Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post caught something of the moment: "It was Bush's
own personal response to the controversy that destroyed him. The self-portrait of George
Bush drawn these last few days before the balloting was singularly unattractive. Bush
came over as a petulant politician, lacking grace and dignity, and complaining peevishly
about being 'sandbagged' and 'ambushed' by all the other nasty politicians. He resembled
nothing more than a spoiled child whose toy has been taken away." That was the talk of
New Hampshire through the primary.
Bush's handlers were resigned; some of them knew it was all over. "What can I say? He
choked up," said one. "George does not have a sense of theater," noted another.
The New Hampshire primary was a debacle for Bush. Reagan won 50% of the votes to
George's 23%, with 13% for Baker and 10% for Anderson. Big Mo had proven to be
fickle. [fn 23]
As for the old curmudgeon William Loeb, he was dead with two years.
Bush played out the string through the primaries, but he won only four states
(Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) plus Puerto Rico. Reagan
took 29. Even in Pennsylvania, where the Bushmen outspent Reagan by a colossal
margin, Reagan managed to garner more delegates even though Bush got more votes.
Sometime during the spring of 1980, Bush began attacking Reagan for his "supply-side"
economic policies. Bush may have thought he still had a chance to win the nomination,
but in any case he coined the phrase "voodoo economics." Bush later claimed that the
idea had come from his British-born press secretary, Peter Teeley. Later, when the time
came to ingratiate himself with Reagan's following, Bush claimed that he had never used
the offending term. But, in a speech made at Carnegie-Mellon University on April 10,
1980, he attacked Reagan for "a voodoo economic policy." He compared Reagan's
approach to something which former Governor Jerry Brown of California, "Governor
Moonbeam," might have concocted.
Bush was able to keep going after New Hampshire because Mosbacher's machinations
had given him a post-New Hampshire war chest of $3 million. The Reagan camp had
spent two thirds of their legal total expenditure of $18 million before the primaries had
begun. This had proven effective, but it meant that in more than a dozen primaries,
Reagan could afford no television purchases at all. This allowed Bush to move in and
smother Reagan under a cascade of greenbacks in a few states, even though Reagan was
on his way to the nomination. That was the story in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The
important thing for Bush now was to outlast the other candidates and to build his
credentials for the vice presidency, since that was what he was now running for.
One of Bush's friends did not desert him. When Bush came to Houston on April 28 for a
lunchhour rally, he was introduced by former Watergate special prosecutor Leon
Jaworski, a man devoted to his cause. Jaworski condemned Reagan as an "extremist
whose over-the-counter simplistic remedies and shopworn platitudes of solutions trouble