The Bush Team: Losing Control of the Spin

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The original idea was intended to combat the lingering public sentiment that Bush isn't experienced or serious enough for the job. But the effect has often been to make the President appear removed from the people--more concerned with touting his tax cut to Congressmen than projecting the regular-guy image voters responded to during the campaign. Hughes is brewing a remedy. Beginning this week, when Bush attends an inner-city block party in Philadelphia on July 4 --and continuing through meetings next week with families designed to show his concern for their health-care problems--Hughes will try to put the compassion back in Bush's conservatism. "We're moving to a second stage," she told TIME last week. "He's going to talk about bigger themes." On the agenda through August: a focus on cultural issues--promoting character education in schools, supporting faith-based charities--that cut across political lines.

Democrats are giddy about the opening Bush has given them. They insist the White House can't solve its problem simply by sending him to national parks. "Every politician who gets in trouble thinks it's how they're saying things instead of what they're saying," says Paul Begala, who saw his share of trouble as an adviser to Bill Clinton. In 1994, as Clinton pressed his health-care overhaul and lurched toward a wipeout in the midterm elections, his advisers insisted it was the delivery, not the content, that was turning off the public. "Guess what? It was the content," says Begala. "So we changed. We had to." Bush's predicament is not so dire. Robert Teeter, co-author of the nbc News/Wall Street Journal poll that caused some anguish in the White House last week, says there's no need for the Bush team to panic. "People are still forming their opinions of him," says Teeter, a Republican. "All in all, he's in reasonably good shape."

Still, Hughes is taking the challenge seriously. It's in her nature. An Army brat whose father was the last U.S. commander of the Panama Canal Zone, Hughes, 45, is the most powerful woman ever to hold a White House job. A former local TV reporter, she has a keen sense for the American vernacular, and she channels it directly into Bush's mouth. In February, when speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote an elegant, ornate script for the President's first address to Congress, Hughes marveled at its beauty--and then rewrote most of it in the plain language the President feels comfortable speaking. It was easily his best speech.

Not every event has gone so well. After winning on the tax cut, Bush held an elaborate signing ceremony in the East Room--on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. "It got zero coverage," says an aide. And the designated high point of Bush's trip to Europe last month--his speech in Warsaw calling for NATO expansion and a unified Europe--came a day before his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, so the press ignored it.

Sometimes the messenger is the problem. The White House touted an event at a park near Birmingham, Ala., last month as an important talk on conservation, but the President gave a flat, disjointed speech that devoted five minutes to the subject. He seemed most interested in getting to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a three-day weekend--his sixth visit in less than six months as President. It didn't help that his promise to fully finance the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act was subverted by reports that his budget calls for cuts in a host of other conservation programs.

Some Republicans think Bush won't overcome the perception that he's too beholden to moneyed special interests until he picks a fight with one of them. What Bush needs, says a G.O.P. strategist, is a battle with Big Business. "They haven't given anyone reason to believe Bush isn't doing the bidding of corporate America," says the strategist. "They need a brawl." Asked about this, Hughes quickly shakes her head. "It's not our style to pick fights." Then she pauses and seems to think about it. Maybe it's time for a change.

With Reporting By John F. Dickerson, Karen Tumulty And Douglas Waller/Washington