Word: perots
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...Perot disowns it, but his drug sweep is the nub of a good idea...
George Bush hates to attack his political rivals. Character assassination is so unseemly a business that the courtly President relies on others to do it for him. "How come nobody is taking on Ross Perot?" he asked in frustration at a White House meeting in early June. Informed that a frontal attack on the Texas billionaire could backfire with the resentful public, Bush replied, "Well, dammit, if no one else is gonna do it, I will...
...without a sympathetic pretext to protect him. So, when the Washington Post detailed Perot's considerable record of investigating people, including Bush himself, the President jumped at the opportunity. Seizing on reporters' misinformed suggestions that Perot had investigated Bush's children, the President described Perot's habit as not "particularly American." In an interview with ABC's 20/20 taped later, Bush inflated the charge: "If he was having my children investigated, that is beyond the pale. Leave my kids alone...
Never mind that the Post story did not suggest any such thing. Never mind, too, that Perot received a thank-you note from Bush in late 1986 after he passed along some harmless gossip about the Bush kids. What mattered was that Bush had found a way to throw the wily Perot on the defensive. "The public found out," said Robert Teeter, Bush's campaign chairman, that Perot "is not the kind of person who has the character, the judgment and the temperament to be President...
...public also learned once more what Bush meant when he said he would "do what he had to do" to win re-election. Perot released the handwritten Christmas Eve note from Bush a day later and said he had intervened only "as one father to another." Perot then charged, "There has been a 90-day effort to redefine my personality by a group called Opposition Research of the Republican Party . . .They're generally known as the dirty-tricks crowd . . . This was a carefully thought-out and carefully executed effort to try to damage my candidacy." And that, said Perot...