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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Inevitably, either discomfort or romance arises from this kind of codependency. While Bush was running for president and the miles and days clicked off on the campaign trail, the candidate and his word worker were inseparable. Hughes appeared in almost every photo of the candidate. On each flight to the next venue, she sat next to him, leaning in to talk, confide and counsel. This kind of intimacy might lead lesser adults into precarious territory. Bush and Hughes, however, were oblivious to the growing perception among the traveling press entourage that they were more than just friends and political confederates. When someone finally advised them of how their kinship might be misinterpreted, the campaign responded with an odd maneuver. Hughes brought her son onto the campaign jet and home-schooled him out on the hustings.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience for him," she told reporters. "He wants to go everywhere I go."
The press corps suspected, though, that Hughes' son's arrival on the plane was a direct message to us and the wider world that there was no hanky-panky between her and the boss man. The fact that this development coincided with an increased profile in the campaign by Laura Bush was probably a part of the same communications strategy.
Despite her former career as a journalist, Hughes has cultivated an absurd, counterintuitive notion that she can either control or strongly influence what is reported. Of course, she ought to know better, but this does not preclude her from persistently trying to write stories for reporters. She relaxed -- momentarily -- when conservative writer and commentator Tucker Carlson came to Austin to interview Bush. The piece Carlson filed for the now defunct Talk magazine was not what she had anticipated from someone whose politics were expected to be like Bush's.
Carlson, a floppy-haired antagonist of progressives, wasn't supposed to be hard on Karen's man. In fact, in an interview with Salon last year, the CNN host said his wife was worried that his story might appear to be "sucking up." Bush, knowing Carlson's political predisposition, lifted the shades hiding his true beliefs and offered a clearer view of himself to the reporter. Carlson's story described how Bush swore freely and mocked condemned death-row inmate Karla Faye Tucker. He told Salon that he was astonished by how Hughes responded to his article in Talk.
"It was very, very hostile," Carlson said. "The reaction was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan to begin with. Then I heard that [on the campaign bus], Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane. I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness."
When cornered, Hughes dissembles. But she is rarely cornered. Nonetheless, she seems to have lost her ability to distinguish between the real world and the red, white and blue movie playing on a loop in her head; it's a drama where "W" is the hero and crowds are cheering him as a savior while the national anthem plays as the soundtrack. This is considerably more than a political skill. It's more of a serious psychological tic. Even when confronted with a videotape or a transcript contradicting her recall, Hughes still finds denial a viable political tool.
During an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Hughes appeared to compare pro-choice supporters to terrorists, then later denied precisely what she had said.
"And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions," she told Blitzer. "And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own."
Rarely good with a follow-up, Blitzer let this rank assertion slip past unchallenged. The Washington Post, however, held Hughes' nose to her own words. Regardless, she still was unable to see how she had used the war on terrorism in an analogy that practically put pro-choice supporters in an al-Qaida training camp saying evening prayers with Osama bin Laden.
