By Brigitte L. Nacos
The death of Michael Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan’s premier
image maker, and the departure of Karl Rove from the Bush White House highlight
the centrality of public relations, propaganda, and manufactured news in modern
White Houses and administrations. Power-holders and power-seekers have always
tried and often succeeded in manipulating public views about themselves, their
politics, and policies, but Michael Deaver opened a new chapter of public
relations stagecraft during the Reagan years. While major factors during the
presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and his associates
proved the most aggressive and ruthless yet in marketing a president, branding their party, and manufacturing news
to sell their policies—most notably the Iraq War. Calling Deaver rightly “the
media maestro who shaped President Ronald Reagan’s public image,” the Washington
Post’s Patricia Sullivan writes. “As the White House deputy chief of staff
during the first term of the Reagan presidency, Deaver orchestrated Reagan's
every public appearance, staging announcements with an eye for television and
news cameras. From a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office, Deaver did
more than anyone before him to package and control the presidential image.”
Commenting on Karl Rove’s sudden retirement from his White House job, Frank Rich takes his readers back to the summer of 2002, when “Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. ‘You don't introduce new products in August,’ he said sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.” While Card offered a glimpse of the behind-the-scene marketing tricks in selling the war on terrorism--in Iraq, Karl Rove was, no doubt, the brain behind such political maneuvers.
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