Pressing Issues: Take Me Out to the "Bulge" Game

By: Greg Mitchell The rumors started on the blogs two weeks ago, spread to semi-respectable Web sites, then into print, and finally this week the story was enshrined as a true phenomenon when it inspired one of David Letterman?s Top 10 lists. The Daily Mail in London called it ?the question gripping America.? It even turned up in a poll sponsored by The Economist.

?It,? of course, is The Bulge. No, not the new O?Reilly factor, but the mystery of whether President Bush has some foreign object latched to his back.

Unreliable photos taken at the presidential debates suggest, to some, that the bulge could be a bullet proof vest, a back brace, a radio transmitter, one of Saddam?s missing WMDs, or perhaps just a bunch of intelligence memos the President hasn?t gotten around the reading yet (as Letterman would have it).

Or maybe the president?s just glad to see us.

In any event, it?s fun to observe how daily newspapers, right up to The New York Times, have attempted to cover the mystery without appearing to embrace it. Sort of like the Swift Boat charges, but with pictures.

The Charlotte Observer called it ?The Battle of the Bulge.? New York?s Daily News declared: ?Bush?s Back is Front and Center.? Dan Froomkin at The Washington Post?s site started a ?Bulge Watch.?

Trying to get to the bottom of it, Knight Ridder?s Camille Ricketts interviewed the presidential tailor, who said the bulge was just a pucker along the jacket's back seam. That?s reasonable, but who could have guessed that Bush, of all people, had a tailor named Georges de Paris? So anything is possible.

The Economist's poll found that of those who had seen a picture of the bulge, 49 percent think it's caused by "a radio receiver so that his team could communicate with him during the debate.?

But then some people will believe anything these days. The latest Gallup poll showed than 62% of Republicans still believe Saddam was involved with the 9/11 attacks.

How has the Bush campaign responded to all this? Bush spokesman Scott Stanzel said on Wednesday that the bloggers were ?spending a little too much time on conspiracy Web sites. Did you hear the one about Elvis moderating tonight's debate?"

Tim Grieve of Salon.com (which has spearheaded the rumors) revealed this response from Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman: "The president is an alien. You heard it here first. The president is an alien. That's your quote of the day. He has been getting information from Mars."

Syndicated humorist Andy Borowitz claimed, however, that Bush strategist Karl Rove, in hailing the president's performance in the second debate, gave credit to ?improved radio reception by the bulge in the back of his jacket.?

The bulge has spawned a suddenly popular ?internets? site called Bush Wired, which includes a gallery of bulge photos (even one from the Crawford ranch!) and cartoons. Sure to come: a bulge book, movie, video game, reality TV series, and strap-on device.

Letterman said the bulge was troubling but at least is ?an improvement over the last guy, who had a bulge in his pants.? Among the Bush explanations for the bulge from Dave?s Top Ten list this week:

"It's a device that shocks me every time I mispronounce a word."

"Mmm, Muenster cheese."

"Halliburton is drilling my back for oil."

"John Kerry voted for the bulge in my jacket, then voted against it."

"Oh, like YOU?VE never cheated in a presidential debate.?

"Accidentally took some of Governer Schwarzenegger's steroids."

"If Kerry's gonna look like a horse, then I'm gonna look like a camel."

Equally silly, Tina Brown wrote in The Washington Post that the bulge ?is a Rorschach test for feelings about Bush. ... The Bulge or its imagined fallout sweeps away at last the need for all this demeaning, low-tech, door-to-door, vote-begging uncertainty. It offers something decisive, something silly, something disqualifyingly ridiculous. A Milli Vanilli president is something even the red states would understand.?

When VP candidate John Edwards appeared on the Tonight Show earlier this week he told Jay Leno, apparently joking, that he thought the bulge was Bush?s ?battery.? Then he suggested that at Wednesday?s final debate, his running mate, John Kerry, ?ought to pat him down.?

Sure enough, when the candidates shook hands at the start of that debate, Kerry put one mitt on Bush?s back. Maybe there?s something to this after all?

As for me, I can?t help flashing back to my days in the 1968 presidential campaign, and the famous rallying cry against Hubert Humphrey: ?Dump the Hump.?