VIPs asked to remove ties during Bush speech in Indianapolis

INDIANAPOLIS -- White House staffers reportedly asked men sitting behind President Bush during a speech in Indianapolis to remove their ties to enhance the message's grass-roots appeal.\n"These are VIPs, right? Ordinary people aren't up on stage behind the president of the United States when he's speaking," said Bill Blomquist, a political science professor at IU-Purdue University at Indianapolis.\n"But the trick is to make VIPs look like they're ordinary people," he added.\nBush's speech Tuesday in Indianapolis was part of a three-state swing timed to pressure moderate Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to back a tax-relief package larger than the $350 billion bill that eventually passed Thursday night.\nCritics said the plan would primarily benefit the rich, but Bush discounted such claims as "the old tired stale class warfare argument" during the speech at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.\nApparently to reinforce that point, White House staff members instructed men on stage with the president to remove their ties, Indianapolis television station WISH reported Wednesday.\n"They wanted them to be themselves and that's what we were trying to get out of those shots, and it worked for the most part," said Mike McDaniel, a former state Republican chairman who helped organize the event.\nThe station aired telltale video of Indiana House Minority Leader Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, with a tie before the speech, tieless as he shook hands with Bush, then wearing a tie again in an interview afterward.\n"When you see somebody who is in coat and tie, then not in coat and tie, then in coat and tie, it sort of reveals that this is about stagecraft rather than statecraft," Blomquist said.\nBosma also removed his pocket square on his own initiative, but acknowledged he took off his tie at the request of White House staff.\n"When the guy from the White House tells you to take your tie off, you don't ask why," Bosma said.\nThe story, coming just weeks after Democrats charged that Bush's landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was a political ploy, set off a new flap. The story was picked up online by the Drudge Report, The New York Times included it in a front page story Friday and James Carville and Tucker Carlson debated it Thursday on CNN's "Crossfire."\nReporter Jim Shella said he received hundreds of angry e-mails after the story aired.\nViewers' reactions to the story ranged from, "'Those Bush people are smart,' to, 'You're out to get the president,'" he said.