On which he was able to bestow his gifts by commenting originally and his words on those president s. Im mike nelson. Im the guy you had to put up with during the first panel. Fortunately, we have a new cast of people to add their voices to the wonderful voices you heard from the scholars that were on the first panel. Once again, we have Miller Center people here, and the Miller Center. One of the main emphasis is to study the presidency in depth, historical depth with objectivity. In other words, were all in the business of doing stuff that an editorial cartoonist is not in the business of doing which is reacting to events on a daytoday basis as oliphant did as a cartoonist and whereas we all strive to be as objective as we can and the job of the editorial cartoonists and pat oliphant as well as anyone has done it to provide comment, to provide opinion and to provide something to provoke discussion rather than perhaps aspire to settle discussion. The panel today, this afternoon that would use george bush. I dont use the h. W. He was george bush when he was president. John adams didnt have to change his name so im sticking with george bush and of course, his immediate successor bill clinton and george w. Bush, the one who came next and finally, we sort of dip our toe into the obama presidency, pat of which pat oliphant was able to capture in his cartoons and were able to see at least one example of pat oliphants gifts as a sculptor. We only get to see an image of it, but its an extraordinary work and one ever our panelists, the one well introduce right now, Mary Kay Carey can tell us about the sculpture. Ma mary kate is a senior fellow and has been teaching in the Politics Department of the university she was a speechwriter and Communication Specialist of all sorts in the bushquayle campaign and then in the george bush presidency. The former director of the Miller Center and a member of the History Department here held prominent positions in both Bush Administrations and probably did other things that im not even aware of that are worth noting and then chris lowe. A senior fellow has worked over the years and i dont know how many people get to say that truthfully including seven years in the obama administration. So what were going to do is the same thing we did the first time around. Well take cartoons from each one of these presidencies in sequences. All of them oliphant creations that are now part of of the university of virginia collection and that are available in many cases for you to go see either there or over at the Miller Center where there are some others and lets start with that first cartoon. For those of you who cant read that far back because i know its difficult. You have george bush on the top and what they tried to sell and then as he is perceived and then dukakis, what they tried to sell and then as he is perceived and it says altered egos and i cant read. Can condition else read that . You got it . [ inaudible ] thanks. Altered e goes on or how we think of them when we think of them at all. There you go. I was on the 1988 bushdukakis campaign and i would say the top half is exactly not true how he was perceived and the bottom half is exactly how dukakis was perceived from our point of view. I remember being i remember having a tshirt that said beware of greeks having lifts and there was a lot of joking about the difference in height between governor dukakis and president bush. I remember there was a saturday night live skit called dukakis after dark and it played upon this, that there was this other side of Michael Dukakis that nobody saw or knew about, but on the topside i would say the left side of what they tried to sell is exactly what we all perceived in george bush. A war hero, 58 combat missions and lifelong public servant, and i met David Mccullough when making a documentary about president bush. It takes about 50 years for historians to render a judgement on a president and how glad he was to see that historians had come around on george bush and given him the credit and that george was alive to see it, and so i do think that he was admired widely especially by the time he died, and i do think the top of this is not accurate, but i also realize im a little biased. So whats been portrayed here. One of the challenges by the panel is for many of you, we dont need to explain what the references are in these cartoons because you see many of you are talking about it as a win factor. Of course, for young people, nowadays they thought george bush was a wimp. Why did they think he was a wimp . Thats actually a really good question. The origin of the wimp factor label was a magazine cover that had president bush under the wimp factor which stung. At the time i had no Campaign Affiliation and i would go in as a detailee in the beginning of 89. It may seem like 49 now as i age and it all looks misty. But why was he labeled a wimp and why did the label kind of sort of stick . Even if youre a bush partisan and just about everyone who worked for bush became one if they had not been before. Its interesting, when just as a side bar comment, you do learn a lot about these leaders by looking at the attitudes of the people in the circle around them and just he commanded a lot of loyalty from the people around him, so, but why . There is something about the thin, ready voice, having been kind of a second banana to reagan for eight years. The sense that on the campaign trail he was he was actually not in my view a forceful and charismatic public speaker, by and large. He actually is one of those people, actually johnson had a little bit of this, too, and came across much better in public than in private. Reagan, by the way, and sometimes its just the opposite. So there are qualities there and theres an occasional quality that would leak to the surface and a sense that on the campaign trail he would spout the convention conventional pablum and people who had to say to different audiences and therefore people had trouble getting a firm sense of him and then some people both on the right the right wanted him to be a more muscular conservative in one image of him and he didnt fit that, so theres something in the image of him that people are perceiving. Im not sure that mr. Oliphant would have drawn bush more, and he sticks with this for a while because the caricature seems to capture something that resonates with a lot of the American People and you have to face up to that and understand it. And this is is why these are voe valuable as historical items and they capture something about the way people are perceived in their generation that will then be lost 30 years later and by looking at the cartoons you can recover. What i find interesting is how it gets to peoples minds and the Honest Campaign recognizes your liabilities and tries to push back against that. You try to push back against the unforced errors and of course, the most famous unforced error from the 88 campaign was you all recall Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with an illfitting helmet. No candidate would ever do that now. That could hesly have been the perception and mary kate could talk about it better and some of the important moments of george bush 41 and the grocery scanner thing where he didnt know how that worked and the famous moment in the 1992 debate when he looked at his watch and seeming to be bored and whenever we prep a candidate for debates or tell them to never, ever look at your watch. I remember when i was working for john kerr ney 2004. He was doing president ial debate prep in wisconsin and we wanted him to go out and do some public event and we wanted to highlight how gas prices were high and we wanted him to fill out a gas tank and to avoid the dukakis moments or the george bush grocery scan we actually check, do you know how to fill up your gas tank, but thats one of those moments that you didnt want to happen and because of these moments in the campaign you double and triple check every time you put your candidate in public because you dont want these visual images to stick in the peoples brain. One thing we havent noted yet in every cartoon we will see and the right quadrant punk, the pigeon who is a de facto greek chorus not a pigeon, a penguin that pat oliphant include individual of his cartoons to provide an additional dollop of commentary. For me, the joy of these cartoons is on the one hand they are snapshots of a moment, but on the other hand they are windows into a period and what we start to see in this cartoon is the departure from the era in which we regarded president ial elections as contests with the giants and think of the making of a presidency in 1960 where they were once again meeting on the field of battle, two titanic figures, either one of whom was worthy of trotting on a heroic stage and now i think we see by 1988 were looking at president ial candidates as diminished and even comic figures and that in some ways has become a default setting ever since. So this is actually a very nice cartoon and this is george bush and George Washington walking down pennsylvania avenue on Inauguration Day in 1989 and that was the 200th anniversary of George Washington being sworn in at the same time that george bush was sworn in and president bush was very honored by that and got sworn in using two bibles, one stacked on top of the other, one was the bush family bible and the other was George Washingtons bible and he started his inaugural address by pointing that out because he was so honored by that and one other comment and that same conversation with David Mccullough, David Mccullough believes that george bush was the most qualified person to run for president since the founders at the time and didnt say it at the time, but said it after wards and that brought it to mind, as well and all of the jobs that president bush had done in service for the precedent perfectly prepared him for the moment and we got through the cold war without a single shot being fired or end of the cold war, excuse me. Thats what jumped out for me. He was very proud of that moment. The only thing i felt amused by that one is the Old Post Office which is now the trump hotel. And what is interesting about this and i would simply without talking about the current president and mary kate and others and president s, i think its seen as bad form to compare yourself to previous president s and im not sure, and while it was perfectly appropriate to pay homage to George Washington with the bible. Its not the classiest thing to say im the greatest president since no, i was referring to somebody else, actually. Simply to say that there are subtle ways that president s reference other president s. Some dont see what punk is saying. Beautiful, aint it, george . The second george is written in a different font, and i guess youd call that what is that font . 18th century font and a pun on two georges and the 18th century font. Im struck with the image of the other president in this picture, George Washington who has come down to us, i think largely because of the pictures we have of him as this sort of bland and even boring figure and the solid and virtuous in every way, but no spark of life do we see in any of the pictures that we have in George Washington. Just take out your dollar bill and look at that whereas in truth i dont think any american in history has had such excitement and advation in his own generation as George Washington was in his. People were crazy about washington and they thought he was an exciting guy, a sexy guy, but George Washington is the bland figure that his portraitists portrayed him as. So i had to ask i guess i should read this out loud. Here is apparently dan quayle in the baby carriage saying gug, gug, and punk saying you must be so proud. And this, apparently, i had to ask was a reference to the tower nomination and that dan quayle said that the people opposed to john towers were engaging in mccarthyism. I find this very unfair and i think there is background that george bush met Harris County republican chair in houston which was quite a big deal and john tower decided to run for Lyndon Johnsons senate seat in a special election after johnson left to become Vice President , and thats when the two of them first became friends. So at this point theyd been friends for almost 40 years. In 1968, i think there was a discussion earlier on the earlier panel about nixons short list for Vice President ford, but in 68 john meachams book about bush, destiny and power, nixons short list for vp was john tower, george bush, spiro agnew and one more, Ronald Reagan. Wouldnt that have been something . So then now comes 1989. At this point, tower is former senator tower and former chair of the Arms Services committee in the senate and bush names him his old friend to the secretary of defense and it comes out that theres concerns about as her apartment put it, his love of women and booze and there was also some sort of conflict of interest investigation, as well and this was the First Time Since 1959 that a cabinet officer was not confirmed and the senate at that point was 45 republicans and 55 democrats, i believe, and the vote went down 4753. No and so that to me means two democrats crossed over ask voted yes or more republicans voted no, but it was due to the fact that the democrats were in the senate in control of the senate and that is why tower did not get through. George bush felt strongly that loyalty goes down as well as up and it was tremendously loyal to john tower despite the flaws that were exposed. In meachams book he tearfully says to john tower i will not pull the rug out from under my friend and stuck out to him and it also set the stage for why he was so tremendously loyal to Clarence Thomas nomination, as well. He, i believe, inaccurately is depicted here as treating dan yail as some kind of baby and that couldnt be further from the truth. He wenta, genst everyone who went for quayle in a surprise move and treated quayle as an equal because he himself had been a Vice President and he wanted the same treatment for his own Vice President and continued his tradition that hed started with president reagan on having lunch every week with the Vice President. They had a very close relationship, and i think he was this is not the way he looked at dan quayle. This is about a speech that quayle gave. I take a more synthetic view to the cartoonist perhaps than mary kay does this. I do not join the dan quayle rehabilitation lobby. I agree that bush tried to treat quayle the way he thought a Vice President should be treated and with appropriate dignity, but do not think that dan quayle was one of the key insiders of the Bush Administration and though he was in a lot of meetings. Bush treated him appropriately, but he was not a very influential person, i believe, in the senior ranks of the administration and heres what happens. This is early 89 and quail gave a quite nasty speech basically saying tower was defeated because of mccarthyism. The investigation of tower had been run by sam nun who was the senator of the senate Arms Services committee. For not knowing anything about this panel, i was with sam nunn and jack reed for other reasons and nunn kind of basically for some reason started reminiscing about the tower fight at some length, and he to this day knew what to say in the senate and he worked with him on Armed Services for many years, and a lot of investigation was done confidentially and it was ever made public. And so to accuse basically sam n nunn of being the latterday version of mccarthy was not a wise thing to say and it was not as george bush might be caricatured to saying. It wasnt the prudent thing to say so bush would be depending on people like sam nunn as an essential partner on anything he would get done on National Security issues. Including handling the confirmation of the person nominated to take the tower which was dick cheney of wyoming as secretary of defense. So here, people noticed that hed been mild mannered on the campaign trail in 88 and here he is making his debut in early 89 in the hitman role like people had associated or gore would later do a little bit of this for clinton, and it was it was not an attractive role for quayle, and it was want an attractive role to have quayle may and i think oliphant is calling him. Whether one thinks dan quayle is underrated or for the first time tonight, overrated [ laughter ] this to me is a brilliant example of caricaturist art and weve seen where noses and chins and eyes were treated in typical caricature fashion, right . Exaggerated and here we dont even see dan quail the impression being that he is an infant and therefore of no significance at all, but to not show a character as a form of caricature i think is really interesting. The baby carriage has that fancy monogrammed initial cue. Like its the super fancy baby carriage from a very wealthy family. Right. Thats a nice little touch. You know, the i forgot to say earlier and signifying the invisible dan quayle reminds me of doons bury at the time and had skippy, the evil twin and he was an as terrific or feather in the white house and president bush got a kick out of it and there were prank photos taken of john sununu and bob gates and dick cheney talking to an empty chair, talking to the podium when nobodys at the podium and they would sign it and send it to the president