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Bush channels Reagan on foreign policy
With his first major speech, the GOP front-runner sought to put a string of gaffes behind him.
By Mark Dennis
[11/20/99]

"Drop the Chalupa, Al Gore!"
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[11/19/99]

Why won't George W. Bush talk about AIDS?
Texas gays say their governor's "compassionate conservatism" doesn't include them.
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[11/19/99]

Rush to judgment?
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[11/19/99]

Jasper's stand
Shawn Berry was the hardest suspect to convict of the dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. Did his role in the killing come second to the town's need to clear its name?
By Ashley Craddock
[11/18/99]

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The list of zingers, four pages of which were released recently by the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), never proved useful against the surprisingly well-informed Clinton. Ironically, however, it may now end up embarrassing the former president's son, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, instead.

The younger Bush has stumbled repeatedly in his statements about foreign policy. He has called Kosovars "Kosovians," Greeks "Grecians," and mixed up Slovenia with Slovakia. Most recently, of course, he failed a surprise quiz from a reporter who asked him to identify the leaders of four current international hot spots. Bush got only one right.

Later, in his own defense, Gov. Bush told ABC's Sam Donaldson that "America understands that a guy doesn't know the name of every single foreign leader."

But Bush's father took a much less generous view toward then-Gov. Bill Clinton's inexperience in foreign affairs back in 1992. Bush had his staff prepare a long list of anti-Clinton zingers for possible use in their first debate on Oct. 11, 1992, or for later in the campaign.

"If Clinton seems perplexed by [a] foreign affairs question," the zinger script suggested that President Bush hit Clinton with this comment: "Now I know what to get you for Christmas -- a world globe."

Another planned Bush riposte to an expected Clinton stumble during the presidential debates was: "If you ever go on 'Jeopardy,' don't choose the category, 'Foreign Heads of State.'"

The partial zinger script was released under FOIA as part of a request I filed for documents from the so-called Passportgate investigation, a special-prosecutor inquiry into the Bush administration's suspicious search of Clinton's passport files before the 1992 election.

The pages released were included because some of the jokes related to Clinton's foreign travels to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union while Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Viewing the jokes as possible evidence of White House coordination with the State Department's passport search, the special prosecutor's office questioned Bush about the zingers after the president left office.

Ultimately, no criminal charges were brought in the passport case. But the investigative files offer a rare look at the inner strategies of the Bush reelection campaign as it tried desperately to close Clinton's lead in the polls in 1992.

Though Bush never was able to use the zingers in the debates, he did deliver other derogatory comments about the lack of foreign-policy expertise of the Democratic ticket, Bill Clinton and Sen. Al Gore. Most famously, Bush declared at one campaign stop, "My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos."

Next page | "Al Gore can't help you now!"