http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=9EC2BA72-7BF2-46BF-B157-6097F55B6416 Obama’s new muse: George W. Bush
By: Carrie Budoff Brown
September 24, 2014 08:16 PM EDT
President Barack Obama drafted most of Wednesday’s United Nations speech by himself, but it often sounded like he had a ghost writer: the predecessor he mocked.
Type Obama’s money phrase — the evocative description of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant as a “network of death” — into thesaurus.com and George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” could very well come out, as many tweeters and former aides to the 43rd president noted.
Michael Gerson, a former White House speechwriter who helped compose Bush’s famous slogan, offered an explanation. “When dealing with an ideology that inspires beheadings and mass murder, the English language only offers so many words that carry sufficient moral weight,” Gerson said in an e-mail. “‘Evil’ and ‘death’ are two of them.”
Even so, the parallel was striking given Obama’s attitude toward Bush.
Obama didn’t just run against Bush’s foreign policy. He used to ridicule it. His rejection of the Bush worldview was so emphatic that it seemed to prompt the Nobel Peace Prize committee to give him the award just for getting elected.
So much for all that.
Sure, there are differences — Obama touted an international coalition for airstrikes that included five Arab nations, and it’s hard to imagine Bush inserting America’s racial divide and the failings connected to Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, into a foreign policy address as Obama did. But close your eyes and listen to Wednesday’s speech with a Texas accent, and you might feel like you’re having a flashback.
“That was only one echo of Bush” of many, Marc Thiessen, another former Bush speechwriter, said of the “network of death” line.
For example, Obama argued Wednesday: “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil.”
Bush, in an address to airline employees weeks after the 9/11 attack, declared: “We face a brand of evil, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time in the world.” And in a 2006 speech before Congress, Bush stated: “These radicals have declared their uncompromising hostility to freedom. It is foolish to think that you can negotiate with them.”
Obama, similar to Bush, has framed the fight as an ideological struggle, Thiessen said.
“In this century, we have faced a more lethal and ideological brand of terrorists,” Obama said. “It is time for a new compact among the civilized peoples of this world to eradicate war at its most fundamental source: the corruption of young minds by violent ideology.”
Bush, in the 2006 speech, said: “This is the great ideological struggle of the 21st century, and it is the calling of our generation.”
Current and former Obama aides, however, dismissed the comparisons. They maintained that the president has used the same language for years.
“I don’t think that is true at all,” senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote on Twitter. “This is how he has talked abt his CT [counter-terrorism] strategy for as long as I have worked for him.”
The writing process was similar to other major foreign policy addresses, a White House official said Wednesday. Obama shares thoughts with his speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, and then writes through drafts by long-hand on a yellow notepad. The president wrote most of the 39-minute address, the official said.
Jon Favreau, Obama’s former chief speechwriter, said he doubts the White House labored over the phrase “network of death.”
It’s an unremarkable, but accurate, way to describe the threat, Favreau said, unlike Bush’s “axis of evil” that linked North Korea, Iraq and Iran in an axis that didn’t exist.
“ISIL is internationally recognized as a terrorist network that seeks to kill — hence, network of death,” Favreau said. “I think [Obama] and Ben probably gave as much thought to those words as they did to all the other words in the speech, and I’d be shocked if there was a specific decision or discussion that led to their appearance.”
The origin of “axis of evil” was a mini Washington parlor game following Bush’s speech in 2002 until the back story eventually came into focus.
David Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic who was then a White House speechwriter, has said he wrote the first draft of that year’s State of the Union address and referred to terrorist groups and extremist governments as forming an “axis of hatred.” In the revision process, his colleagues altered that phrase to “axis of evil,” Frum told the New York Times in 2008.
That colleague was identified as Gerson, now a columnist at the Washington Post.
The “network of death” seemed to catch on Wednesday in a similar way, as the phrase dominated the headlines out of the speech.
And before the day was out, a Brooklyn artist had registered the domain name, networkofdeath.com.
