George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

I have a tendency to avoid on and on and on, eloquent pleas. I don't talk much, but I
believe, maybe not articulate much, but I feel. [fn 8]
Was Bush worried about not being an exciting candidate? "Charisma short? Needing a
charisma transplant? Not much," was his rejoinder. A high school student of Knoxville,
Tennessee wanted to know if his president would seek ideas from foreign countries to
improve education. Bush's riposte:
Well, I'm going to kick that one right into the end zone of the Secretary of Education.
But, yes, we have all-- he travels a good deal, goes abroad. We have a lot of people in the
department that does that. We're having an international-- this is not as much education as
dealing with the environment--a big international conference coming up. And we get it all
the time--exchanges of ideas. But I think we've got-- we set out there-- and I want to give
credit to your Governor McWherter and to your former Governor Lamar Alexander--
we've gotten great ideas for a national goals program from--in this country -- from the
governors who were responding to, maybe, the principal of your high school, for heaven's
sake. [fn 9]
In a speech to graduating college seniors, Bush described the visit of the new
Czechoslovak President, Vaclav Havel, to the White House in early 1990:
And the look on his face, as the man who was in jail an dying, or living -- whatever-- for
freedom, stood out there, hoping against hope for freedom. [fn 10]
Bush once admitted that he had difficulty keeping the most elementary sense of direction
in his mental life; he told a group of school children, "I read so much sometimes I start to
read backwards, which is not very good." [fn 11]
Bush is a bureaucrat and administrator at heart, with all the sinister overtones these have
rightly acquired during the twentieth century. His discourse is highly bureaucratic, and is
famous for being so. Bush's obsessions with "things", as in the notorious "vision thing,"
reflects the essence of Aristotelian bureaucratic cataloguing. We saw the "adversary
thing" back in 1976; since then we have seen the "Super Tuesday thing," "the vice
presidential thing," and a nostalgic glance at "this drilling thing," in reference to Bush's
"experience in offshore drilling." [fn 12] When Bush talked by telephone with the
astronauts of the space shuttle Atlantis, he asked, "How was the actual deployment
thing?" Sometimes this can even occur in the plural, as in this reference to his dog
Millie's puppies: "Kids just love those little fuzzy things." Bush's language is also
peppered with the acronyms of the inside-the-beltway Washington functionary. "My
allied colleagues and I should agree to take up these ideas at the C.S.C.E. summit this
fall, to be held around the signing of the C.F.E. treaty," Bush said on one occasion. Those
who do not know what GATT, SPRs, G-7, Start, Cocom, OTS, and Chapter VII mean are
going to have a hard time following Bushspeak. [fn 13] And like all bureaucrats, Bush
loves the passive voice. His stock reply on Iran- contra was, "Mistakes were made." Who
made them? Bush's answer, which he alleges is borrowed from Yogi Berra, was "Don't
make the wrong mistakes."