solely to the pressure of his handlers; it is a life-long habit which has become more accentuated
during the years of his presidency. In February 1988, BusHampshire primary: h told prospective voters in the New
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, wehave 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--inthis 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 hismental 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 beingso. 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 actualdeployment 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 oneCocom, OTS, and Chapter VII mean are going to have a hard time following Bushspeak. [fn 13] occasion. Those who do not know what GATT, SPRs, G-7, Start,
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."
Very often Bush's pronouncements are designed for self-defense against his detractors. In the spring
of 1988, Bush was asked his reaction to Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, and to the
political satire of Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live. Bush answered:
I used to get tense about that. My mother still does. She's 87. She doesn't like it when people say