Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media
by Bill Sammon
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bill SammonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-02-27
ISBN: 1596980028
Number of pages: 357
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Product features:
- Presidency of George W. Bush, World Leaders
Book Reviews of Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media
Book Review: Bill Sammon has set a new standard in Presidential biography
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best campaign memoirs and Presidential biographies I've ever read. Bush supporters should read it to be reminded of just how adept Bush and his team were in exploiting the shrill hysterics of their opposition. Bush detractors should read it to learn that incivility, endless false claims and simply hating the opposition isn't enough to win elections, even when nearly all the media supports you and your candidate.
Bill Sammon is an avowed conservative and an admirer of President Bush. He does nothing to disguise either of these worthy qualities, which sets him apart from others such as Theodore H. White, who pretended to be impartial, while writing hagiographic campaign and presidential biographies. Honesty counts, I think.
The title "Strategery" is drawn from Will Ferrel's routine on Saturday Night Live. The Bush team liked this play on Bush's well-known mangling of the language so well that they adopted it. That's part of the power of the Bush strategy: the ability to laugh at themselves.
Sammon's subtitle is "How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media." The book lives up to the billing.
Sammon begins in March, 2004 (where his earlier wonderful work "Misunderestimated" left off) and ends in late 2005. He covers the 2004 campaign in detail, paying particular attention to Kerry's gaffes as a candidate and media's minimization of them while raising a shrill chorous against Bush, even stooping to lies and forgeries.
CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream media do not come off well in Sammon's recounting of events. Of course, they didn't come off well at the time either. To read again of the total lack of journalistic ethics and basic honesty on the part of CBS, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes in their publicizing of the forged documents deliberately intended to impact on the outcome of the Presidential election is all the more chilling because Mapes and Rather still continue to insist that the documents haven't been "proven" as forgeries and that they may have been fake, but accurate. Sammon does a marvelously entertaining and convincing job of letting the malefactors own words and deeds hang them.
Sammon has had exceptional access to President Bush and his interviews add to the portrait of Bush as a strong and decisive man. That does not mean Sammon paints Bush as infallible; but rather as an admirable man who reaches a decision through discussion and contention and than sticks to that decision, instead of changing direction with the latest batch of polls. Overall Bush comes across as a decent, honorable man who truly believes that the attempt to inculcate democracy in the Middle East nations is a worthy goal.
Sammon renders John Kerry as a bumbling candidate entirely through Kerry's own words and actions. The real story here is how the Bush team, despite an overwhelmingly hostile mainstream media, took those numerous gaffes and got the public to understand that Kerry and the Democrats weren't offering voters the path they wanted to trod. Karl Rove, who is also interviewed for the book, truly deserved Bush's label as "The Architect." Equally meritorious is Ken Mehlmann, the campaign manger.
Where Sammon shines, however, is in his vivisectioning of the mainstream media during the March, 2004 - late 2005 period. Sammon minutely dissects many of the major and some of the minor media outrages of the time, from Newsweek's entirely bogus story of flushing the Koran down the toilet (the ensuing riots costing at least the lives of 15 people for which Newsweek took no responsibility) to the buffoonery of Chris Matthews, a minor league cable broadcaster, who was ripped to shreds by Democrat Zell Miller and Republican Peter King. Sammon records the clear bias of people like Robin Givans at The Washington Post and others who claim to be objective, unbiased journalists. How anyone can read Sammon's dispassionate, fully documented account of so many media outrages and retain a shred of trust in the mainstream media is beyond me.
Of particular merit is Sammon's recounting of the media feeding frenzy relating to the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Sammon refutes the major lies and distortions of the mainstream media, one by one in a convincing manner. Not with a little glee, Sammon points out that Rush Limbaugh, the bette noir of the left, accurately predicted that the left would ultimately blame Hurricane Katrina on Bush, just as they have blamed Bush for everything else. Sure enough, within hours Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was blaming Bush for permitting global warming and claiming that increased hurricane intensity, though legitimate scientific opinion holds that hurricane activity is cyclical and we had been moving through a cycle of increased hurricane activity for decades. Sammon also demonstrates how the mainstream media minimized the ridiculous inaction and mistakes of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, instead (as if one would be surprised) blaming Bush for non-existent events, such as the claimed 20,000 dead, mass rapes and so on. If Sammon was smiling gleefully as he was writing this indictment of big-name journalists, he couldn't be blamed.
Overall, Sammon has written an impressive Presidential biography and campaign history in one volume. I suspect that Sammon's work will survive the test of time better than the work of Theodore H. White and others who have attempted the task. While conservatives will surely appreciate this work simply because it unabashedly supports their cause, the opposition should also read it if for not other reason than to gain insight into why they continuously lose elections. It is not because, as they so often claim, that the electorate is stupid: rather, quite the contrary, it is because the electorate is able to see through the distortions raised by the opposition.
Jerry
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Summary of Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media
Strategery is a term borrowed from a saturday night live skit and self-deprecatingly adopted by the White House for their meetings. White House Correspondent Bill Sammon is borrowing it yet again in his latest account of this unlikely-yet historic-president. It is written with verve and piercing insight by Sammon, who has been granted unprecedented access to President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their most senior advisers. No other journalist has interviewed the president more times than Sammon.Americas Books
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