ONCE UPON A TIME, there was another president named Bush, and he, too, gave a speech that later gave him fits. In 1989, during a nationally televised address on drug law enforcement, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that he said had been seized right across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park. Bush’s point was that the drug trade was so widespread that the stuff was being dealt right there in his own neighborhood.
Soon thereafter, Bush learned that there was more to the story about that bag of crack. A Drug Enforcement Administration official had lured to the park a dealer who then sold the crack to an undercover agent. The dealer hadn’t done business there before, and for a reason that undercut Bush’s point–dealers didn’t see the park as a very good market!
