Was President Bush
literally channeling Karl Rove in his
first debate with John Kerry? That's the
latest rumor flooding the Internet,
unleashed last week in the wake of an
image caught by a television camera
during the Miami debate. The image shows
a large solid object between Bush's
shoulder blades as he leans over the
lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.
The president is not known to wear
a back brace, and it's safe to say he
wasn't packing. So was the bulge under
his well-tailored jacket a hidden
receiver, picking up transmissions from
someone offstage feeding the president
answers through a hidden earpiece? Did
the device explain why the normally
ramrod-straight president seemed hunched
over during much of the debate?
Bloggers are burning up their
keyboards
with speculation. Check out the
president's
peculiar behavior during the debate,
they say. On several occasions, the
president simply stopped speaking for an
uncomfortably long time and stared ahead
with an odd expression on his face. Was
he listening to someone helping him with
his response to a question? Even weirder
was the president's strange outburst. In
a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said,
"As the politics change, his positions
change. And that's not how a commander
in chief acts. I, I, uh -- Let me finish
-- The intelligence I looked at was the
same intelligence my opponent looked
at." It must be said that Bush pointed
toward Lehrer as he declared "Let me
finish." The green warning light was
lit, signaling he had 30 seconds to,
well, finish.
Hot on the conspiracy trail, I
tried to track down the source of the
photo. None of the Bush-is-wired
bloggers, however, seemed to know where
the photo came from. Was it possible the
bulge had been Photoshopped onto Bush's
back by a lone conspiracy buff? It turns
out that all of the video of the debate
was recorded and sent out by Fox News,
the pool broadcaster for the event. Fox
sent feeds from multiple cameras to the
other networks, which did their own
on-air presentations and editing.
To watch the debate again, I
ventured to the Web site of the most
sober network I could think of: C-SPAN.
And sure enough, at minute 23 on the
video of the debate, you can clearly see
the bulge between the president's
shoulder blades.
Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with
the claim that the Bush administration
insisted on a condition that no cameras
be placed behind the candidates. An
official for the Commission on
Presidential Debates, which set up the
lecterns and microphones on the Miami
stage, said the condition was indeed
real, the result of negotiations by both
campaigns. Yet that didn't stop Fox from
setting up cameras behind Bush and
Kerry. The official said that
"microphones were mounted on lecterns,
and the commission put no electronic
devices on the president or Senator
Kerry." When asked about the bulge on
Bush's back, the official said, "I don't
know what that was."
So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a
spyware expert and the owner of the Spy
Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in
Spokane, Wash., looked at the Bush image
on his computer monitor. "There's
certainly something on his back, and it
appears to be electronic," he said.
McKenna said that, given its shape, the
bulge could be the inductor portion of a
two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna
noted that such a system makes use of a
tiny microchip-based earplug radio that
is pushed way down into the ear canal,
where it is virtually invisible. He also
said a weak signal could be scrambled
and be undetected by another
broadcaster.
Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that
the president may have begun using such
technology earlier in his term. Because
Bush is famously prone to malapropisms
and reportedly dyslexic, which could
make successful use of a teleprompter
problematic, they say the president and
his handlers may have turned to a
technique often used by television
reporters on remote stand-ups. A
reporter tapes a story and, while on
camera, plays it back into an earpiece,
repeating lines just after hearing them,
managing to sound spontaneous and error
free.
Suggestions that Bush may have
using this technique stem from a D-day
event in France, when a CNN broadcast
appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to
surprised viewers -- the sound of
another voice seemingly reading Bush his
lines, after which Bush repeated them.
Danny Schechter, who operates the news
site MediaChannel.org, and who has been
doing some investigating into the
wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush
campaign has been worried of late about
others picking up their radio
frequencies -- notably during the
Republican Convention on the day of
Bush's appearance. "They had a frequency
specialist stop me and ask about the
frequency of my camera," Schechter said.
"The Democrats weren't doing that at
their convention."
Repeated calls to the White House
and the Bush national campaign office
over a period of three days, inquiring
about what the president may have been
wearing on his back during the debate,
and whether he had used an audio device
at other events, went unreturned. So far
the Kerry campaign is staying clear of
this story. When called for a comment, a
press officer at the Democratic National
Committee claimed on Tuesday that it was
"the first time" they'd ever heard of
the issue. A spokeswoman at the press
office of Kerry headquarters refused to
permit me to talk with anyone in the
campaign's research office. Several
other requests for comment to the Kerry
campaign's press office went unanswered.
As for whether we really do have a
Milli Vanilli president, the answer at
this point has to be, God only knows.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/08/bulge/
