Bush Legacy Tour

SPRINGFIELD, MO-Thursday we paid a visit to House Minority Whip Roy Blunt’s district in Springfield, MO. Unlike so many of our stops where we highlight voting records of members that are desperately trying their best to distance themselves from the McCain/Bush Conservative agenda, Roy Blunt is proud of being part of Bush’s failed legacy.  Roy Blunt thinks a third term of Bush via John McCain would be a good thing. In fact he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN back in May just that.

The program discussed whether a McCain vote is voting for a third term of Bush’s economic policies. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) not only acknowledged that it would be, but celebrated a third term of Bush’s economic policies.

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

A good thing? There is not much that Blunt has to be proud of in sharing in Bush’s economic legacy especially in Missouri.

Some key stats show that Missourians are not better off since Bush’s took office…

·         The average median income of Missourians went from 48,166 down to 44,686

·         The number of unemployed in Missouri went from 124, 100 up to 170,800

·         Missourians spent $8.4 billion on the Iraq War

·         36,000 more Missouri kids do not have health insurance than when Bush took office

And we talked to several Springfield residents that do not think a third term of Bush’s failed conservative party through McCain will be “a good thing.”

Springfield Resident Jerry Price shares his thoughts on the Bush legacy.

Springfield resident and former teacher of 22 years, Sharon Matti discusses what the current administration has done for education.

Missouri State student Abbey Sumner talks about the big issues and their impact on young people.

ST JOSEPH, MO- St. Joseph is an hour outside of Kansas City and is the town where the Pony Express began and where outlaw Jessie James had his final fatal standoff. We did not make our trip to St. Joe to celebrate the history of the Wild West, however.  We paid a visit to St. Joe because their Congressman has been a supporter of the Bush/McCain conservative policy agenda.   The plan was to pull up directly in front of Representative Sam Graves’s office located on the third floor of the main post office building. Our logistics person headed down to site ahead of the bus to secure the parking spaces necessary. When she arrived, she ended up dealing with local police and homeland security. Apparently Rep. Graves’s office had gotten wind about our visit and his staffers made great strides to alert law enforcement of the malfeasance about to occur with our pulling up a bus and allowing folks to see the voting record of their boss.  They even resorted to having their staffers move their cars from their spaces in a lot to the meters in front of the post offices so that we could not park there. Their diabolical plan worked and we were a whole two car lengths behind being directly in front of the office building, causing the press and the public to walk an extra twenty feet to see the bus!  Checkmate Graves! If Representative Graves and his staff put nearly this much thought into governing for working and middle class people, perhaps we would not be paying him a visit at all. 

Representative Graves has been a reliable voted for the conservative agenda. Rep. Graves Supported Bush’s Multi-Trillion-Dollar Tax Breaks for Wealthy in 2004. Time and time again he has voted to keep troops stuck in Iraq and has done little for those returning home by voting against the 21^st Century GI Bill. His stance on healthcare includes voting against the State Children’s Health Insurance program and not allowing Medicare to negotiate for cheaper drug prices for our seniors. That is not the only vote Graves has cast against seniors. In 2004 Graves told The Kansas City Star that he would support Bush’s plans to privatize social security through initiating private savings accounts. Graves also voted against raising the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 over two years.  With gas prices at $4 a gallon and food prices sky-rcoketing, it is difficult to imagine how Graves think anyone could made ends meet on $5.15 an hour.

Graves and  Cheney

In front of Graves's office

ST LOUIS, MO-The biggest national failure… underneath the tallest national monument. 

From underneath the Gateway to the West, the Bush Legacy Bus reflects perfectly the giant silver arch that glistens on the Mississippi River in the shine of its exterior.  If the monument represents westward growth, the Bush Legacy represents growth of other kinds.

      ·         A deficit that has grown to the estimated $482 billion by the time Bush leaves office

      ·         The slowest job growth in 50 years.

·         The most drastic growth in home foreclosures since the depression.

·         Healthcare costs have grown by 10% each year since 2001.

Placing a museum on wheels underneath one of the most recognizable monuments in the world, begs the question, “What would a monument to the Bush Legacy look like?” Thanks to the internet we were able to find an artist’s rendition of just that.

Artist’s rendition of a monument to the Bush Legacy by Shadowplay:

Bus in front of the Mississippi

PEORIA and NORTHBROOK, ILL

"Will it play in Peoria?"

Our stop in Peoria on Saturday forced me to sit down and look up the origin of that expression.  What I found was that the phrase comes from the days of vaudeville and refers to the idea that any performance that did well in the city of Peoria would do well in the rest of the country.  Peoria continues to have the  good standing of being the litmus of all things American. Based on that, our stop Saturday in Peoria precipitates that we will have a good next couple months for the bus.

The bus received a warm reception. We set up next to the farmer’s market by the river and had people come through who were enjoying a leisurely Saturday on the river. Quite a few locals were pleased and surprised to see the bus in a town that they consider to be largely conservative. Others were not surprised to see the bus nor were they surprised that it received a good reception given that so many of Bush’s failed policies have hit the town hard.  The depressed economy and the fact that we have had the slowest job growth since the depression has impacted the town in immeasurable ways. I spoke to quite a few locals who feel that the jobs are simply not there and a lot of people who have  lived in the town for generations are now moving to Chicago and other cities to find work. I came across an article in Salon that describes a 2003 visit by President Bush that blatantly shows what the people of Peoria thought about the Bush Legacy five years ago. The interviews in the article from 2003 sound exactly like the conversations I had on Saturday. They will likely be the same conversations we will be having about McCain if he gets in office, based on his rubberstamping of Bush’s failed policies over the last 8 years.

DES MOINES, IOWA- Appearing on national television is nothing new for the Bush Legacy Bus. She had been featured on networks big and small all over the country and in a few cases abroad. She never shies away from a camera whether it belongs to a professional cameraman or a truck driver speeding up to catch a photo.  Yet, this morning’s camera appearance was certainly special and memorable.  CBS Sunday Morning came to Des Moines to take some footage of the Bush Legacy Tour for a piece they are doing on Bush’s Legacy. They are interviewing historians and other figures (and buses) about what Bush’s legacy will look like to future generations. The crew took some shots of the bus and we did a quick interview about the tour and also interviewed the Iowans who had come out to see the bus. They were hard-pressed to find any passerby’s that had good things to say about Bush’s legacy.  We held a brief event at our location in front of the downtown public library and then packed up to go to Drake University for the second half of our day. We then had the pleasure of meeting up with Howard Dean’s Register For Change Bus that was making an appearance there.  Dean came to the University and gave a speech about the importance of registering new voters during this election.

Chairman Dean then made a trip to our bus to take a short tour before heading to the next city. Check out the video of Dean’s tour.

TWIN CITIES, MN, DAY 4 RNC- Our last day at the RNC was significantly calmer than the previous three. We parked the bus at the Peace Picnic at Harriet Island all day and joined in the festivities. The bus was parked in the center of the action and we had a lot of visitors. Three hundred people came through easily.  The picnic attendees were there to call attention to the War in Iraq and advocate for a responsible pullout of the troops and a foreign policy in the future that thinks before they bomb. The bus was very well received by the picnic attendees but it was not without its critics in the park as a whole. At one point in the day several tour buses pulled up with RNC delegates who were at the park briefly to attend an event. They poured out of their buses right next to ours and about a dozen delegates came on the bus. It is difficult to say whether or not they knew what the bus was actually about but they quietly explored the exhibits inside. On the outside of the bus several of the delegates were more vocal including Illinois State Senator David Luechtefeld who expressed his disapproval of the bus.

Bill Habedank Jody Inlow Wayne Inlow

We started our morning like thousands of red-blooded Americans do every day at the Mall of America.  We had a an event at 10am in the parking lot there and no sooner than we started to set up the mall cops asked us to move. We cooperated and moved to the area across the parking lot where the rest of the tour buses were.  Seeing as we were set up along-side tour buses of the exact same size we thought we would be ok. We decided to park there for a while, especially considering three of our staff were inside shopping.   We were there for about 5 minutes and had not set up any of our exterior accoutrements and the mall cops came back told us that we needed to leave. This was especially ironic because our bus was literally parked alongside of four or five buses that had signs saying “Republican Delegates in the windshield.” The locals that I spoke to later on in the day about this were especially enraged about us being thrown out given the fact that the mall gets huge subsidies from  the taxpayers unlike most malls that operate completely privately.  It s the mall’s loss, we were going to spend a lot of money on Orange Julius’s and things from As Seen On TV.

Guess which of the following buses was kicked out of the Mall of America parking lot...

After being thrown out of the mall we regrouped and eventually made our way to Gopher country at the University of Minnesota. We stop at “the U” and opened up the bus for an hour or so. We had a great response from the students who had just started back to class and were happy to have a distraction. We then packed up and headed over  to the True Blue Minnesota movie screen that was set up on a major boulevard in St. Paul. The huge screen, the size and height of billboard was showing non-stop progressive films and video clips.  They had been showing videos from the Bush Legacy Bus all week, which we were excited to find out. They popped in a couple of our videos while we had the bus parked there. We stayed for about an hour and let people on the bus. The highlight was a delegate with a McCain/Palin button on that put $5 in the donation jar. Keeping with our intense schedule we rolled out after and hour and went to another event at Golden’s Deli where they were showing a screening of the Iraq Inc. We kept the bus open for a couple hours and eventually headed back to our hotel in time to watch the RNC speeches on the TV. Thad stayed with us for a drink celebrating a chaotic but fun day. Thad enjoyed his time on the bus. And we really enjoyed having him. He was a great sport considering we did four stops, three of them unplanned. He fit right in and was great talking to people about the issues on the bus. We filmed a video of him describing his day and why he decided to take the day off of work to join us.

Golden's Deli

 “We love oil, we love  war, we love McCain even more.”                                                         

 “Down with people, up with profits!”                                                                                                

 “More wars, less jobs!” and the simple                                                                                            

 “Drill! Drill! Drill! Drill! Drill!" A character in a polar bear suit was mockingly kicked and beaten (especially by Sarah Palin) while the crowd screamed, “Sink or swim, sink or swim!”  We drove the bus by a few times for the some visibility. The idea of the Bush “Legacy” bus as a tribute to the failures of the administration fit in well with the tongue-in-cheek nature of the protest.  We normally refrain from the satirical with the bus but the ambiguity of the term legacy as we utilize it, was perfect. After the event several of the members of the press that were filming the protest hopped on the bus for a tour. We eventually pulled into a nearby neighborhood in St. Paul that was somewhat untouched by the convention. Some locals came on and were relieved to see the bus in the midst of the RNC. They said they almost did not come on because they saw the words Bush on the side but were glad that they did.

TWIN CITIES, MN-Day one at the RNC was every bit as crazy as we had imagined.  The day began at the big peace rally on the Minnesota state capital.  We were parked about a block and half away and went down to the rally to pass out fliers about the bus. We obviously got an overwhelmingly positive response. There were thousands of people including Iraq Veterans Against the War, SEIU, and many other groups in the crowd.  We pulled folk on the bus and did some rides along the perimeter.  The police were out in droves and just driving anywhere around the perimeter was a daunting task. After the march started we eventually pulled out of the area and made our way to our next event. The next event was at a local activist Dan’s house in St. Paul. He lives on a major street and arranged for the bus  to come by and he invited 60-100 of his closest friends and neighbors. There was good food, drinks and company and the bus was a huge hit.  There were a lot of people that stopped their cars or their bikes to check out the bus. The bus became an interesting part of the counter RNC landscape. A number of the partygoers expressed that they were happy that we were organized and had a professional layout to the bus. They expressed concerns that all of the counter-RNC movements will be linked to the minority of the extreme protesters that were assaulting police and throwing things at delegates.

We stayed for a couple hours and rolled out to the next event which was a spur of the moment appearance at a party a few blocks away. The party was attended by a lot of local progressive and some candidates that are running for various levels of office. We parked the bus and folks came out to see it.  It also caught the neighbor’s attention, all of whom were incredibly supportive about having a 45 ft. long bus parked on their street.  One of the neighbors pointed out an interesting fact to us. Turns out we were parked directly in front of Senator Norm Coleman’s house!  The conservative Senator was not home, no doubt attending the RNC festivities.  It was ironic to be on his street with the bus and given the fact that every other house had a sign for his opponent Al Franken. That has to make for some awkward driveway conversations for the Coleman’s.

 

Day 5 DNC Thursday-

Today was our best day yet with foot traffic. The bus was packed constantly. There was a line to get in the door. People were coming out of the convention center next to us and came through the bus in droves.

Once again we had people from all over the country and the world come through the bus.  We had quite a few Europeans who were there for the convention that attested to the fact that the US’s image abroad has suffered during this administration. They commented on how inspiring the convention was for someone from a foreign country with all of the diverse groups and people in attendance. They stressed how they do not feel anything against the American people but just do not like the policies of the current administration. The foreigners who came through the bus were incredibly familiar with the policies we feature on the bus. It is amazing that people from across the pond know about SCHIP and that McCain voted against it.  The fascination by foreigners for American politics was evidenced by the three foreign documentary film crews that came through the bus .  We had a Slovenian, Japanese and British crew come through the bus all filming movies about Bush and/or the 2008 race.

There were numerous teachers from all over the country who made it out to the convention. I met quite a few teachers that were there for the convention that had a lot of problems with the Bush Administrations educational policies including No Child Left Behind. They feel the program has made their jobs more difficult without actually increasing the quality of the education their students received. I spoke to one-long time teacher who was never involved in politics until No Child Left Behind was enacted and now she is working constantly to get an administration in place that will make the necessary changes to No Child Left Behind or replace it with a program that makes sense and is properly funded.

We left our spot in front of the convention center early to catch the MSNBC live filming. The bus ended up being featured in the background three times. We then took the bus to its evening resting place and headed to Invesco field for the big event.