George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

During the summer of 1979, Bush grappled with what has since been called "the Vision
Thing." What could he tell the voters when he was asked why he wanted to be president?
During that summer Bush invited experts on various areas of policy to come to
Kennebunkport and give him the benefit of their views. Bush met with these experts from
business, academia, and government in seminars three days a week from 9 to 5 over a
period of six weeks. Many were invited to the family house at Walker's Point for lunch.
In the evenings there were barbecues and cocktails on the ocean front.
It is an indication of the extraordinary intellectual aridity of George Bush that these blab
sessions produced almost no identifiable policy ideas for Bush's 1980 campaign. Bush
had wanted to avoid the fate of Ted Kennedy had been widely ridiculed when he had
proven unable to respond to the question of why he wanted to be president. But Bush
never developed an answer to this question either.
Or, more precisely, it was the imperative to avoid any identifiable idea content that
emerged as Bush's strategy. For, just as much as Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter,
George Bush was one of the pioneers of the hollow, demagogic, television-based
campaign style that had become dominant during the 1980's, greasing the skids to
political atrophy and national decline.
Together with James Baker III, always the idea man of the Bush-Baker combo, the Bush
campaign studied Jimmy Carter's success story of 1980. They knew they were starting
with a "George Who?", virtually unknown to most voters. First of all, Bush would ape the
Carter strategy of showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire early and offer, attempting to
ingratiate himself with the little people by assiduous cultivation. Bush spent 27 days in
Iowa before the caucuses there, and 54 days in New Hampshire.
During this period, Bush was overheard telling a New York Times reporter that he didn't
want to "resist the Carter analogy." Bush readily admitted that he was "an elitist
candidate." "If Carter could do it with no credentials, I can do it with fantastic
credentials," Bush blurted out. He conceded that the fact that nobody knew anything
about his "fantastic credentials" was a little discouraging. "But they will! They will!"
Thanks to Mosbacher's operation, the Bush campaign would advance on a cushion of
money-- he spent $1.3 million for the Illinois primary alone. The biggest item would be
media buys- above all television. This time Bush brought in Baltimore media expert
Robert Goodman, who designed a series of television shorts that were described as "fastmoving,
newsfilmlike portraits of an eneregtic, dyanimc Bush creating excitement and
moving through crowds, with an upbeat musical track behind him. Each of the
advertisements used a slogan that attempted to capitalize on Bush's experience, while
hitting Carter's wretched on-the-job performance and Ronald Reagan's inexperience on
the national scene: 'George Bush,' the announcer intoned, 'a President we won't have to
train.'" [fn 15] One of these shorts showed Bush talking about inflation to a group of
approving factory workers. In another, Bush climbed out of a private plane at a small
airport, surrounded by supporters with straw hats and placards and yelled "We're going
all the way" to the accompaniment of applause and music Goodman hoped would sound