George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Bush also had to look back at his performance in the 1984 campaign, hardly an epic
effort. Bush had gotten in some trouble because he had refused categorically to rule out a
tax increase in terms as adamantine as Reagan's. Bush tried to wiggle out of press
onferences where this came up: "No more nit-picking. Zippity doo-dah. Now it's off to
the races," was his parting shot as he sought to exit one press conference where he was
being grilled. Otherwise Bush was the ultra-orthodox Reagan cheerleader, judged
"fawning" by Witcover and Germond: "he had the reputation of being a bootlicker, and
his conduct in office did nothing to diminish it." [fn 1] Columnist Joseph Kraft wrote of
Bush: "the patrician has tried to be a populist. He comes across, in consequence, as
puerile." [fn 2]
Bush's big moment was his vice presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro. During the
debate, Bush remarked that the marines who had been killed in the bombing of their
Beirut, Lebanon barracks in October, 1983 had "died in shame." On the morning after the
debate, Bush went to Elisabeth, New Jersey for a rally with longshoremen. He said to a
man in the crowd that "we tried to kick a little ass" in the debate with Ferraro. Then he
saw that a microphone suspended from a boom was within earshot. "Whoops! Oh, God,
he heard me! Turn that thing off," said the tough guy of the royal "we." Barbara Bush got
inot the act with her quip that Ferraro was a "four million dollar --- I can't say it but it
rhymes with rich." Britisher Teeley added that Ferraro was "too bitchy." [fn 3] In the
most stupefied election of modern times, these slogans were the stuff of which great
issues were made.
The Washington Post went after Bush as "the Cliff Barnes of American politics," a
reference to a character in the soap opera Dallas whom the Post found "blustering,
opportunistic, craven, and hoplessly ineffective all at once." Others, foreshadowing the
thyroid revelations of 1991, talked about Bush's "hyperkinesis." Even the unsavory
George Will commented that "the optimistic statement 'George Bush is not as silly as he
frequently seems' now seems comparable to Mark Twain's statement that Wagner's music
is better than it sounds." [fn 4]
There was thus very little hope that Bush could help himself by campaigning effectively.
But did George have any new achievements in his resume that he could point to?
There were few that he would or could talk about. In the context of his "you die, we fly"
role as Reagan's official surrogate at state funerals, he had met the new Soviet leader Yuri
Andropov at Brezhnev's funeral for a "spook to spook" conversation, as Bush said. He
had then met Michael Gorbachov at Andropov's funeral in the spring of 1985. But Bush
would not want to play up his role in turning the "evil empire" Reagan of the first term
into the summit-going "useful idiot of Soviet propaganda" of the second term, since this
would stir up problems along Bush's right flank.
All Bush could talk about were his foreign trips. When Brezhnev died in November,
1982, Bush had been in Africa, whence he diverted to Moscow. This was a trip to seven
black African states, including Nigeria and Kenya. When he got back to Washington he
tried to capitalize on the African junket, which was undertaken in the spirit of the Reagan