In August 1989 then President George Bush took his family to their summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for a nineteen-day summer vacation. No sooner had he arrived than he hopped into his twenty-eight-foot fishing boat, FIDELITY, confident he'd catch some bluefish as he had so many other times before. He didn't mind that a flotilla of press boats was following him to record every moment of his expected angling successes.

However, Bush didn't catch a fish that day . . . or the next day . . . or the next . . . or the next. While those around him were getting strikes, the President was striking out a fact reported daily by the media. By the tenth day without even a nibble, a local newspaper began publishing a "fish watch." Every day the paper ran a drawing of a bluefish inside the internati…