The Note

ByABC News
June 27, 2003, 9:54 AM

W A S H I N G T O N June 26&#151;<br> -- If you don't have a professional or financial stake in the now-raging debate about media bias (say, Eric Alterman's tuition fund, or Bernie Goldberg's summer share), you can't help but believe that the standard of conduct and coverage to which Bill Clinton was held was too high, and the one for George W. Bush is too low.

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NEWS SUMMARY

We don't know where the bar SHOULD be placed by the political and White House press corps to hold each and every president (and candidate) accountable to the public interest, but we DO know it belongs somewhere between Point B(ush) and Point C(linton).

For the first time in The Note's career, Democrats have joined Republicans in the belief that the press is systematically biased against them, and agitate everyday to try to change things (or work around their media enemies).

The Bush White House tends to leave any griping about press bias to surrogates, while in public, led by Ari Fleischer, they adopt a faux "the press will do its job/we'll do ours" posture.

But put an enterprising reporter in a "hallway close to..(a) meeting room and near what appeared to be a kitchen storage area" while Karl Rove is doing one of his opening-act speeches-for-bundlers (paving the way for a POTUS event), and the de facto campaign manager of Bush-Cheney '00 and Bush-Cheney '04 gives off a different vibe.

The Dallas Morning News' Gromer Jeffers stood outside Karl Rove's CLOSED PRESS briefing in Fort Worth yesterday, and through the capacity of sound to travel through and around closed doors, got the sense from the president's political adviser that there is still a perception of bias extant at 1600 (maybe it's pro-underdog bias, in this case, though ): LINK"Even with the president's popularity, Mr. Rove said, the race will be tough. Early surveys indicate Mr. Bush getting support from less than 50 percent of the public in a matchup with a generic Democratic nominee."

"For starters, Mr. Rove said, the Democratic nominee would become a media darling with The Washington Post , New York Times and political writers."

"'He will be a hero on the evening newscasts,' Mr. Rove said. 'He will be at or ahead of us in the polls.'"

(Mr. Jeffers work is a must-read.)

In a world without Ann Devroy LINK

or an independent counsel law, no president is going to face the kind of relentless you-can-do-no-right scrutiny that Bill Clinton had slapping him in the face every day (and/but we all know he brought some of it on himself too).

But when the New York Times White House reporter leaves Seoul to go (figuratively?) to London to (implicitly) write about how the White House press corps isn't subjecting Bush to high enough scrutiny, well, The Note gets a big laugh out of it.

Writing under a "London" dateline and keying off of all the pressure Tony Blair is feeling over the pre-war justifications of taking out Saddam Hussein, the New York Times ' Sanger and Hoge write powerfully and with a bit of Pogo LINK

about why President Bush isn't facing the same heat that Blair is facing, or that Bill Clinton surely would have faced with the shoe on the other foot: LINK

"In contrast, President Bush has largely brushed off questions about the intelligence as the work of 'revisionist historians.' His Republican allies, unlike Mr. Blair's divided Labor Party, have kept Congressional hearings behind closed doors."

"Mr. Bush's protective press aides have been successful at shielding him from many questions on the subject, but even when reporters had brief access to the president on Tuesday at Camp David, today at the White House they asked about other subjects. 'That would be unimaginable in London, at least in this environment,' a British diplomat said here today."

"Mr. Bush's political aides say that while the issue of potentially tailored intelligence has not gone away, they are more worried about the possible political impact of continuing casualties in occupied Iraq. Within Mr. Bush's foreign policy team, officials say they are more worried about Mr. Blair than about their own boss ."

"On Thursday, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, is expected to describe Mr. Bush's vision of the American-British agenda in the aftermath of Iraq at a speech in London."

"Whether Ms. Rice and others will ever face the kind of questioning that has emerged in London is unclear. Democrats on this side of the Atlantic are now making more pointed charges and raising more specific questions."

"Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war if necessary, declared last week that the president 'misled every one of us,' though he later said he was referring to two specific pieces of intelligence. This morning, Howard Dean, another aspirant for the Democratic presidential nomination, who opposed the war, told a foreign policy forum here that the question was coming down to 'what did the president know and when did he know it.'"

"But on Capitol Hill, such charges do not appear to be resonating very loudly."

The story does not make clear how Mr. Sanger and Mr. Hoge calibrate "resonance."

Oh, and what would the Republican Congress had done if the shoe were on the other foot on this Doug Jehl's New York Times front-page lead?

"The State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today ." LINK

"The report on the trailers was initially prepared for the White House, and Mr. Bush has cited it as proof that Iraq indeed had a biological weapons program, as the United States has repeatedly alleged, although it has yet to produce any other conclusive evidence."

The AP's Ken Guggenheim writes, "The early stages of a House Intelligence Committee's review of prewar intelligence on Iraq has found that the administration ignored doubts about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capability, the panel's top Democrat said." LINKOur guess is that the panel's top Republican would disagree.

The Washington Post 's VandeHei and Eilperin write up the nuts and bolts of the K Street Project (in which Republicans are systematically filling every lobbying job in DC with a party loyalist) in a style that could earn them PhDs in political science (or, perhaps more accurately, anthropology). LINKPresumably, at some point, these two will turn their attention to the extent to which special access and favors are granted to GOP lobbyists in ways that would make Mark Middleton blush one of the three most inexplicably uncovered stories of the 43 era.

Meanwhile, business executives "seek" to restore AmeriCorps funding, while the White House continues to play its "hide" role, for no apparent reason. LINK

Those execs also took out a full-page ad in the New York Times .

The examples keep coming ..(And, no, Craig Shirley, you don't need to remind us of the easily documented liberal bias that allows Democrats to get major breaks in the dominant media in all sorts of cases )

Now, apparently, all it takes to get David Firestone to write a New York Times story about the child tax credit is for Leaders Daschle and Pelosi to write the president a letter. LINKAgain: imagine if Bill Clinton said he was for a program, but didn't move to restore the funding.

So, beyond all this, there is the ONE issue from which no incumbent president can run and hide: the economy.

ABC News' Schindelheim reports that "the government this morning said the economy grew at a slower pace in the first quarter than it previously reported.

The revised GDP for the first three months was 1.4%. This is a bit of a surprise. Economists expected that the number would stay at 1.9%, the May estimate. he government revises the number based on additional data. One of the reasons for the downward revision was that the actual numbers show that businesses spent less than first estimated on investments."

Beyond the staffs of the Democratic Hill leadership, the cooler, smarter heads in the Democratic party all believe that it will take a strong presidential nominee to make any of this stick, and amidst their growing fundraising freakouts (Ah, the pressure!!), the candidates have (mostly) headed out to see who can become the reigning Wizard of Westwood.

Tonight, live from the UCLA campus in Southern California, the California League of Conservation Voters and its national parent organization, the League of Conservation Voters, will host the first presidential candidate forum to focus on environmental issues. If the Hill schedule cooperates, you just might be able to see this live on C-SPAN.

The forum takes place the day before Christine Todd Whitman completes her tenure at the EPA, where she has had to battle the harsh criticism of the center-left environmental lobby against the Bush Administration's policies.

We expect the candidates will attempt to outflank each other by brandishing their pro-environment credentials to woo this core group of mostly Democratic activists. 500-600 people are expected to attend.

Confirmed participation thus far: Braun, Dean, Graham, Kerry, Lieberman, and Sharpton.

The moderator is Los Angeles-based newscaster Warren Olney. He will be joined on a panel by : Steve Curwood, host of National Public Radio's "Living on Earth;" Pilar Marrero, Politics Editor for La Opinion; and San Jose Mercury News reporter Paul Rogers, and KABC reporter John North.

Governor Dean campaigns in California today before tonight's LCV forum. Senator Graham has a fundraiser at the home of college administrator/developer Tom Safran in Los Angeles after the LCV forum.

Congressman Kucinich won't be in California, instead he'll be at Johns Hopkins University tonight with Ralph Nader for a Democracy Rising forum.

REAL political insiders have already gotten the scoop on dueling polls (the R one from POS and the D one from Greenberg/Carville), casting radically different lights on the president's re-election prospects.

Oh, to clarify for those of you who misunderstood: we don't actually have a show on ABC Family on cable.

Those of you in the second tier should have the double dose of data by the time the first round of the NBA draft is over tonight.

Yesterday's Note lead was our little way of joking about this Los Angeles Times story. LINK

We are sorry for any inconvience our attempt at humor might have caused, but thank you for sampling ABC Family!!

Bush-Cheney re-elect:

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Sree Roy asks: "What do Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush have in common?"

"Answer: Well, beyond the obvious first lady connection, both visited Philadelphia this week as part of whirlwind tours that focused on books." LINK"During Bush's visit yesterday, she raised almost $600,000 at a Bush/Cheney '04 luncheon in the ballroom of the Rittenhouse Hotel. The event drew 400 people, including master of ceremonies David Girard-diCarlo, chairman of the law firm Blank, Rome, Comisky & McCauley and one of President Bush's top fund-raisers; Aramark chief executive officer Joseph Neubauer; lawyers Bob Asher and Alan Novak; business executives Fred Shabel, Brian Tierney, and Mary Dougherty; and city Republican Chairman Vito Canuso."

"Like his predecessor five years before, President Bush will visit an infamous former slave port during a trip to Africa next month," the Associated Press reports. LINKBill Safire invokes the Name of the Rove in his latest column on the FCC and media conglomeration. LINK

MoveOn:

Remember: results released at time TBD tomorrow.

Double or triple MoveOn voting?

Very hard to do, say the MoveOn people.

(a) you have to be a valid MoveOn member to get a ballot. Someone could theoretically create several fictitious identities (names, addresses, phone numbers) and obtain extra ballots, but MoveOn would probably figure it out and especially so if there were suddenly a glut of new members close to the election.

(b) the MoveOn folks temporarily turned off a "You Voted Twice" notification e-mail to improve their server speed, but they insist that people who submitted two ballots would only see one of them counted.