Can I correctly infer that Hall considers those people snobs who looked down their noses at GWB for enunciating nukUler.

Yup. So do one or two of the linguists over at the Language Log blog (Pullum at least, but maybe McWhorter, too). (Though they might not agree with Dubya's politics, they hardly agree with folks who abuse Bush for his idiolect.) One of them, Geoff Nunberg has written a book about it called Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times . But the president to use it before Dubya was, I believe, Ike. What Dubya has done is try hard not to speak like his New Englander father. (Personal disclosure: I liked the elder Bush's dialect better.)