The opinion journalism of Dana Milbank: otherwise, the Washington Post's White House correspondent

John J. Miller

ON April 17, two days before the official publication of Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post appeared on the Today show to discuss the book's political impact. White House officials "have good reason to be worried," said Milbank. "I think we finally found the weapon of mass destruction here." He continued: "The administration will have a much tougher time knocking down Bob Woodward than they have had in dealing with some of their other critics."

Yet the Bush team hasn't tried to knock down Woodward--it's been too busy pumping him up. On the president's reelection website, there's a "suggested reading list." Plan of Attack sits at the top. There's even a link to Amazon.com, for purchasing convenience. The GOP has been called "the stupid party" before, but encouraging people to buy a book like the one Milbank described would be about as smart as screening Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 at a Bush-Cheney fundraiser.

To be sure, Plan of Attack is no reverential tribute to Bush's presidential leadership. John Kerry's campaign has tried to exploit several of its details. By embracing the book, GOP strategists perhaps intended to smother some of its criticisms. But Plan of Attack is certainly not the full-frontal offensive of Milbank's telling. "I don't know whether [Bush has] read it," said Woodward in a CNN interview. Somebody who has talked to him said he's looked at the book, and he's happy with it."

Bush's top staff, however, is definitely not happy with Milbank. He holds one of the premier jobs in political journalism--White House correspondent for the Washington Post--yet he approaches his beat with anything but balance, as his attempt to shape public perceptions of the Woodward book demonstrates. The bias comes as no surprise, given his profession. In a recent Pew Research Center survey of national journalists (such as Milbank), 34 percent labeled themselves "liberal" and only 7 percent labeled themselves "conservative." (Most say they are "moderate"--which is how Dan Rather describes the New York Times.) Even in this crowd of semi-closeted Democrats, however, Milbank stands out as probably the most anti-Bush reporter currently assigned to the White House by a major news organization.

Milbank arrived at the Post four years ago, having worked previously at the liberal New Republic. Before that, he held junior positions at the Wall Street Journal and attended Yale, where he was a leading member of the left-wing Progressive party. He's always had trouble hiding his views. "There was a lot of attitude in his copy" when he began covering the White House, said the Post's national political editor Maralee Schwartz in the New Yorker earlier this year. She added that his stories had to be "detoxed" before they could appear in print.

Milbank doesn't report outright fabrications or reams of background quotes that can't be verified. He usually gets his facts right, which isn't to say he gets them straight. The main problem with his articles is one of tone. Milbank will write a juicy lead paragraph that disapproves of Bush and then bury all the mitigating details deep within his story. The first sentence of Milbank's article on June 18, for instance, declared Bush to be "at odds" with the 9/11 commission over the relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda. It wasn't until the seventh paragraph that Milbank admitted that the commission "agrees with the administration on key points."

Other times, Milbank simply unloads on the president. On Memorial Day, he and co-author Jim VandeHei described "the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring," which they deemed "unprecedented" and remarkable "both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts."

Don't forget, these words were written by news reporters.

They were also wrong, or at least highly misleading. The Bush campaign was so irritated by the article that it issued a 16-page memo rebutting its various claims.

Milbank and his colleague, for instance, undercounted the total number of negative ads Kerry had run by more than 50 percent because they started their count on March 4, when Bush began his ad campaign (Kerry had started to run his ads long before). They also failed to acknowledge that when negative ads financed by independent groups are included in the mix, the president had been a target far more often than he had been a perpetrator.

That wasn't the only misfire. They also pointed to a Bush ad charging Kerry with intending to "repeal" key parts of the Patriot Act. "Kerry has proposed modifying those provisions," they claimed, "but not repealing them." They went on to chide Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman for offering "no direct evidence" to support the ad's allegation.

But how's this for direct evidence? "It is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law." That's what Kerry said at Iowa State University in December--as Mehlman pointed out to reporters in a conference call nearly a week before the Milbank-VandeHei story appeared.

Curiously, Milbank used to think that negativity in politics was downright positive. At least that was the central premise of Smashmouth, his campaign-trail book on the 2000 presidential race. "There's reason to believe that tough, negative campaigning helps strengthen our leaders, boost creativity in policymaking, and bring reform to government," he wrote. "There's nothing wrong with candidates going negative--but it's a bit rich for the press to dwell on the negative and then scold the candidates for doing the same."

Yes, a bit rich--especially for a reporter who has gone relentlessly negative on Bush. It's not a new problem, either. Since at least 2002, when Milbank wrote a front-page article headlined "For Bush, Facts are Malleable," the claim that Bush is a liar has been a theme in his reporting. In one of his stories on the 9/11 commission, Milbank practically begged Kerry to use its findings to "raise doubts about Bush's credibility."

Dick Cheney often discovers himself in Milbank's crosshairs as well. When the vice president cursed at Democratic senator Pat Leahy, Milbank (with Helen Dewar) filed a whole news story, which included the sanctimonious observation that Bush had promised to "change the tone in Washington." Comparatively little space was given to the substance of what prompted Cheney's remark: Leahy's overheated criticism of the vice president's ties to his former company, Halliburton. Moreover, when Kerry used the same expletive in a Rolling Stone interview late last year, neither Milbank nor the other members of the Post's propriety police considered it newsworthy.

Milbank, in fact, seems to have accepted Leahy's contentions about Cheney long ago. For a 2002 story on Cheney's sale of Halliburton stock, Milbank suggested that the vice president had shown "shrewdness" in selling his shares before their price dropped. The implication was that Cheney had fattened his bank account on the basis of inside information--i.e., "... he sold his shares in August 2000 knowing the company was likely headed for a fall."

But perhaps he was just following the advice of editorialists at Milbank's own newspaper, which had urged Cheney to sever all ties to Halliburton when he became Bush's running mate. Milbank breezed right past this inconvenient detail and simply noted that "conflict of interest laws did not require the sale"--as if he would have defended a decision by Cheney to cling to his investments.

Milbank gets one thing right when it comes to officials in the Bush administration. "They don't particularly like me," he said on CNN in January. He has turned this observation into a complaint: "I feel like it is a great achievement when at the end of the day I've gotten the communications director or the press secretary on the telephone." Yet he also seems to take strange pleasure in his unpopularity. "Nobody's ever told me what my nickname is with the president," he has said, "but we suspect it can't be repeated in polite company."

The White House critique of Milbank is not that he's tough, but that he's unfair. And is it any wonder? Milbank has described covering the Bush administration as "daily hand-to-hand combat." The purpose of the fighting, it would seem, is to make the president look like a fool. Here's what Milbank said on CNN in April, regarding Bush's nationally televised press conference: "They gave us more than 24 hours notice this time, which means all of the reporters had plenty of time to think up a 'stump-the-president' type of question that he might not be expecting."

And this guy is shocked that people who work for the president don't always return his phone calls in a jiffy? In Milbank's mind, the fault lies entirely with an incommunicative White House. When the Russian government released a statement earlier this year describing a phone conversation between Bush and Vladimir Putin--and the Bush administration didn't--Milbank went thermonuclear on the pages of the Post: "It may come as a surprise to some that the Kremlin, symbol of secrecy and repression, has become more transparent than the White House, symbol of freedom and democracy. But such experience has become routine."

The Bush White House is certainly guarded when it comes to relations with the press--there aren't nearly as many leaks as there were during the Clinton years and its spokesmen don't go out of their way to nurture relationships with their favorite journalists. But the Kremlin? These are the reckless words of a man so frustrated by the president he has become unhinged. What Milbank needs, it would seem, is an extended tour of duty outside the fever swamps of Washington's Beltway--perhaps in Moscow, or at least somewhere far from the president he clearly despises.

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