Chicken George (politics)

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Chicken George was the name for a man in a chicken costume who shadowed George H. W. Bush through a portion of the 1992 U.S. presidential election.

[edit] Debating the debate format

Bush first began being called the pejorative term "chicken" by Democrats when he refused to agree to the debate format determined by the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates. In previous years the normal pattern had been for a period of direct negotiations between the parties after the non-partisan CPD's decision. In earlier years the general consensus was that the Republicans had benefited most from these negotiations. To prevent a repeat of this pattern, the Clinton team thus refused to conduct any negotiations to alter the CPD rules. The Bush camp threatened to cancel all of the debates if the negotiations did not occur.

Clinton supporters worked to portray the President as cowardly, or chicken, due to his alleged fear of debating Clinton. On the initiative of a local labor organization, a young Democratic campaigner crashed a Bush Labor Day event held at the Detroit Economic Club in a giant chicken costume as a publicity stunt. This technique proved successful and soon the Clinton campaign was ensuring that the chicken would appear at each Bush event (the name "Chicken George" was a reference to a fictional character in the Roots novel and Roots television miniseries.

The original Chicken was played by Darrel Parker and John O'Meara, volunteers from Michigan. The Chicken did not speak, and was accompanied by a spokesman calling himself Colonel James Baker III, but who was actually played by Corbett Edge O'Meara, then an unemployed paralegal and cab-driver and now a prominent Detroit lawyer still active in Democratic politics. The Chicken was a guerrilla-politics operation of the Michigan Campaign and was directed by Jay Byrne, then regional communications director for the Clinton-Gore '92 campaign. Byrne recruited O'Meara and Parker and bankrolled a trip in O'Meara's Geo Metro where the pair first visited cities in the various Michigan media markets and then later shadowed President Bush as he made campaign visits by train across Michigan.

In cities across Michigan the Chicken, and his handler "Colonel Jim Baker" would get out of O'Meara's Geo Metro with a sandwich board that read: "Chicken George, Afraid to Debate". They would position themselves in a location convenient to media outlets, to aid in the media response that the campaign was seeking to manufacture. They would report their location to the campaign, who would begin calling the local media wherever the pair were. The campaign workers would report that they were people in whatever town the Chicken was in, and would act like the Chicken was drawing huge attention. The Chicken and spokesperson would then escort the media to local area republican campaign or elected official offices where they offered buckets of fried chicken and repeat their demand for Bush to debate.

At every stop some media person, either a print reporter with a photographer or a TV crew, always responded. The manufactured stories would appear, created a buzz, and be forwarded along to news media at the next stop. These initial publicity efforts were eventually picked up by the national news media and included an ABC World News Tonight story interviewing the the pair on a golf course in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. After this publicity peak, Clinton field campaigners in numerous states purchased chicken suits and began holding events and dogging President Bush at local campaign events.

The exploits and success of the Michigan Chicken George culminated at the end of an October Bush campaign whistlestop train tour modeled from David McCullough's book on Harry S. Truman (Bush had met with the biographer McCullough earlier in the year to discuss this campaign tactic). The Michigan Chicken George campaign arranged for a Burma-Shave billboard campaign along the President's route and for the Chicken to appear at each campaign stop. By the final day of the train tour, the manufactured local response had been hyped by Byrne to the national campaign, and the national media began to buy into the completely manufactured media event. At his final stop in Holland, Michigan a distracted and flustered President Bush went off his scripted remarks and started to wag his finger and engage The Chicken. This resulted in dozens of television news images, print reports, and a front page Sunday New York Times photograph of the president of the United States engaging in an undignified verbal exchange with a man dancing in a chicken suit.

As damage control the Bush campaign responded by attempting to unleash a pack of live ducks in front of the Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock to bring attention to Clinton's supposed "ducking" of the draft. Apparently warned in advance, Clinton's chief dirty trick responder Betsey Wright greeted the Bush web-footed campaigners with a large flaming pile of briquettes calling for "duck barbecue" party. The tactic was not subsequently repeated.

Throughout the Chicken George campaign O'Meara and Parker gave interviews to many members of the national political press corps. During these interviews, the two were never connected to the campaign and said that they were just a couple of college student victims of Bush's economy out trying to speak their minds. This was the recorded historical visage of their efforts as chronicled by veteran political reporter Jack Germond in his book on the campaign, Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992 (Warner Books, 1993).

According to some reports, Bush found the chicken quite funny. However, that day after day the President's image placed himself across a sea of reporters engaging the chicken meant that the chicken appeared on television newscasts far more often, and the argument that George Bush was scared of meeting Clinton got wider publicity. The image of the leader of the free world conversing with a giant chicken was felt by some observers to not be in keeping with Bush's desired image.

Eventually, Bush agreed to participate in the debates, including one in Michigan, and the chicken thus stopped shadowing him.