Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Olson

A deliciously accidental self-own, this line captures the early-2000s PR haze around George W. Bush: all vibes, no verbs. Olson is trying to launder campaign boilerplate into something that sounds substantive, but the sentence keeps betraying her. “From what we’ve heard” frames the candidate not as a known quantity but as rumor in a suit, mediated through handlers and chatter. It’s the language of a press class that has accepted access as a substitute for evidence.

Then comes the stumble that makes the quote stick: “a lot issues that he wants to run on.” “Issues” aren’t typically something you “have,” like a backlog of emotional baggage. Bush, famously dogged by questions about intellectual seriousness, gets recast—by accident—as a man with “issues” in the psychological sense. Olson immediately rushes to correct the implication: “They’re positive. They’re good.” The doubled reassurance reads like damage control performed in real time, revealing anxiety that the audience might hear what the words actually said.

The final clause, “He thinks he’s got a good vision for America,” is the softest form of endorsement: not “he has,” but “he thinks.” It’s belief about belief, a hedge that keeps Olson credible if the “vision” turns out to be thin. Context matters: this is the pre-9/11 moment when Bush was sold as a “compassionate conservative” and the media often treated “vision” as a brand attribute. The quote’s intent is to normalize and uplift; its subtext is uncertainty, patched over with sunny adjectives.