At that point, Bush backpedaled. "If he's told all there is to tell on Moscow, fine," Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "I'm not suggesting that there's anything unpatriotic about that. A lot of people went to Moscow, and so that's the end of that one."
But the list of zingers, prepared on Oct. 10, indicated that Bush was not so ready to let the patriotism theme go. His problem, however, was that when he tried to raise the loyalty issue through a question on character, he stumbled badly and was then thrown way off balance by Clinton's counter-blow.
Through the campaign's final weeks, Bush shelved the Moscow zingers. But he did resort to other clumsy insults against Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore.
"Listen to Gov. Clinton and Ozone Man," Bush shouted at one campaign stop. "This guy [Gore] is so far off in the environmental extreme, we'll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American. This guy's crazy. He is way out, far out. Far out, man."
Bush added, "My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos."
Although stung by the passport-ploy failure, the Bush campaign kept quietly pursuing derogatory information about Clinton's student travels. In the days after the debate, phone records revealed a flurry of calls from Bush's campaign headquarters to Czechoslovakia. There were also fax transmissions on Oct. 14 and 15.
On Oct. 16, what appears to have been a return call was placed from the U.S. Embassy in Prague to the office of Bush's ad man Sig Rogich, who was handling anti-Clinton themes for the campaign.
Following these exchanges, stories about Clinton's 1970 Prague trip began popping up in Czech newspapers. On Oct. 24, 1992, three Czech newspapers ran similar stories about Clinton's Czech hosts. The Cesky Denik story had an especially nasty headline: "Bill Was With Communists."
The Czech articles soon blew back to the United States. Reuters distributed a summary and, over three consecutive days, The Washington Times ran articles about Clinton's Czech trip. The Clinton campaign responded that Clinton had entered Czechoslovakia under normal procedures for a student and stayed with the family of his Oxford friend.
Despite these last-minute efforts to revive the Clinton's loyalty issue, the Democrat held on to defeat Bush in a three-way race involving populist billionaire Ross Perot.
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