A Rare Occurrence of Fairness to the President

No, I don’t plan to make a habit of this. It’s a New Year and all, but let’s not get carried away: I have no intention of being fair to the President on a regular basis.

But I was reading a bit of Jim Hightower’s new book, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time To Take It Back, and I came upon this passage on page 20, at the beginning of the second chapter:

These days, honesty in politics is about as rare as a rooster laying eggs, but in the 2000 presidential run, there was one wonderfully candid moment.

It came from George W at a fat-cat dinner in New York City. A sea of affluence filled the room — men were dressed in white tie and tails, women in designer gowns. Trying to make a little opening joke about his Big Money support, George said: “This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite. I call you my base.”

Now, Hightower’s pretty coy here, but he makes it sound, at least to me, that Bush was speaking to a primarily Republican crowd here — as if this was similar to, say, Trent Lott’s “Gee, if we’d only elected Strom president, we wouldn’t have had all these problems, wink wink” moment of a year ago. Hightower describes Bush’s line as a “little opening joke”, implying that it was just that, an opening joke in a more substantive speech.

Problem is, I actually remember the speech at which then-Governor Bush said that line. It was in his remarks at the Al Smith Memorial Dinner, which is a quadrennial affair which is traditionally attended by both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, who then each give a humorous speech, generally marked by self-deprecating humor. The 2000 event featured Bush saying the above line, in addition to also claiming that he and William F. Buckley had something in common: “He wrote a book while he was at Yale, and I read one.” Al Gore used similar self-deprecating humor (something at which he has always been adept), saying things like “Please accept my apology for interrupting your meal. Since this is a special occasion, I wanted to mark it by getting all of my interruptions out of the way before Gov. Bush speaks.”

The speeches at that dinner are archived by C-SPAN here, beginning at roughly the 48:00 mark.

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