Not that anyone believed him anyway...

Associated Press | February 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge met privately with Republican pollsters twice in a 10-day span last spring as he embarked on more than a dozen trips to presidential battleground states.

Ridge's get-togethers with Republican strategists Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff during a period the secretary was saying his agency was playing no role in Bush's reelection campaign were revealed in daily appointment calendars obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge told reporters during the election season.

His aides resisted releasing the calendars for over a year, finally providing them to the AP three days after Ridge left office this month.

Homeland Security officials said the meeting with Luntz at department headquarters was aimed at improving public communication of the department's message, particularly on television. Ridge declined an interview about the calendars, referring questions to former aides.

''We did not discuss homeland security in a presidential campaign context," said Susan Neely, a former assistant homeland security secretary who attended the May 17 session with Luntz and Ridge. ''We asked him his impression of how well we were explaining whatever the issues were of the day. There was no follow-up meeting."

What seems saddest to me is that they are such true believers they don't even understand why their "explanation" convicts them. They were meeting with pollsters to talk about the department's message? Hello? The public's opinion? Their "message?" In an election season? Where the major issue is security? How could that not be politics?

They were asking "How well we were explaining whatever the issues were of the day?" What issues were those? The ongoing failure to protect chemical plants? The poor security at our ports? I'm guessing not. And what metrics were being used to measure "how well?" Did they just happen to have a state-by-state breakdown, suggesting that, perhaps, the message wasn't being "explained" well enough in the states where Ridge later visited on the campaign?

Even it it wasn't that blatant, how could meeting with the inventor of the phrase "death tax", a co-author of the Contract with America, not be political? Only in that sense that they view what they do as "marketing" and not politics.

Either they're so far inside the bubble that they can't even comprehend what being outside of it is, or they just aren't even really trying to come up with excuses anymore.