George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

on October 5 had doomed him to defeat in his close race with Bernie Sanders, the former
socialist mayor of Burlington.
Bush stewed, raged, and squirmed. He looked around to see if anyone would come to his
aid. Sitting next to Bush was GOP Senator James M. Jeffords, who had voted in favor of
the civil rights bill Bush had vetoed. He had made an emotional speech in the Senate
lambasting Bush for trying to punch giant "loopholes" in the civil rights of citizens.
Jeffords sat staring straight ahead, doing a fair imitation of Bush at the Nashua Telegraph
debate. When Bush got up, he was dissociated and tongue-tied. He stumbled through his
speech, improvising a few lines in which he praised the independent-mindedness of
Vermonters like Smith, but whined that he wished it would not come at his expense.
Bush then asserted that
we have a sluggish economy out there nationally. That's one of the reasons why I favor
this deficit so much. [fn 55]
The crowd was puzzled; some of them were perhaps driven to try the socialism of Bernie
Sanders over this. The mental disintegration of George Bush went on apace.
Bush's second stop of the day was in Manchester, New Hampshire. Here he was greeted
by his old friend, the Manchester Union Leader, with a front page cartoon of the granitefaced
man in the mountain saying "Read His Lips, Mr. President. Go Home and Take
Your Taxes with You." Here there was no attack on Bush's economics; the candidate he
was supposed to be helping, Rep. Robert C. Smith, had obviously concluded that any film
footage showing him in the same picture with Bush would pose the threat of disaster, so
he had simply stayed in Washington. The congressman's wife was there to tell the
audience that her husband had stayed in Washington for House votes he could not miss;
an apoplectic Bush ferociously chewed on an apple before he rose for perfunctory
remarks.
Bush's third stop was in Waterbury, Connecticut, where the beneficiary of his presence
was Gary Franks, a black Republican whom Bush needed as a fig leaf for his veto of the
civil rights bill. Franks solved the Typhoid Mary problem by barring the news media
from the campaign event, so no sound bites associating him with Bush could be used
against him by his opponent. Later there was a brief photo opportunity with Bush and
Franks together.
Surely Bush had cut a ridiculous figure. But how many Iraqis would die in January,
February and beyond to assuage Bush's humiliations of this day?
Bush's last pre-election campaign trip would eliminate stops in Oregon, Nebraska,
Illinois, and North Carolina, where Republicans teetered on the edge of defeat. Bush was
trying to cut his losses, and he was not alone. During the months before the election,
Bush had spent hours sweating under television lights to tape endorsement commercials
for over 80 GOP candidates. One Congressman, Rep. Alfred A. McCandless of
California, used pieces of Bush's tape in a commercial designed to highlight his