Bush's Plea for Attention

But here's the twist: "The degree to which the White House is struggling to regain control over the political conversation was demonstrated Tuesday when Bush aides distributed excerpts of the president's tough-on-Democrats speech before he landed in Georgia. Unlike previous administrations, the Bush White House keeps tight control over the president's speeches, usually handing out only the most significant ones in advance and even then only a few minutes beforehand.

"On Tuesday, though, the parts of Bush's remarks that went after Democrats on taxes were given to the reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One and also, to maximize their exposure, disseminated by e-mail to hundreds more on the White House press list."

Here's the text as delivered.

The e-mailed excerpt was so partisan that it made me wonder: Is there any distinction between the Republican National Committee press office and the White House's?

You might expect e-mails from the latter to have some tenuous connection to governing -- leaving the overt politicking to the former. But that is apparently no longer the case.

Economy Watch

Michael Abramowitz and Peter Baker write in The Washington Post: "The president will step up his efforts to tout the economy at a White House event Wednesday, when officials said he will announce that he has met his target of cutting the deficit in half over five years -- three years ahead of schedule. . . .

"One reason the goal was achieved is that the bar was set low. As the economy improved, the $521 billion deficit never materialized, and the government ended 2004 with a $412 billion deficit. Moreover, Bush's policies, including the tax cuts and war spending, helped wipe out the surplus that his administration inherited from the Clinton administration in 2001; Democrats point out that the government was supposed to be running a $300 billion surplus this past year, so in effect, they say, there has been a downward swing of more than half a trillion dollars. . . .

"White House officials hailed the improving short-term budget picture as a vindication of President Bush's tax-cutting agenda, though the long-term prospects are considerably bleaker, given the escalating costs of health-care and retirement programs and, in the view of many economists, the red ink produced by tax cuts."

Let's review a few basics: The fact that tax cuts were followed by increased revenue does not justify the causal relationship that Bush and others have attempted to assert. Even the administration's own economists grudgingly concede that the tax cuts did not pay for themselves. And the elephant in the room, so to speak, is that Bush's huge deficits (compared to Clinton's surpluses) were caused by the government spending way more than it took in. Bush's tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, will have to be paid back by future generations.

North Korea Watch

As with many other foreign policy issues these days, the debate over what to do about North Korea inevitably turns to how things got so bad in the first place.

Did the Clinton approach amount to failed appeasement, as the White House would have you believe? Or did it in fact succeed in containing a threat that was then unleashed by Bush's reversal of U.S. policy?

Anne Gearan writes for the Associated Press: "North Korea's apparent nuclear weapons test may bear out the warnings of Bush administration hard-liners that the reclusive regime can never be trusted, but it also forces an examination of whether the silent treatment those same hard-liners have given North Korea for years has backfired. . . .