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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-08-28
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NATION, Page 22THE PRESIDENCYTime for Some Decorum
By Hugh Sidey
Let George Bush wander a few miles from the Oval Office
or the womb of Air Force One, and he is apt to go native in
search of the great American middle class. He has been sighted
in a Frederick, Md., JCPenney store buying socks and recorded
in New Hampshire's political precincts slanging from the stump
about frogs without wings and liberals jumping on an
unspecified part of his anatomy. Last week he uncovered a cache
of supermarket checkout gear at the Orlando convention of the
National Grocers Association. The pampered and protected
President was dazzled. Supermarket habitues have been using the
stuff for more than a decade.
After Bush's latest foray, the President's subterranean
political network in Washington sent a message: get him back up
on his presidential pedestal. There remains in this nation
despite hard times a huge reservoir of regard and respect for
the presidency. Anyone inside or outside the White House who
tampers with it diminishes himself.
"Where is Roger Ailes when we need him?" worried one
partisan, who remembered Ailes in the 1988 campaign, shouting
into a telephone at then-Vice President Bush, "If you are going
to wear those silly short-sleeved shirts, put on a coat. If you
don't wear a coat, get a plastic envelope for your pocket and
fill it with pencils, so you look like a real clerk -- and stop
flapping your arms."
Ailes claims to be out of presidential politics and, in
any case, political handlers don't treat sitting Presidents the
way they do mere aspirants. By all counts, Bush's goofy moments
stem from his own unchecked impulses.
Richard Nixon has noticed the trend, and in several
gatherings of his old campaign cronies, he has spoken up. "Bush
should not attack or defend in this campaign," Nixon declares.
"He is no good at it because it is not in his nature. He is too
polite. When he tries, he sounds phony. His greatest strength is
being presidential."
But if Bush has lost a little luster of late, he probably
gained some of it back last week when Colorado's bumptious
Democratic Governor Roy Romer, in the White House East Room,
upbraided the President for his budget and commandeered White
House cameras to claim that Bush was making a political pitch.
Well now, agree with Bush's budget or not, the President does
have a constitutional duty to present his plan. A lapse of good
manners is hardly an answer.
In October the 200th anniversary of the laying of the
cornerstone of the White House will be marked with a series of
seminars about the stately old building, the dignified and
durable symbol of this government. George Washington kept close
watch over its planning and design, wanting a monument that
reflected the majesty of the office. And Washington's insistence
that the presidency be founded on the highest dimensions and
standards of human character has been the ideal for more than
two centuries. When the first President was 15 years old, he
compiled for himself 102 "Rules of Civility," which he put in
his notebook. Among them: "Shake not the head, feet or legs,
roll not the eye, lift not one eyebrow higher than the other;
wry not the mouth." Bush -- and his rivals -- should read it.