Word: midlands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gotten eight years more sophisticated and cynical since Bill Clinton's "The Man From Hope" essentially gave him a lead in the 1992 race. But Dubya managed to hit every amiable, feel-good note he intended to. He told us, "There used to be a slogan in Midland, 'The Sky's the Limit.' It's such an optimistic slogan, really." (Let it never be said the man can't read subtext.) He talked baseball. He showed Laura feeding him cake at their wedding. He took us out for a drive. He hung out in the yard with us. Knowing...
This West Texas city built on oil is the starting point for the Bush backstory; the second chapter of his autobiography, written mostly by Hughes, is titled "Midland Values." For those who market Bush, highlighting his Midland roots is a way to counter a competing impression of the man as a callow, underachieving product of a wealthy, East Coast elite. For a candidate short on biography, Midland solves a problem. There's no wartime heroism in Bush's past or a hardscrabble beginning. This is someone who concedes he was something of a mess until he was 40. For Bush...
...election in which authenticity is a must, Bush's attachment to Midland has the added value of being true. He spent his formative years there, before the family moved to Houston when he was 12, playing baseball, throwing rocks and riding his bicycle to the Roy Rogers movies downtown. But more telling is that after completing the trifecta of a privileged East Coast education--Andover, Yale and Harvard--Bush returned in 1975. "He decided these were just his kind of people," says boyhood chum Charlie Younger. Bush wore loafers without socks, but in the time he lived there, first...
...Bush's Midland bona fides are real, the campaign's mythologizing of the place is outsized. "It's a place where the sky is as big as your dreams," gushes an aide. The reality of Bush's Midland is not as ideal as advertised. "The rewards are pretty disproportionately given out," says Bush's boyhood next-door neighbor Randall Roden. "There was some diversity with Indians and Mexicans, but you didn't find them owning oil companies or running them." In the 1950s the Midland Bush knew was prosperous and virtually all white, a town legally segregated just like others...
...G.O.P. Convention will be the Bush team's chance to put the best version of their candidate and his past on display. Count on a film with romantic images of Midland. And count on the rest of the staging to be as laser-focused on making Bush seem noble, sincere and decent. For the convention in Philadelphia, the Bush team has chosen as its theme the careful "Renewing America's Purpose. Together." The real leitmotif--pushed by the campaign for many weeks--is much edgier: "George Bush Is a Different Kind of Republican." Mimicking almost exactly the language Bill Clinton...