It’s ‘Sweetie Pie’ and Kisses as Bushes Have Their Day in Sun

The other George Bush--the funnier, friendlier, more emotional George Bush, the one his friends keep talking about--arrived here Thursday.

At least it looked like him. He stepped up to the podium at a tribute to Barbara Bush, and what emerged was most un-Bush-like. Jokes. Timing. The Big Tease in the Big Easy.

He mocked his would-be analysts. “Who is the real you?” he said he was asked. “After the Democratic convention, you’ve got to be a little more demonstrative. You’ve got to show your emotions a little more.”

He looked at his wife--almost wickedly.

‘With Feeling’

“So here we go, the introduction with feeling, with demonstrable emotion,” Bush roared, his audience bursting into laughter.

“Come on up, sweetie pie!”

As the crowd of Republican women shouted its approval, George Bush hugged Barbara Bush, and kissed her on the cheek.

And Barbara Bush stopped the crowd as well.

“Thank you very very much,” she said archly, and paused with actor’s timing. “Sweetie.”

“I hope you won’t take your eyes off him--and see if he looks at me adoringly ,” she said. “As I looked at him.”

The exchanges capped a week where the far-flung Bush family meshed together, all five children and five in-laws, the 10 grandchildren, and boosted the patriarch in New Orleans.

In the formal nomination Wednesday night, the Bush children delivered delegates. His grandson, George Prescott Bush, delivered the Pledge of Allegiance Tuesday night.

The family display, ordinarily rebuffed by the publicly reticent Bushes, has taken on new importance since warm pictures of the Michael S. Dukakis family arose from the Democratic convention in Atlanta.

Barbara Bush continued with the same theme in her brief remarks at the convention Thursday night, when she praised her husband as an “extraordinary special man” who was “always there” when his family needed him.

Recalling the death of their 3-year-old daughter from leukemia in the 1950s, she said: “The hardest thing we ever faced together was the loss of a child. I was very strong over the months we were trying to save her. At least, I thought I was. Maybe I was just pretending.

Shares in Grief

“But when she was gone, I fell apart. But George wouldn’t let me retreat into my grief. He held me in his arms and he made me share it and accept that his sorrow was as great as my own. . . .

“As long as I live, I will respect my husband for the strength of his understanding,” she said.