Bush Actually Expects To Recover Politically

Today's Washington Post has an article detailing the administration's attempt to polish the turd that the Bush Presidency has crapped out this year.

The White House is attempting to rally the President's approval ratings in the face of the Iraq debacle and the extra-legal NSA spying program.

The Post article is basically a recap of the year's setbacks for the administration, and the public relations campaign that has been recently launched to salvage the sinking ship.

The cornerstone of the spin meisters is to convince the people that the Iraq war is winnable:

The Iraq push culminated the rockiest political year of this presidency, which included the demise of signature domestic priorities, the indictment of the vice president's top aide, the collapse of a Supreme Court nomination, a fumbled response to a natural disaster and a rising death toll in an increasingly unpopular war. It was not until Bush opened a fresh campaign to reassure the public on Iraq that he regained some traction.

(...)

As Bush focused on Social Security the first half of the year, the cascading suicide bombings in Iraq played out on American television screens. It was summer by the time Bush decided to shift public attention to Iraq. A speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., failed to move the political needle. Bush then escaped to Texas for August -- a vacation shadowed for weeks by a dead soldier's mother named Cindy Sheehan, then brought to an abrupt halt by Hurricane Katrina.

Plans to rebuild public confidence on Iraq were shelved as the president was consumed by the hurricane and the fiasco over Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination. Then after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was charged with perjury in the CIA leak case, Democrats forced an extraordinary closed-door Senate session to demand further investigation of the roots of the Iraq war.

That proved a galvanizing moment at the White House, according to a wide range of GOP strategists in and out of the administration. Rove, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House strategic planning director Peter H. Wehner urged the president to dust off the 2004 election strategy and fight back, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. White House counselor Dan Bartlett and communications director Nicolle Wallace, however, counseled a more textured approach. The same-old Bush was not enough, they said; he needed to be more detailed about his strategy in Iraq and, most of all, more open in admitting mistakes -- something that does not come easily to Bush.

I, for one, do not believe recent poll numbers showing a drastic improvement in Mr. Bush's approval ratings. It simply doesn't make any sense. The Iraqi elections turned out as poorly as expected, despite assertions to the contrary. Plamegate and the NSA scandal are heating up. Clearly, something else is at work here.

One of the most endearing traits of the American people is optimism about the future. The administration knows this and is trying to appeal to this aspect of the American character. The war, the apologists are saying, will turn out successfully if we stay the course. The PR effort relies on the people being more optimistic than realistic.

The American public, however are not the suckers the administration takes them to be.