Chapter –XXVI

The Catastrophe: Bush's Second Term...

Bush kicked off the all-important money-gathering aspect of his re-election campaign
with a Halloween fund-raiser in Houston attended by Barbara Bush, Dan Qualye, Marilyn
Quayle, with a room full of fat cats. Before leaving Washington that same day, he had
told GOP Congressional leaders of his great concern for the unemployed; he had just
vetoed two successive bills to extend unemployment benefit payments, and the
Democrats in Congress were fixing to send him a third, to see if he would veto that one,
too: the unemployment issue was beginning to hurt Bush badly. With his usual shameless
hypocritical aplomb, Bush whined that it was time to stop playing politics with such an
important issue. In Houston, Bush talked about his experiences in the "I Like Ike" years
of 1952 and 1956, and then attacked the Democratic Congress for meddling. In a
hyperthryroid burst of splee, Bush told the assembled plutocrats that Gen. Schwarzkopf
would never have gotten anywhere if he had had to deal with "those carpers" on the Hill;
if Congress had been in control, Saddam would still be in Kuwait.

Bush was flailing; his tracking polls were showing him that he had no monopoly on rage,
but that much of the American population was now enraged with the silk stocking
blueblood who would not extend their wretched unemployment benefits for twenty lousy
weeks or less. Bush needed a theme; some other theme than economics. Was he toying
with the "Give 'em hell strategy developed by Clark Clifford for Harry Truman for his
desperate 1948 election bid, which Truman turned into an assault on the "do-nothing"
Congress? If so, it was not a good bet. Truman had managed to personify the scrappy and
peppery underdog, calling his opponent Dewey a fascist and comparing him with Hitler.
Truman had charged that the Republicans had "stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back."
"The Republicans, Truman had said, sought "to nail the American consumer to the wall
with spikes of greed." Bush would have a hard time delivering lines like these without
evoking gales of laughter. All Bush would be able to muster would be his patrician-
hyperthryroid irascibility, and that has been much overdone. The voters might well
conclude that Bush was attacking them, and repay him with their own implacable emnity.