LATE ONE NIGHT in April 1980, when two future presidents were in a dogfight for the Republican party nomination, Peter Teeley sat at his typewriter trying to prepare a punchline for George H.W. Bush to throw against Ronald Reagan. Remembering an editorial that criticized Jimmy Carter's economic policies as put together by a group of "economic witch doctors," he started thinking about what witch doctors actually do."And then it hit me," he told the historian Jon Meacham, decades later, "They do voodoo." Teeley, Bush's press secretary, tucked a line into the candidate's speech at Carnegie Mellon University, criticizing Reagan's economic plan-cutting taxes to raise revenues and balance the budget-as "voodoo economic policy." It was so effective that it haunted Bush almost immediately. Democrats tossed the offensive back at the soon-formed Reagan/Bush ticket. Bush later denied saying it.But there was video of the Carnegie Mellon speech and it became one of the defining criticisms of Reaganomics-and entered the political lexicon as a go-to rhetorical cudgel.Teeley, who died Nov. 29 at age 84, was born in 1940 in Barrow-in-Furness, England, a city bombed heavily during World War II. When he was 6, his parents set up a bookmaking business to raise money for passage to America.Teeley eventually saw the world from Air Force Two as Bush's press secretary, as the vice president was dispatched intensively by Reagan at the end of the Cold War. Author and satirist Christopher Buckley, whom Teeley hired to write speeches, said that the team had to keep an eye out the window of the plane for Soviet ground-toair missiles, "but it was exhilarating." Alixe Mattingly, who also worked for Teeley in the Bush years, remembers her boss as a pack-a-day smoker with occasional flashes of temper-and a beloved mentor. "Every staffer wanted to hear Teeley think out loud. And sometimes it was loud, but he was so smart and so creative, and all of his ideas had such a twinkle in the eye, that it was inspiring." Maybe not so inspiring to the Reagan crew, who never got over "voodoo economics." Buckley said Teeley got such a residual chill from the president's staff that he wouldn't eat in the White House mess in the West Wing.Teeley left the administration after Bush's first term as vice president to open a consulting business, but he was back for his 1988 campaign for president and served briefly as Bush's ambassador to Canada.Although Teeley moved on from his famous phrase, critics and pundits have kept it in heavy rotation ever since, lobbing it at politicians from John Kerry and Barack Obama to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It has also stuck particularly close to Reagan, perhaps because, Buckley asserts, it has always carried the "sting of truth." "You can't cut taxes and raise spending and expect to balance the budget," he said. "And guess what? They never did."

He Coined the Term 'Voodoo Economics'

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