One is when you get to see somebody in action you get a different view, totally different. Also, we haven't had a lot of the issues on which I was critical that have arisen since I've been here. For instance, on an issue like immigration that I was really passionate about, he took on a lot of Republicans and I'm very proud of what he was doing. When it comes to the war, he's been incredibly steadfast in the face of a lot of people who would like him, really for the sake of polling reasons, to change the way he conducts the war. During my time, it's come down to a handful of key issues such as energy, education, immigration and retirement reform. On all of these, the president didn't do half measures. He's pushing for the right things—regardless of whether he accomplished them or not. I'm fully confident that over time immigration and retirement and all those things, those are the right policies and we'll end up with them.
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