'The Wizard of Oz Letter'

April 2 — This was the week the curtain got pulled back on the Bush presidency. In exchange for allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath, President Bush gets to bring along his vice president when he appears  privately before the commission.

A top Republican strategist dubbed the legal document striking the unusual deal “the Wizard of Oz letter” because it strips away the myth that Bush is in charge. Until now, it’s been all speculation about Vice President Cheney’s influence. With the revelation of the tandem testimony, nobody with a straight face can deny Cheney is a co-president or worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush’s strings.

Aside from being fodder for the late-night comics, the arrangement confirms Bush’s inability to articulate anything without a script--or a tutor by his side. There’s a reason  lawyers don’t take testimony in groups. The whole idea is to get individual recollections and then compare stories to uncover contradictions.  Try thinking about it this way: can anyone imagine Bush’s father in a similar situation bringing his vice president? (For those who need a refresher course, the elder Bush was a rocket scientist compared to his son, and the vice president was Dan Quayle.)

Even President Reagan testified alone on the Iran-contra scandal. He didn’t insist on having Vice President Bush sit beside him. Of course, Reagan couldn’t remember much of anything. His faculties were failing as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, which he later revealed. Still, Reagan permitted his testimony to be videotaped.

This is a defining moment in the Bush presidency because it reveals weakness at the top.

What Cheney and the tight circle around Bush are protecting is the myth they have created since 9/11 of a war president astride the world stage. Anybody who punctures that imagery is destroyed. Richard Clarke is only the latest in a series of insiders who have pulled back the curtain. At the center is an incurious president who is so inarticulate that he can’t be left on his own to make a sustained argument on behalf of his policies without falling back on rehearsed talking points and sound bites.

The Democrats must be greatly tempted to lampoon Bush, but they should leave that to Jay Leno and Jon Stewart. John Kerry is smart to stay out of the way when it comes to the 9/11 commission. The Bush strategy is to muddy the picture, castigate Clarke as a disgruntled partisan, and portray his criticisms as nothing but politics. But Clarke’s book is flying off the shelves, and his revelations will be followed later this month by a sequel to “Bush at War” from Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, which the White House is nervously anticipating.

Also due by the end of April is a memoir/expose by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who angered the administration last year when he went public with his finding that Iraq had not sought uranium from Africa. Wilson’s wife was then exposed as a CIA operative by columnist Robert Novak, who was acting on information provided by the administration. Wilson’s book is titled, “The Politics of Truth.”  It could be subtitled: “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

Wilson praises Clarke for how he’s handling himself in the media spotlight. “He’s a ferocious bureaucrat,” says Wilson, “and I mean that in the positive sense of the term. He learned to operate in that environment.” When 9/11 commissioner Jim Thompson confronted Clarke on the gap between what he is saying now and the rosy briefings he gave while working the White House, Clarke explained that was politics. Wilson says an effective response would have been to point out to the many lawyers on the 9/11 commission that White House aides are paid to make the case for the president just as lawyers make the case for their client. “If you can’t abide it, then you step away,” says Wilson. “Clarke was in it for the long haul, to roll back Al Qaeda.”

Clarke said under oath that he would not accept a job with the Kerry campaign, and he asked an activist group (MoveOn.org) to stop using his voice on an ad bashing Bush. What Clarke said has been said before, that the Bush administration was slow to recognize the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that going to war in Iraq was unnecessary and has made us less safe. The difference is who’s saying it. Clark is not some Washington time-server. He’s the ultimate serious guy who knows what he’s doing and cares passionately about countering terrorism. He was Bush’s crisis manager on 9/11, the man who sat in the chair in the Situation Room while other top aides fled to safety.

The person whose reputation got hurt the most during the Clarke counterattack was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who went to the Senate floor to threaten Clarke with perjury. It was crude character assassination, and it opened the door for Democrats to make the same accusation against Condoleezza Rice, who has made more conflicting statements than Clarke. The danger is not that Rice might actually be prosecuted, but the charge is political mud, and it might stick.