 "Photo: Callie Richmond")
A 45-foot, 28-ton mobile museum highlighting the "the corrupt legacy of the Bush administration" stopped in downtown Austin Tuesday afternoon.
The bus is the latest initiative of Americans United for Change, a three-year-old Washington, D.C.-based progressive interest group.
The biofuel-powered bus parked in Austin, opening its doors to the public from the 11th Street headquarters of the Texas AFL-CIO, the Texas branch of a national labor union board.
The bus, which was funded by a coalition of progressive groups including Americans United for Change, MoveOn.org and VoteVets, hosts museum-style exhibits on perceived Bush administration failures.
A timeline of Bush administration debacles cover the floor of the bus, from Enron's collapse to the firing of former White House Chief of Staff Scooter Libby. The walls feature interactive exhibits on Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, global warming and high gas prices.
A largely progressive crowd of about 30 spectators milled in and out of the bus during the first half of the two-hour exhibit. Employees of the Texas AFL-CIO and members of other progressive political organizations came to view the exhibit.
"[The exhibit] shows imagination and determination," said Ruth Epstein, Democratic chair for Travis County Precinct 238 who toured the bus Tuesday. "No one thing can change hearts and minds, but it adds to the cumulative criticism of the administration."
The bus is a month into its four-month tour of the nation, in which it will visit 44 states. The group visited states in the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast and the West Coast before coming to Texas. It will visit Crawford, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Odessa this week.
A spokeswoman for Americans United for Change, originally founded in 2005 to combat President Bush's initiative to privatize social security, said the political group wanted to find an innovative way to plead their political case.
"We thought, 'Let's do something different,'" said the group's spokeswoman Julie Blust. "It's campaign season, everybody's going to sling mud with commercials on TV."
Blust said the goal for the bus tour was not just to educate the public about the failures of the Bush administration.
"These aren't issues that are new to working Americans," Blust said. "But I think that a lot of times, they don't connect them. We want to make it clear that their problems aren't isolated incidents or coincidences."
Government junior and Young Conservatives of Texas Vice Chairman of Operations Nick Prelosky said unorthodox tactics like these can be used for misdirection.
"It's not very sophisticated, but it's eye-catching." Prelosky said. "The crux of the [political group's] argument in the upcoming election rests on their lack of substantive issues to talk about, so the best they can do is to talk about the failures of the Bush administration."
Blust said Americans United for change wanted not only to cement Bush administration failures in voters' minds, but to explain the political problems of the last eight years.
"We want to cement the Bush legacy in history while he's still in office," Blust said, "But we're really talking about the entire conservative legacy."
Exhibits tied Republican presidential hopeful John McCain to the last two terms of the Bush administration. In one display, the group described George Bush posing for pictures with McCain on his birthday the day after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2003. The Iraq war panel read "It's not just Bush's war."
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