"What You're Reading Is Wild Speculation"

Kerry Howley | April 10, 2006

So said President Bush during a pro-WoT speech I dropped in on this morning at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Without explicitly pointing to this Seymour Hersh article on White House plans to hit Iran, he talked up "a multinational approach to asking clear questions." The talk was brief, pro-freedom, anti-terrorist. More interesting was the townhallish Q&A afterward. He jumped at a chance to defend his decision to declassify the July 2003 intelligence report on Iraq. And he struck a blow against micro-managers everywhere when he said he couldn't answer two questions -- one astute question on sex-trafficking, another on private military contractors -- because he delegates such things to other people. Bush came off pretty well, if only because he was set against a backdrop of stuttering grad students who had serious trouble differentiating between defending their respective theses and asking straight questions. Except, that is, for the first kid, who boldly asked, "As aspiring policy makers, do you have any advice for us?" Bush's response: Ignore the polls.

Comments

|4.10.06 @ 7:04PM|#

Kerry - shame on you for printing such wild speculation.

|4.10.06 @ 7:25PM|#

Lo. Yes. All those Republican polling firms that went unused during 2000 and 2004. If this guy thinks his campaigns were based on ignoring the polls, then he really is clueless. The RNC and his campaign spent millions upon millions in focus groups and testing for their messages.

Moorlock|4.10.06 @ 7:31PM|#

Careful, you're about to swallow some spin: Dubya didn't "declassify the July 2003 intelligence report on Iraq" - he authorized the selective leaking of portions of it.