Word: bushing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the Cabinet sessions, Bush repairs to the Oval Office and widens his net. He often invites Darman or Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady along to go over this point or that; sometimes he turns it into a working lunch. Bush is soon on the telephone shopping the options around to his "sources" on Capitol Hill: Senator Robert Dole on political matters, Ohio Congressman Willis Gradison on health care and economic matters, Tennessee Republican Don Sundquist on tax questions. Following the May Cabinet debates over which countries to name as unfair traders under the new "Super 301" section...
...also bail him out of trouble. Last March, William Bennett, the new director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, temporarily banned imported assault weapons. Bush, a life member of the National Rifle Association, kept his distance in public. Opinion polls backed Bennett's move, but gun owners did not. N.R.A. lobbyists complained bitterly and even withheld a pivotal endorsement of Dan Heath, a Republican congressional candidate from Indiana, just a week before the March 28 special election. Heath lost the race by 1,778 votes...
When he sees no easy way out, Bush often just splits the difference, an inclination that frequently angers conservatives. Bush has repeatedly opted for this route as President. He decided to build both the MX and mobile ! Midgetman missiles, when either might suffice. He backed a boost in the minimum wage to $4.25 an hour, 30 cents less than Democrats and labor unions wanted. Bush supported a wage increase during the 1988 campaign, but after his Inauguration, White House economic advisers opposed it as inflationary. "He had to deliver on a promise," said a top official. "The easiest thing...
...Bush also displays a sense of fairness that one adviser described as "an almost procedural due process." In February he reopened the complicated question of whether the U.S. should provide sensitive technology to Japan for that country's FSX aircraft after learning that the Reagan White House had ignored Commerce Department doubts about the deal. During Cabinet meetings, when political considerations are paramount, Bush often asks, half-seriously, "What should we do in case we just want to do the right thing...
...Bush certainly is not innocent of political calculation. In Cabinet meetings, he is often the first to shoot down ideas that won't fly in Congress, as he did when aides suggested buying Democratic support of a capital-gains tax cut with a White House retreat from the campaign pledge not to raise other taxes. "We'll get clobbered for that," Bush said. When pressed on a political question, he has a playful stock reply: "If you're so damned smart, how come you aren't President of the United States...