JTA’s Ron Kampeas was at a Republican Jewish Coalition event on Monday night, featuring former Bush speech writer David “Axis of …” Frum. Like his new book, most of the night was dedicated to his take on all of the GOP’s headaches.
This time around, Frum said, the Democrats don’t know problems.
For them, he added, it’s “shall we have the dark chocolate with the chiffony center or shall we have the white chocolate. … We love them both.”
If that rubs you the wrong way, at least know that Frum is just as eyebrow-raising about his former boss. Here’s my favorite passage from Frum’s book on his stint in the White House:
“In the six weeks after I joined the White House, I became so fascinated by Bush’s extraordinary intimacy with [Karen] Hughes that I asked four different people who had worked with them in Texas whether they thought there was, or ever had been, something between them: if not a relationship, then perhaps an attraction. Everyone of them was astonished by the idea – and not just the men, who can be obtuse about these things, but women, too. My theory, for what little it is worth, is this: Bush had a much more strained relationship with his mother than is often acknowledged. Barbara Bush can be a difficult-to-please woman – and George W. Bush was a son it would often have been difficult to be pleased by. … When it came to marry, Bush sought a woman as unlike his mother as possible: warm not stern, shy not assertive, domestic not political. When he ran for governor, he recruited Hughes – a woman very like his mother (she even looks much as Barbara Bush did in her mid-forties), but who offered him the unqualified admiration his mother never did. His wife was his mother antidote. His aide was his mother substitute.”
