With whom olyphant was able to. Estow his gift on a country who is able to combat his gift visually with president s. I am mike nelson. I am the guy you put up with during the first panel. We have a new cast of people to add their voices to the wonderful voices you heard from the scholars who are on the first panel. Once again, we have Miller Center people here. The Miller Center, one of its main emphasis is studying the presidency indepth, historical depth, with objectivity. We are in the business of doing stuff that editorial cartoonists are not in the business of doing , reacting to events on a as a newspapers cartoonist. We all strive to be as objective as we can. Provide comment, to provide opinion and something to provoke discussion, rather than aspire to settle discussion. The panel this afternoon will cover the president s from george bush i do not use the h w. He was george bush when he was president. When John Quincy Adams became president , john adams did not have to change his name, so i am sticking with george bush and his immediate successor, bill clinton. George w. Bush, the one who came toe finally we did our into the obama presidency, part of which he was able to capture. Example we only had to see an image of it, but it is an extraordinary work. One of our panelists, the one i will introduce now, mary kate can tell us something about that sculpture and about the president , who it portrays. She has been teaching this year in the Politics Department of the university. She was a speechwriter and theunications specialist in bush campaign. A former director of the Miller Center and a member of the history here held prominent positions in both bush administrations, both george and ,eorge w administrations probably did other things that i am not even aware of, that are worth noting. A senior fellow at the center has worked in all three branches of the government. In theng seven years obama administration. We will do the same thing that we did the first time around. We will take cartoons from each of the presidencies in sequence. Ofations that are now part the university of virginias Collection Library and are available in many cases you to or over ater their the Miller Center, where there are some others. Lets start with the first cartoon. For those of you who cannot havethat far back, you george bush on the top. And what perceived, they tried to sell and as he is perceived, then it is alter read can cannot anybody else read that . Alter egos or how we think of them when we think of them at all. They go. The 1998 campaign on the bush side, and i would say the top half is exactly not true, not how he was perceived. The bottom half is exactly how is perceived in our point of view. I rememberng having a tshirt that said lifts of greeks bearing wearing lifts. There was a saturday night my dark. Alled caucus after it played on this other side of him that nobody saw or knew about. I would say the left side of what they tried to sell is exactly what we all perceived in george bush. Missionso, 58 combat and lifelong public servant. Making aid when i was documentary about president bush. Yearsd it takes about 50 for historians to render , and howon a president glad he was to see that historians had come around on george bush and given him the credit that he truly deserved. Think that he was admired widely. I do think the top of this is not accurate, but i also am a little bit biased. What is being portrayed here, one of the challenges for the panel is that for many of you, we do not need to explain what the references are in the cartoons because you get them. Are thinking about the wind factor. Young people thought george bush was a with. Why . That is actually a very good question. Label was af the magazine cover that actually had a picture of george bush. Time, i was a career foreign officer. I had not declared political affiliation. I would go in as a detail the to work in the Bush White House at the beginning of 89. 49 now, as i like age. First, why was he labeled a with and why did the label stick . Partisan,u are a bush frankly, everyone who worked for him became one. Interesting, as a sidebar comment. You learn a lot about the leaders by looking at the attitudes of the people and the circles around them. He commanded a lot of loyalty around the people around him. Thee is something about reedy voice, having been a second banana to reagan for years, the sense that on the campaign trail, he was actually not a forceful and charismatic public speaker. He is one of those people johnson had a little bit of this as well. He talked much more better much better in private than in public. So, there are qualities there. There is emotional quality that would occasionally beat to the surface. A sense that on the campaign trail, he would spout conventional. And people had trouble getting a firm sense of him. Right wantedn the him to be a more muscular conservative. He did not fit that. There is something to this that you had to recognize. There is something in the image of him that people are perceiving. 1992 thatre that by he would have drawn him the same way. Next round, in the that he sticks with this image for a while. Frankly, because the caricature seems to capture something that is resonating with a lot of the american. You have to face up to that and understand it. This is a final comment. This is a reason why they are so historical. They capture something about the way people are perceived in their generation that will then be lost 30 years later. By looking at the cartoons, you can recover it. What i find interesting about the cartoons is how ingrained the Public Perceptions get in peoples mind. The Honest Campaign recognizes your liability and tries to push back against that, trying to push back against unforced errors. They are there from the 88 campaign, Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with an ill fitting helmet. No candidate would ever do that now. Easily haveave changed the perception. Ofe of the important moments george bush 41 come the grocery scanner thing, where he did not know how that worked or the famous moment in the 92 debate where he looked at his watch and seemed to be bored. Candidates forp debate, we take their watches or tell them to never look at their watch. Him to go out and do some public events. Gas prices were high. Out toed to send him fill up his gas tank. Those moments, we actually checked, do you know how to fill up a gas tank . That is one of those moments that you just did not want to happen. Youve double and triple check every time you put your candidate in public because you do not want these images to stick in the peoples brain. We have not notified the presence of that character. Chorusa defective greek a penguin that he included in all of his cartoons to provide an additional dollop of commentary. The joy of these cartoons is that on the one hand, they are snapshots of the moment, but on the other hand, they are windows into a pyramid. What we start seeing in this cartoon is the departure from the era in which we regarded president ial elections as contest between giants. The making of a president in 1960. It was achilles and heracles meeting on the field of battle. Two titanic figures, either one who was worthy of trotting on a heroic stage. By 1998, we are looking at president ial candidate as diminished and comic figures. That has somewhat come the default setting ever sent. This is actually a very nice cartoon. This is george bush and George Washington walking down pennsylvania avenue. Anniversary,200th not to the day but the year of George Washington being sworn in. President bush was actually very honored by that and he got sworn in using two bibles, one stacked on top of the other. The bush family bible and the other was George Washingtons bible. He was so honored by that. Comment that brought this to mind was that same conversation with david mccullough. He believes that george bush was the most qualified person to run for president since the founders at the time. Did not say it at the time but said it afterwards. Well,rought it to mind as all the jobs that president bush had done before he became president perfectly prepared him for that moment, and it is the reason why we were able to get through the cold war without a single shot being fired. That is what jumped out at me about that. He was very proud of that moment. Only thing i felt was amusing on this one, that building is the old post office, which is now the trump hotel. What is interesting about this mary kate or others could fill you in. It is bad form to compare yourself to previous president s. It was seen it is not the classiest thing to say i am the greatest president since soandso. Simply to say that there are certain ways that they reference back to previous president s. Everybody wants to see mike kennedy. That is one of the interesting things i found in this cartoon. Says beautiful, and it is george. The second george is written in a different font. What is that font . 18thcentury font. Struck with the image of the other president in this action, George Washington, who has come down to us largely because of the pictures that we have of him as this bland and even boring figure. Solid and virtuous in every way, but no spike of life in any of the pictures that we have of George Washington. Just take out your dollar bill and look at that. I do not think any american in been a figure of such excitement and adoration in his own generation as George Washington was in his. People were crazy about washington. They thought he was respectable and an exciting guy. A sexy guy. He is doomed to always be the bland figure that his portraitist portrayed him as. Apparently ask dan kail in a baby carriage. And then punk saying, you must be so proud. Ask, apparently i had to but it is a reference to the tower nomination. Said that people opposed to john towers were engaging in mccarthyism. I find this very unfair. Little that there is a bit of background, which is that george bush first met john tower 1961, when george bush was Harris County republican chair in houston, which was quite a big deal. John tower decided to run for Lyndon Johnsons senate seat after johnson left to become Vice President. That is when the two of them first became friends. In 1968, i think there was a discussion on the earlier panel about the short list for vice 68, according in , nixonseachams book short list for Vice President was john tower, george bush, spiro agnew and one more, Ronald Reagan. Wouldnt that have been something . 1989 and at this point, former chair of the Armed Service committee and george bush names him to secretary of defense. It comes out that there are his love of women and booze and a conflict of interest investigation as well. It was the First Time Since 1959 that a cabinet officer was not confirmed. 45 republicans and 55 democrats. 47 53 went down 4753. Means twoe, it democrats crossed over. They voted yes. It was due to the fact that the democrats were in the senate and in control of the senate. Make is thatint to george bush felt very strongly that loyalty goes down, as well as up. He was tremendously loyal to john tower despite all the flaws that were exposed. Notearfully says, i will pull the rug out from my friend, and he stuck with him. Also, it set the stage for why he was so tremendously loyal to Clarence Thomass nomination as well. I believe he is inaccurately depicted as treating dan quayle as some kind of baby, and that could not be further than the truth. He went against the advice of , went with quayle in a surprise move and treated him as an equal because he himself had been a Vice President and he wanted the same treatment for his own Vice President. They had a close relationship, wayi think this is not the he looked at dan quayle. Philip probably has more. Thatis is about a speech quayle gave after the tower nomination was defeated. I take a more sympathetic view to the cartoonist than mary kay does. I agree with mary kate said that bush tried to treat quayle the way he thought a Vice President should be treated, but do not think that dan quayle was one of the key insiders of the bush administration. Meetings. A lot of bush treated him appropriately, but he was not a very influential person in the senior ranks of the administration, so this is early 89. Tower has gone up and been defeated. Quayle gave a quite nasty speech, basically saying tower was defeated because of mccarthyism. Runinvestigation had been by the chairman of the senate Armed Service committee. Not knowingad anything about this panel, last month i was with sam and jack reed on another issue. Basically reminiscing at some length. Day he feels that it was the hardest thing that he ever had to do in the senate. Timed known tower a long as all the senators had. He worked with him on Armed Services for many years. Wast of this investigation done extremely confidentially and very Little Details of what was found was ever made public. Sam nunn of being the latterday version of joe wise thing toot a say. Prudent thing to say. Of course, bush was going to be depending on people like sam nunn as an essential partner in anything he was going to try to get done for the next four years, including handling the confirmation of the person nominated to take the place of tower. Here, people noticed and 89. This is dan quayle making his political debut in a big way. He had been very mildmannered and here he is, making his debut 1989 in a hitman role that people used to associate with spiro agnew. It was not an attractive role for him and not an attractive role for bush to have quayle play. Sent oliphant is calling him out on it. [laughter] this to me is a brilliant sample of the caricaturist art. We have seen in the cartoons where noses, chins and eyes were treated in typical caricature fashion, exaggerated. Here, we do not even see dan quayle. The impression being that he is an infant, therefore of no significance at all. A character as a form of caricature, it is really interesting. The baby carriage has that , the monogram initial super fancy baby carriage from a wealthy family. That is a nice touch. Earliert not to say that the little bubbles signified dan quayle. Me of dunes berry at the time. It would always show president bush as skippy, the evil twin. That became a huge joke in the white house. Resident bush got a big kick out of it. There were many print photos taken of johnson union, bob gave an dick cheney, talking to an empty chair, talking to the itium and they would sign and send it to the president. You might recall dena carvey doing hilarious impersonations of the president. After he lost the election, he invited dena carvey to the white house and laughed at himself tremendously and did impersonations with him. Dunes barry cartoons, some of and the denatoons carvey stuff is at bush library because it was such a big part of his time in office and his selfdeprecating humor. Lets move onto the clinton years. Lets not move onto the clinton years. In one week, after he left office, it was the funeral of president ford. I went to a. There were a tremendous number of boy scouts who were the ushers for the service because jerry ford was an eagle scout. Went to theren Cathedral School and they knew some of the choirboys. President bush gave a eulogy for choirboysford and the i ran into the next day. They said, we want you to know that we had a vote and president. Ush gave the best eulogy i said, boys, i will tell the president. , i said i think the president knew that there would be boy scouts in the aisles. The tone of the eulogy was, this is what they can learn from jerry ford. The same week, i went to the National Portrait gallery. Sculpture is right in front of the official portraits of president bush putting one and 43. I loved it and i thought it was really funny. So i wrote him a note. I vote a lot of notes over the years. I have this binder of personal notes and i brought it with me. I vote in this note and said, you won the choirboys vote and you have to go to the National Portrait gallery next time you are in town. He wrote me back and i thought i would read it to you. Mary, overwhelmed and by. Imagine a guy like me winning the vote of the National Cathedral choirboys regarding my eulogy. Yes, i would love to go see the newly opened gallery with my new hit in place. I have to go out right now and kick some serious butt. The next thing you know that she did not come to washington. He saw images of it. There was a second one purchased. There is one at the bush library that is still there. It is one of his favorites. He really enjoyed that sculpture. Thank you for creating it. There is one at uva. Any other comments on the move marvelous sculpture . I love this cartoon. He tried to describe it you. It is depicting a couple of car salesman. Like salesman. Runs real nice, needs cosmetics. You have bill clinton and it says imagine your new car here. The punk in the middle says, who do you fancy we should buy a used car from . The reason i love this cartoon is because it is incredibly timely. This is from the health care fight. You can fastforward and basically take the Affordable Care act, put it where conservative health care is put in the Clinton Health care or whatever donald trump has proposed, you can put medicare for all their. It is perfect because that is the criticism of plans. Depicts the challenge that we have with health care and the system. Veryve a series of not appealing options that are and a lota politician of that is imagining what something could look like could fan finance it. Be of the cartoons will it is especially timely. Than the fact that it has the fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. Think this is the best cartoon i have ever see