Shoe Sale Booms, Cobbler Thank Bush
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Several cobblers in different world countries have claimed the shoe thrown at Bush. (Reuters)
CAIRO — A Turkish cobber who claims the shoe thrown at US President US George Bush by an Iraqi reporter is reporting a boom in his sales, thanking Bush for doing him a favor.
"We have been producing that specific style, which I personally designed, for 10 years," Ramazan Baydan told the New York Times on Sunday, December 21
"I couldn’t have missed it, no way."
Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi threw his shoes one after the other at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last week.
The incident and pictures of Bush ducking to avoid the flying footwear continue to make international headlines since then.
Several shoemakers have so far claimed to be the designers and creators of the two size-10 shoes, already destroyed by the investigators' explosives tests.
Turkish newspapers reported Baydan as the shoemaker, printing a picture of the design, alongside the headline "Made in Turkey."
In China, from which most of the shoes in Iraq come, cobblers staked claims to the shoe.
Lebanon's widely-circulated Al-Safir daily front-paged a photo showing Zaidi during a visit to Beirut in November with an accompanying headline: "Did he buy the shoes in Beirut?"
But back in Iraq, the Zaidi family insisted the shoes are purely Iraqi-made.
"His shoes are not Chinese, nor Turkish," his brother Udai told Reuters. "One hundred percent they are Iraqi-made shoes."
Udai said they came from the Baghdad factory of Iraqi shoemaker Alaa Haddad, viewed as among the country's best.
Popular "Bush Shoe"
Baydan claims that orders for the shoe, formerly known as Ducati Model 271 and since renamed "The Bush Shoe," have poured in from around the world.
He said a new run of 15,000 pairs, destined for Iraq, went into production on Thursday.
Four distributors are reportedly competing to represent the company in Iraq, where orders have increased by 100 percent since the incident.
A British distributor has asked to become the Baydan Shoe Company’s European sales representative, with a first order of 95,000 pairs.
An American company has reportedly placed an order for 18,000 pairs.
"Mr. Bush served some good purpose to the economy before he left," Serkan Turk, the general manager of Baydan's company, told the Times.
Bush, 61, prepares to leave the White House in two weeks after a 8-year tenure which saw the invasion of Muslim-majority Iraq and Afghanistan as part of his so-called global war on terror.
He tops the list of the most unpopular politicians in the world, according to a poll conducted by the International Institute Harris.
Domestically, Bush has the lowest domestic approval ratings of any president in US history
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