After defeating the "midget nerd" in 1988, Bush wound up a one-term President, losing to Bill Clinton. I don't know what 2-word epithets he may have aimed at Clinton, but I see that, instead of going on to fight for the second term, he considered — over a year and a half before the election — announcing that he was not going to run for a second term:
He would “call a press conference in about November and just turn it loose,” he said in the audio diary. “You need someone in this job” who could give his “total last ounce of energy, and I’ve had” that “up until now, but now I don’t seem to have the drive.”Energy. That's Trump's favorite buzzword, used most notably against Elder Bush's son Jeb.
More from the diary, making the job of President sound horrible:
“Maybe it’s the letdown after the day-to-day” 5 a.m. calls “to the Situation Room; conferences every single day with Defense and State; moving things, nudging things, worrying about things, phone calls to foreign leaders, trying to keep things moving forward, managing a massive project.... Now it’s different, sniping, carping, bitching, predictable editorial complaints.”As for the criticism of Cheney and Rumsfeld, I'll briefly note Elder Bush's tendency to call everyone "iron-ass":
"[Dick Cheney] just became very hard-line.... Just iron-ass...."
“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here – iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” he said...
“I think [Rumsfeld] served the president badly... I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything...."
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I resemble that remark.
Dukakis really was a midget nerd. Very shortly after he lost the POTUS election, he announced to his state of Massachusetts that the Massachusetts miracle was a sham: the state's budget was in the toilet.
I can't even find online references to this. It was infamous in Massachusetts in 1988, where I was living at the time. Who was this Dukakis guy, famous for the Massachusetts miracle, who lied about it right up to November and then admitted the horrible reality days later?
That guy's an asshole.
And shortly later he acquired a job at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
The "at" means Harvard is ashamed of it and doesn't want to admit it's really about the money. The K School, as it's known there, is where leftist political dinosaurs go to die.
"I can't even find online references to this. It was infamous in Massachusetts in 1988, where I was living at the time. Who was this Dukakis guy, famous for the Massachusetts miracle, who lied about it right up to November and then admitted the horrible reality days later?"
I was a kid then and not following that election too closely--my parents were Democrats and obviously planning to vote Dukakis. But I remember visiting an aunt and uncle that summer in the Boston area and my uncle basically saying the "Massachusetts Miracle" was total BS and my parents' surprise at that. Turned out people in the state had a better sense of what was going on.
Looking back at debate footage, it is striking to me how cold and snobbish Dukakis comes across--and he was the one running against the scion of an elite family! The Dems decided after that to go with the cornpone aw shucks Clinton (at least that was his image, and it worked for him).
George H W Bush's ubiquitous use of IRON-ASS makes him sound like a DUMB-ASS wmp with a limited vocabulary.
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As for the criticism of Cheney and Rumsfeld, I'll briefly note Elder Bush's tendency to call everyone "iron-ass":
"[Dick Cheney] just became very hard-line.... Just iron-ass...."
“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here – iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” he said...
“I think [Rumsfeld] served the president badly... I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything...."
Apparently not a fan of Bender, I see... Pucker up, 41.
Thinking back to his concession speech in 1992. Not only was it extremely gracious, but I remember thinking while watching it that he looked relieved.
I'm not too fond of the one who killed the Reagan Revolution. He came into office, got rid of everyone Reagan had appointed and everything that Reagan had done, and brought the Country Club Republicans back into power. It was left to Newt Gingrich to try to rebuild, somewhat too late. Till maybe 2016.
wimp not wmp
I can't even find online references to this.
This? It's UPI, so they bury the lede, but it's in there.
“I think [Rumsfeld] served the president badly... I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything...."
I agree with this completely. Cheney and Rumsfeld convinced GWB that Iraq would turn out fine. But once Saddam was out of power, it all fell apart, which I predicted. It's great to have a plan, but when you are doing something never done before, even the best of plans go badly. The real problem I had was that when it did, Rumsfeld didn't seem to give a shit. He failed at a corrective plan. It wasn't until the surge that things got better, and he had no part of it.
Given Poppy's relationship with the Clintons, I can't say I respect his judgment of people very much.
Maybe he should have spent a lot of time on the golf course and partied with the country music equivalent of Jay-Z once a week. His insistence on doing the job is what drained him.
I'm not wild about the job he did. But I'm pretty sure he tried his best.
Or anything else, for that matter.
Martha said...
wimp not wmp
Weapons of Mass Proofreading.
Igv,
Yeah, that was my read of it as well.
Couldn't find any trace of a two-word epithet Bush aimed against Clinton, but during the 1992 campaign, he would call VP candidate Al Gore "Ozone Man"--sometimes boiling it down to just plan "Ozone." He'd then explain "You know why I call him Ozone Man? This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme, we'll be up to our neck in owls and outta work for every American. He is way out, far out, man."
The most famous broadside Bush aimed at Clinton and Gore during the 1992 campaign was the accusation that "My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos."
bgates, thanks for the good link.
It's interesting how infantile the NYTimes had become - I doubt GHWB's book is devoted to the handful of gossipy nuggets that the NYT delights in emphasizing. How about a little substance?
I remember Maggie Thatcher's admonition to Bush 41 following Saddam's invasion of Kuwait: "Don't go all wobbly on us, George."
When it comes to fighting a war, you need someone with iron in their spine. Lack of same is shown by the US's military track record since WWII: Korea (tie), Vietnam (loss), Gulf War I (win with limited objectives), Afghanistan and Iraq (Obama snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by running away).
I dunno, MacNamara seemed pretty iron-assy during the Vietnam war..til Tet or so.
"He came into office, got rid of everyone Reagan had appointed and everything that Reagan had done, and brought the Country Club Republicans back into power."
Yup. Cheney and Rumsfeld were far too tough for Poppy who expended his energy in WWII. He was basically a walking resume.
"MacNamara seemed pretty iron-assy during the Vietnam war."
No, he showed what a manager with no principles could do.
At the risk of coming off as short (I am) and defensive (I am not):
Michael Dukakis in his prime - I'll assume he's shrunk a bit in his eighties - was 2.5" below the average height for a white American man. (This increment would be smaller if we compared him only to men his age.) He is indeed short. He is no more a midget, even figuratively, than a 6'1" man is a giant.
Massachusetts was riding high in the mid 80’s. In 1987 Digital Equipment Corp held DEC World. It was the mega event to announce DEC’s challenge to IBM. They brought the QE2 into Boston Harbor to host a lavish party. It was Gatsby awesome, but it was also the end. They were dead but didn’t even know it. In just a few short years, the entire Route 128 tech industry was blown away by the PC and Silicon Valley. Overnight, companies that were household names became dead dinosaurs. The miracle was over.
It might also be technically wrong to say 'pedantic aspie just doesn't get it'... but I'm pretty sure that most people here know exactly what it means.
Hello fellow people, please know that while I myself am below average height I am not upset about it but feel the need to inform you that Mr. Dukakis was less than a single deviation below average and therefore does not meet the medical definition of a 'midget' and so Bush's diary was factually incorrect.
The train is fine.
Tall privilege.
Alexander,
I find it amusing how often people who are run-of-the-mill short are referred to as if they were remarkably, even bizarrely short. I find it odd that the converse (6'1" = giant!) doesn't apply.
Not sure why this is so irritating to you, but hey: Hope your mood improves. This might help:
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/bush-series-1-taller/2859799
Blogger Carol said...
I dunno, McNamara seemed pretty iron-assy during the Vietnam war..til Tet or so.
Oh, no. McNamara (may he rot in Hell) was terrible. LBJ and McNamara micromanaged the war to an absurd degree. LBJ bragged that the military couldn't bomb an outhouse without his say-so. McNamara brought in his whiz-kid "best and brightest" bean counters that decided to run the war using metrics. Unfortunately, they choose stupid metrics. For example, they were all about sortie rates (1 plane, 1 mission is 1 sortie). They didn't consider things like actual bombs on target, they just counted planes making flights. At one point in the war, the military was running out of WWII surplus bombs. To keep the sortie rate up, they'd send F-105s up with a single bomb into the most heavily defended airspace on the planet. An F-105 was capable of carrying many bombs, but to keep their sortie rates high, they sent out more planes. Not all of them made it back.
In another example, LBJ and McNamara asked the military for the top 100 bombing targets in North Vietnam. Instead of taking out the most important targets first, they started at the bottom of the list. The North Vietnamese weren't stupid. They saw what was going on and used that time to really build up their air defenses. A lot of Americans died needlessly going after low priority targets.
I'm pretty sure that Vietnam was the first war where lawyers played a major role with stupid "rules of engagement". Nothing good ever came from that. No lawyer should be allowed to write rules of engagement without first either walking point with the infantry or riding along on combat missions. Let them put their asses on the line before putting restrictions on others.
"I'm pretty sure that Vietnam was the first war where lawyers played a major role with stupid "rules of engagement".
Yup. Where were all the lawyers in WWII ? They came along later and shot the wounded. Nuremberg Trials were the lawyers playground. Now there are 10,000 lawyers in the Pentagon.
Wasn't GHWB later diagnosed with Epstein-Barr? I seem to recall that, and that would explain a lot.
"Vietnam (loss)"
Nope, (but a commonly accepted untruth) at worst a tie. The war was effectively halted after the 1973(?) peace accords. Then, some 2 or 3 years later, the Democrats decided we would no longer support allies in the South (funding dropped to a fraction of what it had been). Tanks flowed from the North shortly thereafter.
JAORE said...
"Vietnam (loss)"
Nope, (but a commonly accepted untruth) at worst a tie. The war was effectively halted after the 1973(?) peace accords.
That peace was just a temporary ceasefire to give the North time to replenish their forces and ready for the final assault. The war was a defeat for America in that North and South Vietnam became a single country under communist control. Preventing that was the main reason why we spent untold billions of dollars and almost 60,000 American lives.
Actually, G.H.W. and Igv are mistaken about Rumsfeld, and no, you don't have to take Rumsfeld's word for it. Douglas Feith's War and Decision has the real story, by which I mean hundreds of foot- and end-notes supported by FOIA information. tl;dr The Pentagon argued strongly against occupation and establishing a "democratic" government; Rumsfeld in particular was extremely skeptical. The plan that was actually executed came from—who else?—the dunderheads at State. If you weren't already nauseated by the self-serving duplicity of Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, et al. you very likely will be after reading this thoroughly-sourced work.
It's easy to pick on Cheney and Rumsfeld. Dad should just shut the hell up and talk about himself and his time as Prez. Leave his don out of his stories.
Elder Bush was a very good president who was elected only because he had served as Reagan's vice president. When he had to run on his own record, he lost.
The only thing worth remembering Dukakis for is that he picked as his running mate the only Democrat nominee for President or Vice President since Jimmy Carter who wasn't a lawyer. Well, except for Al Gore, but only because he flunked out of law school.
And I can never forgive GHWB for promising the Iraqis support in their 1991 uprising only to abandon them as soon as Saddam brought out the helicopters. Too similar to Bay of Pigs for me (I'm Cuban).
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