George H. W. Bush Visits CSM
Vice-presidential nominee topped off 1980 campaign stop with a jog around campus
The 1980 U.S. presidential election took place in an uncertain economy, the Iran hostage crisis, the lingering Cold War and lukewarm support for incumbent Jimmy Carter. San Mateo County, then moderately Republican, offered GOP vice-presidential nominee George H.W. Bush a strategic place to state his case for the Reagan-Bush ticket.
Bush visited College of San Mateo on Oct. 1, 1980, giving a campaign speech inside the Little Theatre, taking student questions and then, being an avid runner, leading a pack of shorts-clad VIPs and campus runners on a three-mile scenic jog around campus.
The campaign stop was a calculated one for Bush’s team. Ronald Reagan was unpopular with young Californians for, among other things, his confrontational stance against student protest when he was governor. Campaign staffers presented Bush, formerly the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as a comparative moderate who would exert a steadying influence in the White House.
U.S. Rep. Pete McCloskey of Woodside, probably the most liberal Republican in Congress, introduced Bush as a leader who would steer a more consistent course than Carter and would dissuade Reagan from sending America to war.
“Sometimes our policies have led to encouragement of forces to get rid of established governments,” Bush told the crowd. He proposed instead to “increase defense spending [and] build a foreign policy from the very first day on a realistic assessment of Soviet intention and a very real assessment of ... human rights policy.”
Bush’s visit entailed tight security and weeks of CSM planning. Secret Service agents guarded every room he entered and path he trod, including the hillside jogging trail.
The visit also came amid a heat wave. Bush insisted on running in the 100-degree weather, wearing the College of San Mateo T-shirt given him by college president Lois Callahan and track coach Bob Rush. He ran the three-mile trail in 22 minutes, generating striking visuals of himself leading a pack of young people. Years later, as president, Bush was spotted wearing the CSM T-shirt in Hungary, where he met with the new democratic government in July 1989 after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Reagan and Bush carried San Mateo County 48 percent to 36 percent in the 1980 election. They carried it 51-46 for their re-election in 1984. They were the last Republicans to win the county in a presidential race. Bush’s visit was the last time CSM has hosted a major-party White House candidate.
