The Note: White House Road Trips

May 9, 2007— -- The White House has two crucial storylines to sell today -- one in Iraq, one in Kansas -- and is sending the top dogs to make the sales. But as with so many aspects of the unpopular war in Iraq, it's not clear that the public is ready to buy what they're pitching.

Vice President Dick Cheney is in Baghdad, in an unannounced visit aimed at delivering a stern message to the Iraqi government -- and bucking up the confidence of the American people. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, traveling with Cheney, hadn't landed in Iraq before pronouncing the Iraqi parliament's upcoming two-month break "impossible to understand." As a "senior administration official" told reporters on Air Force Two this morning -- nothing to suggest that his cufflinks read "RBC" -- that the message to the Maliki government will be: "We've got to pull together. We've got to get this work done. It's game time." Cheney and other US officials have an 11 am ET press conference scheduled. LINK

President Bush is headed to Greensburg, Kan., in a choreographed visit aimed at displaying a robust federal response to a tragedy – and erasing memories of the response to Hurricane Katrina. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.) quickly blamed the Iraq war for depleting the National Guard's manpower and equipment, in a stark display of the unpredictable politics of war. That prompted a sharp response from the White House, and while the dust is already settling, it felt like Katrina again for a few hours. "The debate was reminiscent of the Bush administration's skirmishes with Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, also a Democrat, after Hurricane Katrina," write Susan Saulny and Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. LINK

The Bush administration's core problem is that the public is starting to tune out a president and vice president whose approval ratings are near record lows. It all comes back to Iraq: The latest USA Today/Gallup Poll shows the public unconvinced that staying in Iraq helps in the fight against terror, or even in keeping Iraq from descending into civil war. The results "underscore the limited traction the Bush administration's arguments have gotten as White House officials and congressional Democrats negotiate an interim bill to finance the war," Susan Page and William Risser write in USA Today. LINK