Rick Santorum told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition gathering in Washington today that President Obama blew it by revealing too quickly to America that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. But President Bush’s former press secretary, an RJC board member, tells TPM the news would have been impossible to keep under wraps.
“We should all be proud of it and you can’t hide it,” Fleischer said when asked about whether the President should have announced Bin Laden’s death.
Having said that, he still had problems with the White House’s handling of the news, which he said offered too many “granular” details of the raid that ended the Al Qaeda leader’s life. The White House ended up having to retract some of its initial assertions in that case.
“Frankly, from just a pure communications view, the White House should not have briefed a ‘tick tock’ an hour after the death,” he said. “The Pentagon should have done it and waited a couple of days.”
