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"FacebookPinterest\n\nDan Bartlett was there from the start: first as a 22-year-old consultant to George W. Bush's campaign for Texas governor, then as his policy adviser, then as rapid-response director for his presidential bid, and finally as the Bush administration's wunderkind communications strategist and the aide closest to the president's ear. And now he's jumping ship, going the way of other longtime Bush loyalists Karen Hughes, Scott McClellan, and Harriet Miers.\n\nThis June, just a few hours after Bush named Ed Gillespie the new counselor to the president, we asked Bartlett, 36, to reflect on those times when the administration's communications shop hasn't exactly done a heckuva job.\n\nLet's talk about the war. You've been the White House communications czar ever since the run-up. Where do you feel like there was a failure to communicate\n\n There was never a more benign incident that turned into a bigger messaging problem than \"Mission Accomplished.\" It set the wrong tone for what became a protracted, difficult mission. If there was ever a do-over, that would be it.\n\nDidn't you have a conference call with Scott Sforza, the White House production guy, who was aboard the USS Lincoln\n\n It literally was their mission motto, \"Mission Accomplished.\" They'd been on the longest-ever deployment of an aircraft carrier. We put up a banner, and that's what it said.\n\nYeah, but you put it up directly behind where the president was going to speak. \n\n We didn't know that.\n\nYou didn't know\u2014\n\n About the tight shot No. But I'm not trying to assess blame. I'm not trying to set up Scott. But\u2014\n\nBut all you signed off on was to print up the banner and put it somewhere \n\n Yeah. Put it up. Now, there was a lot of conversation about the speech. There was a comment Rumsfeld made in one of those books where he claimed that he took the phrase mission accomplished out of the speech itself but that he couldn't get the banner pulled down. That's just wrong. I went back and looked at every draft of the speech. That phrase was never in it.\n\nSome of those big administration honchos were messaging problems themselves, right Rumsfeld talking about \"a few dead-enders,\" Vice President Cheney referring to \"the last throes of the insurgency.\" Did you, as the communications guy, have a word with these gentlemen \n\n Um, I obviously talked to their staffs. It's a big challenge handling presidential personnel, let's put it that way.\n\nIs there anybody else other than the president who can tell the vice president to shut the hell up \n\n Maybe the editor of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.\n\nHave you ever seen the president call the vice president on the carpet \n\n No. But he doesn't always do that sort of thing in front of me.\n\nTo read some of Karl Rove's recent comments, you'd think the state of the administration has never been rosier. Does anyone provide a reality check for the White House \n\n The president's closest advisers are paid to make sure he understands every aspect of the decision he has to make. And I can confidently say that in the five years I've had this job, we haven't walked blindly into decisions. Now have there been missteps Of course. But I don't buy this notion that Bush lives in a bubble. You can disagree fundamentally with the decisions he makes, but I don't think they are based on a lack of understanding of what's going on around him.\n\nSo then how do you get your reality check \n\n I have an informal group of advisers who are in the communications field, who work in various jobs in corporate America or have served in government. They come in once a quarter, and we have a working session where I pick their brains about what they're seeing from the president: What are the visuals, what's working and not working. Kind of my own focus group\u2014people who've served in my role as communications directors, people who've worked in Fortune 500 companies, people who are at the highest level of corporate communications who aren't directly involved in politics but who follow it. They know my trade, and I can ask them, \"I know this isn't working. How do I communicate it better\" Or they'll say, \"We want to see Bush more personally\u2014not from behind the podium.\"\n\nCan you give me an example of where this kitchen cabinet changed the way you communicated administration policy \n\n It changed how we've talked about the war\u2014giving people the bad news and not just the good. And I walked through a lot of that stuff with them, and they were an important sounding board. It got into mundane tactics, and also into the highest levels of strategy. And they were always very discreet. You never read about it in the papers.\n\nYou've worked with George W. Bush since 1993. What's changed about him \n\n Those first days in 1993 were pretty raw. To see someone who still isn't considered an eloquent speaker, to see him evolve as a public figure\u2014\n\nDid you see him as presidential material back then \n\n No. N-O. And he would probably agree with that.\n\nRobert Draper is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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