Bush Press Conference, Press Fans Tear Hair

There's been lots of whining by disappointed followers of the Washington press, which got its sad fanny kicked by George Bush during the press conference this week. Just as it used to be more fun to tease Red Sox partisans than to watch an actual Red Sox game, there's a lot more to be enjoyed in the mournful curses going up from the witnesses than there was in the press conference itself. The most energetic imprecations, as always, came from Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler. Somerby, between kicking the walls of his den and breaking #2 pencils in half, scripted and rescripted questions the press corps should have asked. Somerby is always well-informed and entertaining, even if the repetitious fury of his insults seems to stem from bruised idealism and disappointed love. He has ñ or at least once had - higher ideals for the press. He hates to see it reduced to this state. Like any fan, Somerby has scapegoats, who almost always perform as expected. At one of the Democratic primary debates this spring, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times really did ask this question: BUMILLER: "Really fast, on a Sunday morning, President Bush has said that freedom and fear have always been at war, and God is not neutral between them. Heís made quite clear in his speeches that he feels God is on Americaís side. Really quick, is God on Americaís side?" You can find Somerby bewailing it here. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, thought the President's press conference went fairly well. This weblog, which he calls The Purgatory Chronicles, has a lot of straightforward, even wise commentary on public affairs. Nixon apparently manages to maintain his blog on an old IBM PCjr with the original chicklet keyboard. Remarkable. Nixon's take on the press conference:
(Full post is here.)
NIXON: "One of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam was that many Americans had lost confidence in what their Government told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy. "Bush's press conference was a solid move in that direction. The policy wonks in foggy bottom will be dissapointed at the thinness of it, but the broader electorate will take heart from his directness and plain-spokenness."

Dr. Rice's Grammer Jammer

Focused on details, as always, I listened to Dr. Condoleezza Rice's congressional testimony this morning with admiration. One sentence especially impressed me. In it, Dr. Rice used an astoundingly agile combination of conditional and subjunctive moods in the past tense and in the passive voice to deny any responsibility for security failures before the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Let others dissect the content of her remarks. I am convinced that they essential message is conveyed by the form of this brilliant fragment. THE SETTING The conversation here is between former Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer, and the commission's star witness, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. THE CONTEXT Roemer asks Rice if it was her job to press the FBI to respond to warnings of an impending terrorist attack. THE QUOTE

If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something... I would have been expected to be asked to do it.

THE DOUBLE WHAMMER GRAMMER JAMMER Let's try to identify the subject of this sentence. Is it "I", that is, Dr. Rice? Clearly it is Dr. Rice who "needed to do something." But who is the person or persons who had "any reason to believe"? Is this also Dr. Rice? If so, then the first part of the sentence means: "If there was any reason for me to believe I needed to do something..." So far so good. But now we get to the second part of the sentence. "...I would have been expected to be asked to do it." Expected by whom? Perhaps by the President, perhaps by her staff, perhaps by others at the White House, perhaps by the public, were we to every find out the details. But at the very least, by herself. So, in this minimal reading, the sentence becomes:

I would have expected somebody to ask me to do it.

Thus: "If there was any reason for me to believe I needed to do something, I would have expected somebody to ask me to do it." We have now purged the passive voice, but the conditional and subjunctive moods remain. ("would have expected," etc.) I don't think the meaning suffers if we get rid of the cloudy phrasing. Here goes:

If I needed to do something, somebody would have asked.

The passivity of the statement is no longer an artifact of awkward grammar, but an expression of Dr. Rice's state of mind. She did not take action because she was not asked. This is exactly the passivity that Richard Clark complains of in his book. The harmony of form and content is not easily achieved. I am struck by the way Dr. Rice's real passivity fades out against the backdrop of her bureaucratic speech. The full transcript here.