The House voted to override by a majority of 390 to 25, but Bush Democrats in the
senate allowed Bush's veto to be sustained by a vote of 62 to 37. Bush, squirming under
the broad public obloquy brought on by his despicable behavior, finally issued
regulations that would temporarily waive the requirement of returning home for most of
the students.
Bush came back from his summer in Kennbunkport with a series of "policy intitiatives"
that turned out to be no more than demagogic photo opportunities. In early September,
Bush made his first scheduled evening television address to the nation on the subject of
his alleged war on drugs. The highlight of this speech was the moment when Bush
produced a bag of crack which had been sold in a transaction in Lafayette Park, directly
across the street from the White House. The transaction had been staged with the help of
the Drug Enforcement Administration. This was George Bush, the friend of Felix
Rodriguez, Hafez Assad, Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Don Aronow. The funds and the
targets set for Bush's program were minimal. A real war on drugs remained a vital
necessity, but it was clear that there would be none under the Bush administration.
Later the same month, on September 27-28, Bush met with the governors from all 50
states in Charlottesville, Virginia for what was billed as an "education summit." This was
truly a glorified photo opportunity, since all discussions were kept rigorously off the
record, and everything was carefully choreographed by White House image-mongers.
The conference issued a communique that called for "clear national performance goals,"
and the substantive direction of Bush's "education presidency" appeared to resolve itself
into a nationwide testing program that could be used to justify the scaling down of
college education and the exclusion from it of those whom Bush might define as "mental
defectives." Would the testing program be used to finger and list the "feeble minded,"
perhaps over a generation or two? Was there a veiled intent of "culling" the hereditary
defectives? With Bush's track record on the subject, nothing could be excluded.
One of the themes of the "education summit" was that material resources had absolutely
nothing to do with the performance of an educational system. This was coming from
preppie George Bush, who had enjoyed a physical plant, library, sports facilities, low
average class size and other benefits at his posh Greenwich Country Day School and
exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover which most schoolteachers could only dream of.
When, during the summer of 1991, it was found that national average scores for the
Scholastic Aptitute Test had continued to fall, Bush was still adamant that increased
resources and the overall economic condition of society had nothing to do with the
answer. At that time it also turned out that Bush's reshuffled Secretary of Education,
former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, was sending his children to an elite day
school associated with Georgetown University, where the tuition exceeded the yearly
income of many poor families.
Many governors joined James Blanchard of Michigan in complaining that under
Reaganomics, the federal government had unloaded whole sectors of infrastructural
expenditure, including education, on the states. "We do not come to [Charlottesville] to
rattle a tin cup," said Blanchard. "But we cannot afford to have our education revenues