One of the most famous verbal missteps of President
George Bush, which illustrates both Bush’s utter disdain for domestic affairs and his verbal
stream of consciousness. He was speaking at a
photo op to the employees of a
New Hampshire insurance company during the
1992 presidential primaries:
"You cannot be president of the United States if you don't have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial and the Civil War and all that stuff. You can't be. And we are blessed. So don't feel sorry for — don't cry for me, Argentina. Message: I care."
You can see why many of us who paid attention to politics in the 1990s began to doubt Bush’s
sanity, while others chalked it up to his tendency to combine
Halcion and
whiskey.
One of the key problems Bush had in the campaign was the fact that he had ignored the country for four years, and the perception was that he did not give a rat’s ass about the American people. His advisors encouraged him to stress how much he did care in his speeches. To remind him of this, they wrote "Message: I care" on one of the
cue cards. Instead of telling the American people how much he really did care about them, he read the damn card word for word instead after his rambling digression.
This is the start of the great Bush presidential dynasty the
Republicans keep crowing about?