Word: patricians
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Bush's stance is not suprising. As Vice President, in 1985 he cast the deciding vote in favor of increasing out of pocket expenses for elderly medicare recipients. With his patrician upbringing, Bush doesn't seem to understand middle-class dilemmas such as, "Should I go to the doctor about that hacking cough, or should I buy shoes for my children...
...reason is personality. Decisive though the Vice President has appeared since the Republican Convention, Bush backers fear a relapse into the reedy-voiced, diffident aristocrat who thoroughly turned off Californians not long ago. Says Sal Russo, a Sacramento-based Republican consultant: "This state is not hospitable to a patrician candidate, and it's a potential problem having two blue bloods on the ticket." Adds a prominent Republican in the Central Valley: "The preppie image doesn't sell very well around here. Unfortunately, the reason Bush has a preppie image is that he is a preppie...
...then working for the local Congressman J.T. Rutherford, kept an eye on Bush as a Republican threat, "You know, just to load up and be ready." That Bush would consider running from Midland, soon to become a center of John Birch activism, might seem strange, given his father's patrician Republican background, but Bush, who never convincingly took on Texas mannerisms, accepted the values of Midland County as unquestioningly as he had those of Andover. When he had acquired the minimum fortune for a Texas businessman (under a million) and moved to Houston, he ran for the Senate in Barry...
...from Texas remains largely unknown outside his home state and Washington. His career has played out in the boardrooms of Houston and the hideaway offices of the Capitol. The backslapping style of a Lyndon Johnson or a John Connally, two of his early supporters, is totally foreign to this patrician son of a wealthy landowner in the Rio Grande Valley. With his well-cut suits, nails that look manicured even when they are not, and silver hair he never lets down, he is Texas without the swagger, the kind of gentleman that stuffy men's clubs were made...
...eternal second banana, the man thought too timid to sculpt his own political persona, the patrician who ran a pallid third in last month's Iowa caucuses and staggered into New Hampshire facing extinction, the bland campaigner who ended one debate by apologizing for his lack of eloquence -- this consensus choice as political nebbish suddenly transformed himself into the prim reaper who could not be denied. Bush last week harvested victories from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to Oklahoma and Texas. His weakest rival, Jack Kemp, promptly quit the Republican contest. Pat Robertson, another ostensible threat on Bush's right flank...