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 optimisticstatement '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'in turning the "evil empire" Reagan of the first term into the summit-going "useful idiot of Soviets funeral in the spring of 1985. But Bush would not want to play up his role
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 Administration's "constructive
engagement", meaning in practice offering various rewards and inducements to the Pretoria regime
while gently prodding them to withdraw from Namibia. In both Lagos and Nairobi, Bush was
denounced for establishing a US-sponsored linkage between the departure of CubaAngola and the termination of the South African protectorate over Namibia. [fn 5] n forces from
In the summer of 1983, Bush went to Scandinavia, accompanied by scores of Secret Service agents
and aides, bulletproof limousines, and White House communications equipment. Bush's staff were
trying to plan photo opportDr. Goebbels. During a visit to a memorial to the monument to Denmark's World War II resistanceunities and television perspectives in the tradition of Michael Deaver and
fighters, a US Navy officer on Bush's staff instructed the Danish protocol chief that Danish Prime
Minister Schluter and other Danish offocials had to be "herded" to one side as Bush strode toward
the momument: a boorish insult, to say the least. (Bush's travelling entourage has gotten
progressively uglier over the years, as we are reminded by the Bush party's clash with Swisssecurity officers at Geneva Airport during Bush's meeting with Hafez Assad in the fall of 1990. (^)
Hyperthyroid at the top infects the people further down the line.)
In Iceland, Bush gave a speech so generic that it was not clear if he had lost track of what country
he was in. In Stockholm, he clashed heatedly with Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme over the US"contra" covert action programs in Central America. A few years later Palme was to be
assassinated, and many attribute his death to his very detailed knowledge of the European
dimension of Iran-contra. But for Bush the trip was a big success: he got to play tennis doubles with
Bjorn Borg, and went fishing off Iceland. [fn ]
In May of 1984, Bush was off to India and Pakistan. Indira Gandhi was rightly suspicious of Bush,
and had recently commented about bad US-Indian relations: "What can be done? The problem is the
orientation of the [US] administration." [fn 7] The policy which Bush presented to Mrs. Gandhi
included sharp cutbacks in residual US aid and US sabotage of loans to India by the international
agencies. In November, 1984, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated.