On Bush on Clinton and Market Scanners

Nina Camic writes about George H.W. Bush's comment that Bill Clinton was like the "Energizer Bunny" during their goodwill tour. Initially, when I read the post I thought, "Wow, Bush has really gotten up to date, knowing about the 'Energizer Bunny' like that. I recall that when he was president he didn't know about supermarket scanners." Well, looking for a link to make that point I came across Bush's own account of the scene:

I'll give you a personal example. It was alleged that I was out of touch. "Bush is a President that's out of touch. He came from a privileged background, doesn't understand the hurt around this country." I went down to see a technology show and one of the items in the show was a brand new technology for check-out counters. It showed a machine that had never been invented before and, if my recollection is correct, wasn't even on the market at this point. The guy brought in a crumpled milk carton and ran it across this scanner and it did something that no other scanner could possibly do.

I made some comment. "Amazing, this is a wonderful thing." And the people that produced this were saying, "This is the state-of-the-art, and we've got more to come." It was wonderful.

A lazy little journalist with a famous name working for The New York Times, the son of a decent and honorable father, but a lazy little journalist, was sitting in another room. He didn't see this. He wrote that, "Here is Bush, he's out of touch. He saw a scanner. He didn't even know that at supermarkets you can scan something." It played right into the hands of the press that wanted to show I was out of touch and it was picked up.

We pointed out to the press afterwards that, one, the guy wasn't there; two, this was brand new technology. CBS, not my favorite, came and defended me. Another one of the wire service reporters said that I got a bum rap, but the people don't remember that. What they remember is that I was out of touch, that I didn't even know what a grocery scanner was. You can't fight back against that kind of thing. You can do a better job in communicating.

These complaints against the "MSMs" have been floating around for quite some time, haven't they?