Salon: "Who Cares What You Think?"

That's what President Bush shot back at me when I told him what I thought of his performance. As November approaches, I have to thank him for pointing me toward exactly the right question.

By Bill Hangley Jr.

It has been almost three years since I spoke with the president of the United States, and I still get mail about it.

It was July 4, 2001, and we were both at one of those things that the late historian Daniel Boorstin would have labeled a "pseudo-event": A church picnic in Philadelphia, designed to help George W. Bush promote his faith-based policies. I was working at the time for a local nonprofit that had helped set it up, but I had some serious misgivings about the president's performance up to that point, and being a part of the whole operation had left me feeling a bit like a pseudo-person. So when I had the chance to shake Bush's hand, I said, "Mr. President, I'm very disappointed in your work so far. I hope you only serve four years."

His smiling response was swift: "Who cares what you think?"

(snip)

But it was an unexpected return, to say the least, and as soon as our handshake was done, I stepped away and pulled out my notebook to write it down. This he noticed, and I heard him call out, "Who are you with?" I turned to see him 10 or 12 feet farther down the handshake line, craning his neck above the crowd -- he's shorter than I had expected -- and looking right at me, asking again, "Who are you with?"

Maybe he thought I was a renegade journalist; the press corps was expressly forbidden to interview people or mingle with the crowd. Or maybe he just wanted to know who was responsible for me, since nobody could get into the picnic unless they were with one of the organizing groups. But I wasn't trying to speak for anybody, and I certainly wasn't trying to goad a story out of him, so I stammered that I wasn't "with" anybody. As people started to notice, he grinned again and drawled, "Make sure you get it right."

The entire exchange probably took less than a minute. I slipped back into the crowd and he moved on, shaking hands and clapping backs, a powerful man at ease on a beautiful summer day.

And that would have been that, if it wasn't for the Internet. The next day, I sent a casual e-mail to about 20 friends, telling the tale and suggesting that "Who Cares What You Think" would look great on T-shirts. Within days, the story had been forwarded all over the world. Hundreds of people wrote back to thank me, or call me names, or find out if the story was true. It leaked into the press in various guises, but at my (now former) employer's request I never went on the record with it, and I never made T-shirts. Reporters asked the White House about it, but the best they got was what spokesman Scott McClellan told the New York Daily News: "I don't think I'm going to dignify something so ridiculous with a response."

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/19/bush_encounter/index.html

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