Word: bushing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...domestic matters, however, Bush relies on a highly structured decision- making process that even has a name. Known to government-school types as multiple advocacy, it is designed to refine options and allow the President to hear his top advisers argue them out. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, Roger Porter, wrote a book extolling the virtues of the system after watching it work in the Ford Administration. Though multiple advocacy is time consuming and difficult to manage, Bush has peopled his Cabinet with the sort of collegial generalists necessary for success. The President apparently sees little irony...
...Bush generally feels more at home with foreign policy than with domestic issues. Little wonder: in serving as U.N. Ambassador, American envoy to China, CIA director and funeral-hopping Vice President, he amassed a detailed personal knowledge of world leaders. Like Nixon, Bush has a habit of adding intimate footnotes when intelligence briefers provide him with thumbnail biographies of figures making news overseas. "That guy isn't like that at all," he told an analyst who was profiling a foreign politician. "He goes back a long way with some of these cats," a senior official recounted. Two weeks...
...recent clean-air proposal was a textbook case of multiple advocacy. With Bush's campaign promise to reduce acid rain and toxic waste as guidance, Porter assembled five Administration officials: Energy Secretary James Watkins, EPA Administrator William Reilly, Assistant EPA Administrator William Rosenberg, Associate Budget Director Robert Grady and White House Counsel Boyden Gray. They met 16 times during the spring, and on other occasions with lawmakers, industry officials and environmentalists. Gradually they fashioned a package they thought all parties could support...
...plan was presented to Cabinet officers whose departments would be affected. This second group narrowed down the options. The Cabinet postponed one meeting with Bush after the EPA's Reilly, in a move supported by Boyden Gray, argued for an idealistic plan that would have required half the cars in the nation's 20 largest cities to be powered by alternative fuels by the year 2000. Budget Director Richard Darman and Economic Adviser Michael Boskin worked for weeks to come up with the scaled-down version that eventually went to the President. Bush never saw the EPA's 50% proposal...
...help Bush think through an issue, White House aides stage debates, which they call "scheduled train wrecks." Aides once invited opposing sides to lobby the President separately, but quickly realized that Bush prefers -- and benefits from -- live skirmishes. Bush asks questions during the back and forth, takes copious notes on White House pads and often asks lower-level officials for their views. "He doesn't want filters," said a participant. "He actually wants to sit there at the table and listen to Darman fight with Reilly." Darman argued in one meeting that the clean-air proposals were too expensive...