Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Teeter

Teeter’s line is an unusually frank peek at how political trust gets manufactured: not through evidence, but through inherited branding. The “automatically” does a lot of work. It admits that voters, journalists, and donors were primed to treat the Bush name as a shortcut past scrutiny, as if lineage could certify “personal qualities” the way a seal certifies a document.

The key maneuver is the pivot from Clinton to Bush. Teeter frames the 1990s not as an argument about policy but as a lesson in character misrecognition: “we were fooled on by Clinton.” That phrasing turns Clinton’s presidency into a cautionary tale about being duped, tapping the era’s swirling scandals and the broader fatigue with moral ambiguity. It’s less a critique of specific actions than a story about embarrassment. If the electorate feels tricked once, the campaign can sell the next candidate as the antidote: familiar, vetted, supposedly predictable.

The subtext is transactional. Teeter isn’t claiming George W. Bush has proved these virtues; he’s saying the association with George and Barbara Bush allows everyone to skip the awkward due diligence. It’s a strategy of pre-forgiveness and pre-approval: the family is offered as character witness, the son as beneficiary.

Contextually, this fits a post-Clinton moment when “character” became a proxy battlefield, and Republican operatives saw an opening to re-center politics around trust, decency, and cultural reassurance. Teeter’s candor reveals the cynicism beneath the reassurance: authenticity, in this frame, is something you can inherit.