Bush, in fact, always seemed to me to be… well, kind of a nebbish? I think that’s the word I’m looking for?
Like a squeaky little guy.
“Folksy” and “cowboy” were never even close to my mind when I saw him speak.
Why do most people see him that way?
The movie W seemed to me to be portraying more of a Will-Ferrel-As-Bush character, rather than Bush himself.
Are there clips out there or something that particularly well illustrate how he’s supposed to be a folksy ranchy kind of guy?
Maybe my problem is I was actually raised in Texas by a child of ranchers, and interacted with (and was beat up by) “folksy” seeming cowboys (no quotes–actual cowboys) every day in school. (The interacted part, not the beat up part! That just happened once. FTR I did not have it coming. )
Maybe because of this, I have a different standard for folksiness and cowpokiness?
Nope. I think his admiration/emulation of that type might have been earnest, but the daylight shining through the cracks was prepsterish. And yeah, a lot of the cowboy types I used to know were hound dogs, not salt of the earth…not bad people though.
Yeah- the song ‘Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys’ is true, or at least, heartfelt - cowboys aren’t ‘folksy’ people. A ‘folksy cowboy’ is an oxymoron. Bush is just a … nevermind, not gonna go there… bad joke, bad!
Same here. I grew up in Texas, and worked summers on my grandmother’s ranch, and he always struck me as the guy who would hire the real cowboys to do all the work on his “ranch” while he drove around in a shiny dually.
I liked his daddy, used to stand and give him polite applause whenever I’d see him enter or leave an Astro game in the Dome. And I don’t think Jr.'s a bad fella, it’s just that at a branding we’d probably gravitate to different sides of the campfire.
My dad knew Bush in college. He says that back then, GWB was just another preppie WASP from New England with a powerful dad, just like three quarters of the guys he went to school with.
How about Laura? From what I’ve seen, there are the archetypical brassy Texas women; pretty much the same regardless of money, and then there are those whose not-so-secret wish is that they’d been born a few miles east so they could be genuine Southern Belles.
I’m a recovering native Texas and GW Bush always seemed to me to be a “wanna be” Texan with a deep seated admiration for the Texas Rangers and I don’t mean the baseball team.
I think he saw too many John Wayne movies as a child.
Gosh, that title really did me. I was trying to work out who J.R. Bush was- whether it was the President before the current one or his dad (I realised that the initails were different in both cases but thought it may have been an in joke.)
It’s been pointed out numerous times that, despite spending all that time at his Texas ranch, you never saw Bush on a horse (as you saw Reagan on one). ex-Mexican President Vincente Fox went so far as to say that Bush was scared of them:
And there’s this, which you shouldn’t take seriously, since Laura is clearly making a joke:
politics aside, i’ve always liked W, not that i ever met the man. his accent has always mystified me since few educated Texans of our generation talk like that when sober. most of his time in texas was in midland, but his accent is a lot more deep east texas than panhandle, especially his habit of pausing in the middle of a sentence. maybe he chose the accent of one of his dad’s old school east texas oil buddies? and the ranch thing? read hard scabble by john graves, all texans have a return to the land fantasy. and remember, Reagan rode a horse because he was a movie cowboy.
I don’t really know that Bush is fake in any way. Why does everyone assume his accent was a deliberate creation? Obviously people have a different way of speaking in public than in casual conversation, but if you look at the dude’s biography saying he grew up in New England is like saying Winston Churchill grew up in America because his mom was from there and he visited it many times in his life.
Bush didn’t live in New England full time until he went to boarding school at the end of his High School years, by that time it’s highly unlikely he would be someone with a secret New England accent. It’s probably more likely that he had a mild accent that most of the people in New England would place as being somewhere generically from the Texas/Southwest region.
So I think it’s always been asinine to assume that his accent or his bearing are “New Englander pretending to be Texan”, being a New Englander is about growing up there not about having parents from there.
Now, was Bush a real genuine cowboy? Not at all, that was essentially an affectation combined with maybe a genuine interest in ranching that his wealth enabled him to play at. That being said I know a lot of Texans, a lot of well off Texans, and a lot of them wear cowboy boots and a cowboy hat in their business suits. Not one of them has ever worked a day in their lives at a ranch. So that sort of affectation is actually probably more common in Texas than being a genuine cowboy, cattle ranching is about having vast amounts of land with lots of cattle–it is not a labor intensive activity and the overwhelming majority of Texans will not only be totally inexperienced at anything having to do with ranching but most of them will have probably never spent any time in their lives on a working ranch. Yet the cowboy attire is still very common in some circles–so while Bush is guilty of some degree of cowboy affectation it’s a behavior that is 100% in line with being a wealthy silver spoon type from Texas, they all act like that despite being totally removed from the ranching world.
i’ll guarantee you 100% that W’s texas accent is a complete affectation that became a silly habit and morphed into a reality that crippled his thinking. i’ve spent my whole life in this godforsaken state and know damn near all it’s regional idioms and W’s ain’t the real thing, it’s like his brother jeb would talk after being waterboarded while watching Lonesome Dove a thousand times in one week.
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