By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The heads-up for President Bush's first White House news conference came as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton filled every TV screen in the West Wing. Over the loudspeaker, a presidential aide all but pleaded with reporters: "I'd like to have your attention. Please."
Polling and news coverage data, like that scene Thursday, suggest that Bush is being drowned out by noise from the Clintons and their compounding controversies.
In the first four days of last week, when Bush had his first formal news conference and also traveled the Midwest promoting his agenda, the networks' evening TV newscasts aired just eight stories about the president, compared with 16 for former President Clinton.
Bush said he was looking forward to his Tuesday prime-time address to a joint session of Congress, a new president's version of the State of the Union Address, as a spotlight all his. At the same time, he professed no worries about the Clintons distracting Congress and the public from his priorities just as he is trying to move ahead.
"I think I've got the Congress' attention. I certainly hope so," Bush said at his news conference, adding, "My speech Tuesday night, I hope, will help keep the focus on the agenda."
But last week's TV news tally, compiled by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, spells political trouble for Bush when considered alongside what independent pollster Andrew Kohut found in his most recent survey: that one-third of Americans say they need more information about what Bush is proposing.
Worse for Bush, his sales pitch on tax cuts - that he is trying to help working mothers and struggling families - does not appear to be getting through. An overwhelming majority of those responding to Kohut's Pew Research Center survey at midmonth said the tax relief that Bush wants would benefit wealthy taxpayers much more than others.
"The question is how's he going to get center stage so he can get some real public support going on this tax thing," Kohut said. "This is an important problem for the new president when he is competing with the old one for the attention of the American public."
That competition played out most starkly last week in the White House news conference, where the president took four questions about the Clintons. Bush's appearance came about an hour after Hillary Clinton summoned the media to Capitol Hill to answer questions about her brother's role in lobbying the former president for pardons.
Asked about the timing of the president's appearance, Bush senior adviser Karl Rove said yesterday, "He had been in office a month and it just felt like an appropriate time to have a news conference, have his first news conference."
There, too, was the question of how much the Clintons continue to hold the headlines more than one month after vacating the White House.
"We are apparently people who attract a lot of attention. And that's both good and bad," Hillary Clinton said.
Republican media strategist Mike Murphy is one who thinks the Clinton headlines - about pardoned fugitives and removed White House furniture and expensive going-away gifts - are good for Bush.
"He's doing just fine for some Bush reasons, but he has the wallpaper of Clinton's stunning misbehavior behind him so that helps," Murphy said.
"Politics is about choices and now, maybe more than ever, there is a clear choice between Clinton in his entirety - with all the scandal - and Bush's earnest, forward motion on issues like taxes and education that people care about."
Murphy's interpretation echoes inside the White House, where Bush aides whisper with amusement about story after story on Clinton's troubles. One inside joke is that with Clinton stumbling so badly, all Bush has to do is sit at his desk, and his campaign promise to "restore honor and dignity" to the White House is effortlessly fulfilled.
Rove, speaking on ABC's "This Week," contended that the pardon fallout is "overshadowing whatever else would have been on page one with the president's initiatives."
Bush's public approval rating, as tracked by Pew pollsters, has held steady at around 53 percent - unmoved by the escalating Clinton controversies and on par with where Clinton and former President Reagan stood at the same point in their first terms.
