THE TV WATCH
Portraits of Bush, With Hazy Spots
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: August 27, 2004
....The president's spirituality is examined...closely by CNN, which raises the question of whether he has blurred the division between church and state. The answer is yes and no. CNN runs every question by a critic and a supporter of Mr. Bush. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says the president's effort to provide government money to religious charities goes too far. Michael Gerson, a White House speechwriter, disagrees....
***
Over all...CNN does a good job of raising the main issues that the president faces in his re-election bid: disillusionment with an open-ended war that Mr. Bush once implied was easily won and necessary to head off a nuclear threat to the United States ("we can't wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, which could come in the form of a mushroom cloud"), as well as a deficit that even many Republicans deplore....
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("The Mission of George W. Bush" is reviewed along with MSNBC's Bush documentary, "George Bush: The Father's Footsteps." The article begins with a discussion of some curiosities about GWB's early life, before he was "born again.")
....It is Mr. Bush's good fortune that no embarrassing home videos of youthful debaucheries surfaced when he ran for president in 2000, but the shortage of even irreproachable photographs demonstrates something besides luck: the blank pages of the president's early years underscore just how limited a life he led before he ran for public office. A man born to the highest privilege and unlimited opportunities deliberately turned away and chose the most familiar, unadventurous paths. Even the arena of politics, which is hardly for the fainthearted, was a world he knew intimately through his father and his grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush. Running for a House seat in 1977 was, for a Bush, about as radical as a Rothschild's joining an investment banking firm.
In both words and action, Mr. Bush has proved to be a bold, at times even rashly decisive president. Yet the experiences he sought out as a young man were surprisingly bland and even timid. Neither film addresses that dichotomy fully. But the pictures, or lack of them, certainly dramatize just how critical his midlife crisis and spiritual awakening were....
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/arts/television/27WATC.htmlVIEWING TIMES:
CNN PRESENTS
The Mission of George W. Bush
CNN, Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time
Jim Connor, producer; Cliff Hackel, editor; reported and written by CNN's senior White House correspondent, John King; Aaron Brown, host.
BRIAN WILLIAMS REPORTS
George Bush: The Father's Footsteps
MSNBC, Sunday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time
Phil Griffin, vice president, prime-time programming, MSNBC; Mark Effron, vice president, news daytime programming, MSNBC; Rick Kaplan, president and general manager, MSNBC; Tammy Haddad, executive producer for MSNBC convention coverage; Brian Williams, host.
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