Mike Deaver and the New York Times

Mike Deaver died of pancreatic cancer today and the NYT had a story about him as a "shaper" of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, Deaver helped to create what we knew about Reagan. But why is it that every GOP president for the Times has some kind of Svengali like image molder? The Times commented that he was "celebrated and scorned as an expert at media manipulation." But that measure of Mr. Deaver is off the mark. Don't democratic presidents also use people who help shape their public image? Clinton relied heavily on focus groups in molding his campaign and indeed his presidency. But that is not seen by media sources like the Times as "shaping" how we understood that president. Every modern president has someone who thinks carefully about how their candidate/president will be portrayed in the media and those people spend a lot of time trying to assure that the media image is favorable. Political campaigns are made up of images. Does anyone actually believe that Gerald Ford was actually a bumbler? As I think I have noted previously, when Ford presented his first budget I was in the White House press briefing room and watched him answer detailed questions about his proposal for almost two hours - without notes or prompts. But the media continued to characterize him as clumsy and not too bright.

What I know about Deaver was that he had a lot less hubris than image managers like James Carville. And also, from what I know he genuinely loved the process of public policy and politics.

I have just finished reading the Reagan diaries - which are quite interesting. Presumably, unless the Times believes that Deaver actually wrote those, the jottings in those eight years are a pretty good reflection of who the president was. Of course, some of what Mr. Reagan wrote in those pages was with an attention that at some point someone else would be reading them. But what you see from the pages is a person who a) genuinely liked people, b) understood the symbolic power of the presidency, but most importantly c) had a pretty good sense of policy and what was important.