Bush's back isfront & center
New York Daily News -
http://www.nydailynews.com
Bush's back isfront & center
Wednesday, October 13th, 2004
Tonight's presidential debate is supposed to focus on domestic issues, but the first question will concern neither taxes nor health care nor stem cells.
This question will be asked not by the moderator but by viewers at home straining to answer for themselves whether President Bush once again has a mysterious bulge under the back of his suit coat.
Already, there is the question of what exactly caused the bulges at the first and second debates. The Bush people insist the whole matter is just a bit of Internet lunacy. They scoff at the suggestion Bush was wearing an electronic prompter, which you would expect to be much smaller than the apparent bulges suggest. They also deny Bush had on body armor.
The candidates were positioned behind lecterns in the first debate.
Section 9, subsection (a), sub-subsections (iv) and (vi) of the debate rules clearly state that "TV cameras will be locked into place" and "the camera located at the rear of the stage shall be used only to take shots of the moderator."
But the good people at Fox filmed a rear view of the man who is clearly their candidate. They could not have anticipated that a purportedly undoctored freeze frame would flash around what our President would call the Internets showing what became known as "Bush's mystery bulge."
In the second debate, the candidates moved about the stage and Bush's back more than once came into view. A freeze frame again appeared to show a bulge, all the more mysterious for seeming a different shape and dimension than the first.
At the third debate tonight, the candidates again will be at lecterns and we may not get even a glimpse of Bush's back. Those who will be looking prominently include Edward Hayes, a New York lawyer and man about town who terms himself, with considerable justification, "the world's leading expert on suits."
Before he became the best-dressed lawyer in all New York, Hayes was the best-dressed homicide prosecutor in all the Bronx. He has studied the freeze frames from the first two debates with an eye both forensic and sartorial.
"As a man whose first experience with lumps in suits was in homicide in the Bronx and then went on to Saville Row, I'm telling you that is not a tailor's mistake," Hayes said. "Unless somebody doctored the photos, he's got something under there."
Hayes' expertise regarding lumps under suits includes the kind sought out by the seemingly friendly hands of his more nefarious clients when they greet somebody they fear might be wearing a wire.
He indicated how he himself might respond if somebody arrived for a meeting with such a lump.
"I tell you what: If I pat him on the back and feel something like that, I'm on the elevator before he is," Hayes said.
Hayes also has taken note of the fashion challenges posed by body armor.
"A bulletproof vest, you'd see under his armpits," Hayes suggested.
Only the most paranoid of us could believe Bush wore an electronic device to the debates, but if he did, it would be a receiver, not a transmitter. His demeanor in the first debate was not entirely unlike somebody who had a voice muttering in his ear.
Hayes joked that perhaps this also could explain why Bush did so much better in the second debate. "The second time he had a guy from a town with more than a cow and six people in it," Hayes said.
Lump or no, Hayes is not impressed by Bush's attire. The fit is too tight. The material is sometimes, well, a little shiny - the tailor's answer to Freedom Fries.
"A Texas suit," Hayes said.
Kerry wears darker colors and slightly heavier materials with a much better fit - a suit to impress foreign leaders at a summit. "Upper-class, custom-made, probably right down to his shoes," Hayes said.
Hayes knows as well as anybody that neither clothes nor even a lump means much compared with the momentous issues now facing us.
And the domestic matters to be discussed tonight are secondary to the question of the war in which our finest people are being killed and maimed day after day after day.
But there is nothing like a little mystery to provide a momentary distraction in dire times.
"There will be a cast of thousands looking for a bulge," Hayes said.
feeling for himself, I thought... 
But, since it now looks like we're adding $2.6 trillion to it, that will make a total of $8.2 trillion. 
When our economy takes a dive, so does our government's income. If Bush's tax cuts succeed in growing the economy, that will increase our government's income. He's aiming for a smaller percentage of a larger pie. That's what he's hoping for. Some say it worked when Reagan did it... and he wasn't the first, either. 