Even when his handlers tried to make a speech goof-proof, Bush managed to snatch incoherence from the jaws of clarity. During his reelection campaign, when polls suggested, with some justification, that he lacked empathy, his speechwriters fed the stage direction (message: I care) into the teleprompter to remind him to read the next line with something approximating human emotion. Instead, he read the stage direction aloud, robotically emitting the non sequitur MESSAGE I CARE to a confused audience.
