Besides hosting the spin-prep meetings, Charlie Black found other ways to keep busy. While everybody but the press seemed intent on burying those bad old partisan right-wing ultra-conservative mean-spirited hard-edged days of 1992 and 1996, Black was trying to rewrite one of that era's signal episodes. Black helped run President Bush's reelection campaign in '92, and he has an odd recollection of Pat Buchanan's infamous "culture war" speech from that year.
"We were upset with Buchanan," Black told the Washington Post in a story published last week. "He didn't say what he said he would. He threw all that culture war stuff in there without telling us."
Unfortunately, the true story of Buchanan's speech has been told too often and in too many places -- in Newsweek magazine's Quest for the Presidency 1992, for example, and in Witcover and Germond's Mad as Hell -- for old Bush hands to try to make it up from scratch at this late date. Buchanan wrote the speech himself, and then, at the insistence of higher-ups in the Bush campaign, submitted it for approval. And then he delivered it -- just as he wrote it.
Newsweek's book sums up the episode: "In the aftermath, some of the president's shamefaced handlers would try to spin the story that Pat had double-crossed them after all" -- an effort that is apparently still under way. "In fact, everybody who mattered, including Bush himself, had seen it and stamped it APPROVED." Nice try, Charlie.