There are photographs of President Bush from the first debate and he’s got some kind of lump in the back of his coat, and the rumors are flying that he had a special radio receiver and he was getting answers from someone offstage. Wow, it’s like he’s back at Yale.
For a long time, whenever the words president and bulge appeared in the same sentence, we were probably talking about Bill Clinton.
Hey, now!
But then came the great Bush-Bulge Caper of 2004.
The first debate between President Bush and John Kerry was held on September 30, 2004, in Miami, with Jim Lehrer acting as moderator. According to viewer polls and most nonpartisan analysts, the debate was pretty much a dead heat, with neither candidate delivering a “knockout punch” or making a memorable gaffe. (Almost nobody ever delivers a knockout punch in a debate, yet after every debate the pundits inevitably say, “There weren’t any knockout punches.” True, and there weren’t any puppet shows either.)
However, there was something unusual about the evening, as first noted by blogger Joseph Cannon on the morning of October 2:
While watching a re-broadcast of the debate, my ladyfriend noted something odd: Bush seemed to have a wire, or an odd protrusion of some sort, running down his back.
Apparently, Fearless Leader used an earpiece….This theory goes a long ways toward explaining the president’s consistently odd speech patterns—the cavernous pauses punctuating sharp volleys of sound.
First off, you just gotta love anyone who refers to his “lady-friend,” all in one word like that. I would have thought that died with Sinatra or maybe LBJ, but there you have it. Also, I’m jealous of anyone who finds a ladyfriend who watches rebroadcasts of presidential debates.
Anyway, Cannon goes on to speculate that Bush might have been wearing a tiny “tooth-phone” or “molar mobile,” that is, a wireless receiver that’s actually embedded in a back molar and transmits sound waves painlessly from the tooth to the inner ear. (Note: There really is such a device.)
“How can we acquire proof?” wrote Cannon. “Simple. Someone close to the scene of the next debate has to find out the frequency Bush is using. Once again, a simple tape recorder can bring down a president.”
Just like with Andrew Johnson! I mean Nixon.
A few days later, as speculation about the “Bush bulge” was running rampant on blogs and in chat rooms, Salon.com’s Dave Lindorff picked up the ball with an article titled “Bush’s Mystery Bulge.”
“Bloggers are burning up their keyboards with speculation,” wrote Lindorff.
Check out the president’s peculiar behavior during the debate, they say. On several occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an odd expression on his face. Was he listening to someone helping him with a response to a question? Even weirder was the president’s strange outburst. In a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said, “As the politics change, the positions change. And that’s not how a commander in chief acts. I, I, uh—let me finish—the intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at.”
The Salon piece quotes the owner of a high-tech surveillance shop, who says, “There’s certainly something on [Bush’s] back, and it appears to be electronic.” The bulge “could be the inductor portion of a two-way push-to-talk system,” wrote Lindorff.
A number of articles about the mysterious bulge made mention of an incident that summer at a D-Day memorial in France, when a CNN broadcast reportedly picked up a “mystery voice” saying a line just before Bush said the same line. Coupled with the photos of the strange bulge under Bush’s suit jacket at the debate, there was your “proof” that the president of the United States was receiving on-the-spot coaching from some unseen advisor such as Karl Rove.
The story spread to the mainstream media, forcing the White House to issue some kind of a response.
“I think you’ve been spending a little too much time on conspiracy Web sites,” Bush spokesman Scott Stenzel said when he was asked about the bulge during a Washington Post chat session. Stenzel also joked with reporters that “Elvis” would be moderating a future debate.
“It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric,” another spokesperson told the New York Times.
Yet another spokesman for the Bush campaign said the president had never used any kind of electronic communication device, either for coaching purposes or to alert him to a security situation. The Bush campaign also denied that the president was wearing a bulletproof vest, as some had speculated.
As the conspiracy theorists posted photos supposedly showing Bush wearing earpieces, the late-night talk show hosts peppered their monologues with jokes about the controversy.
”I thought George Bush looked great,” said David Letterman. “He was wearing his three-piece bulge. . . . They have a picture of George Bush from the first debate and on his back there’s this big, lumpy bulge. People were saying that’s a radio receiver and someone is feeding him answers to questions. It turned out tonight, the first thing George W. did was show everyone that the bump in his jacket was just a flask.”
Ouch.
Bush’s tailor became the “get” interview of the week. He told the press the mysterious bulge was just a puckering of a seam when the president leaned forward and crossed his arms in a certain manner. (And if you’ve ever experienced a puckering of the seam, you know how uncomfortable that can be.)
The conspiracy theorists weren’t convinced.
“Two points about that ‘Now let me finish,’” wrote Joseph Cannon, the man whose “ladyfriend” first spotted the bulge:
1. [Bush] seems genuinely irritated, as though someone had just interrupted him. 2. In fact, no-one had interrupted him.
Was he addressing Jim Lehrer? No, because the odd interjection came long before the flashing lights warned that his 90 seconds were up. . . . Bush’s expression of irritation appears to have been directed at someone speaking to him, someone unheard by anyone else in the room.
It’s so wacky you want to believe it’s true—the idea that someone was feeding Bush his talking points and that for a moment Bush forgot about the subterfuge and blurted out “Let me finish!” like some character in a Naked Gun movie.
What’s more likely is that Bush was responding to the green flashing light indicating he had about 30 seconds left. He got a little flustered, thought his time was about to run out, and said “Let me finish!”
As for the odd pauses, the vacant stares, the apparent lack of focus at times—since when has Dubya not acted and sounded that way in public?
Humor books are filled with “Bush-isms.” The Internet is bulging (so to speak) with clips of Bush making verbal stumbles at one event after another. He is arguably the least articulate ad-libber of any president since, let’s see, George Washington. If the same odd bulge had shown up in Bill Clinton’s jacket, we would have thought it was a bulletproof jacket or perhaps some sort of sexual massage device. Nobody would have suggested that Clinton was wearing a two-way communications device, because he didn’t need anybody’s help in a debate situation.
George Bush? He needs help counting to 10, or so the easy jokes go. So it was easy to jump to the conclusion that he was wired for communication, like a quarterback getting the plays from the sidelines.
One thing, though: if the president had been using this hightech version of a walkie-talkie for so long, why did he deliver such an average performance in that 2004 debate? I mean, if that’s how he sounds when he’s getting coached, is he completely incoherent on his own?
If the debate marked the first time Bush had ever used the device, that would mean he and his campaign team weren’t just unethical; they were crazy. Wouldn’t you want to “test-drive” such a tricky mechanism in less stressful conditions—say, a photo opportunity with some schoolchildren or something? (“Wow, the president seems to know all the words to “The Pet Goat” without even looking at the pages!”)
It also seems like an incredibly risky proposition. The president of the United States, favored to win reelection, is going to risk his hold on the office by agreeing to get wired like that? Bush and his campaign team are going to open themselves up to international embarrassment and scandal and a lifetime of ridicule, knowing that all it would take is for one person to leak the story of the decade to the media?
Let’s walk through the particulars for a moment. Say Karl Rove was ensconced somewhere in the building where the Miami debate took place. I suppose the Secret Service could sequester a room without explanation and the Bush team could set up some kind of command center with a TV monitor. And I suppose Rove could sit there with a few associates while the Secret Service stood guard outside, making sure no one could enter.
In the meantime, another team is prepping Bush for the debate—strapping the device around his torso, inserting the earpiece, making sure the whole thing is working. Testing one two three, testing one two three, please remember that it’s “nuclear” and not “nukular,” Mr. President. . .
Now the president is onstage, while Rove is in the secret room. Here comes the first question from the panel. Rove has to process the question, formulate an answer, and immediately start feeding those talking points to Bush, a la Albert Brooks’s briefing of Holly Hunter, who in turns spoon-feeds information to William Hurt at the anchor desk in Broadcast News.
Bush has to regurgitate Rove’s notes even as Rove is giving him the next talking point. That’s a lot tougher than it sounds.
Even if all that really happened, why would Bush say “Let me finish” to his coach? If he’s in the middle of giving an answer, he’s not going to tell the unseen advisor to stop talking, since he needs the rest of the information to finish. (Unless Rove was criticizing Bush’s answer, and Bush was getting ticked off with his adviser.)
Ah, but maybe Rove (or whoever) was just giving Bush a few talking points here and there. But if that’s all it was, why bother with such an elaborate scheme?
I’d also like to think the White House would have a more sophisticated way of furnishing information to the president than some device you can buy on the Internet. At the very least, they’d custom-make a few suits so the bulge wouldn’t be so obvious.
Unless, of course, the bulge was just the fabric bunching up.