Bush Bears Down

摘要

What's the best way to deliver an unpleasant mes-sage to George W. Bush? You say little, and let the evidence speak for itself. So, just after Christmas, when the Republican front runner returned to Texas after shaky moments in three debates, he was handed a tape. It had to be to the point because, as Bush told TIME last week aboard his campaign bus, "I'm not gonna watch hours of tapes of myself, and I don't want to rehash all those debates." But this tape was crystalline in its message: it had been carefully edited to exclude all the other candidates, leaving only Bush onscreen with his scripted, repetitive answers and awkward impromptus. The Texas Governor plopped the tape into a VCR, watched it alone at the mansion and got the picture. "I'm a competitor," he told Time last week. "I want to win. And I'm wise enough to understand that all of us need to improve in life."