President Bush Meets With Radio Talkers

Source: nytimes

It appears the natives are getting restless, so the White House had a sit down with some of the biggest names in talk radio...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 — On an overcast Friday morning last month, White House aides ushered an influential group of conservative radio hosts into the Oval Office for a private audience with the president.

For an hour and a half, Mr. Bush discussed his case for the war in Iraq, his immigration proposals and even the personality of his Scottish terrier Barney, who scratched on the door during the session until the president relented and let him into the office, according to several hosts who attended. *snip*

Disgruntlement can now be found not only among the more flamboyant radio voices, like Michael Savage, who raged against Mr. Bush’s proposals on immigration and other issues, but also among more mainstream hosts, like Laura Ingraham, who told her listeners in the wake of the scandal involving former Representative Mark Foley and under-age Congressional pages, “You have to ask yourself, the people who are in positions of power now in the Republican Party, are they able to credibly articulate the conservative agenda to the American people — to rally the base, to rally the country?”

Such questions, coming from such quarters, have created yet another challenge for the White House and the central party leadership as they work to steer Republicans to victory next month in the face of low approval ratings and dissatisfaction among the party faithful.

Strategists on both sides agree that the party’s greatest hope for holding control of Congress now rests with its ability to get core Republicans to vote, and that talk radio, which reaches millions of them, is crucial to the task.

You'll note that instead of actually DOING what the American people want, they just try to influence the influencers. I think this will backfire in unexpected ways.

The challenge now falls to party strategists to persuade the hosts to overcome the frustrations of many hard-core listeners over issues like spending and border security without alienating them.

Hmmm, again, instead of simply attempting to deal with the legitimate anger of the base, they want to "overcome" it. Here's a crazy thought, how about listening to the base instead of ignoring them?

I thought this was the most interesting quote of the piece...

On his Web site, Mr. Medved wrote how Mr. Bush spoke about his commitment to his immigration plan in terms of the fight against terrorism. He said the president made a case that if he were to give in to conservative complaints, “the nation’s enemies (and the rest of the world) would take away the belief that the president could be bullied, prodded, overwhelmed and intimidated.”

Huh? So if president Bush listens to the American people, in specific his conservative base,  that would be the same as giving in to the terrorists? Am I misreading this, cuz that's how it sounds to me. No Mr. President it's not giving in to terrorists to listen to your constituents, it's really not. There was no way in hell a majority of conservatives were going to support your insane plan to fill this nation with a new people and dissolve our borders. It just wasn't in the cards chief, sorry about this little reality break.

We've spoken about this before here, but this is one of my primary complaints about this president. He seems unable to distinguish between Al Quaeda and the American people, that sound crazy? One of the major things that has turned me off of President Bush is his truly unfortunate habit of telling the American people they are stupid, racist, xenophobic, vigilantes, lazy, and that he prefers Mexicans in place of Americans.

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