The GOP Establishment Strikes Back
There are slogans—“Come Home America,” “America First.”
This is selfish! This is beneath the history of our great country.
—George H. W. Bush
Two of the most dazzling and fun nights of my early career took place during the 1988 inaugural celebration for President George H. W. Bush. Being back in Washington, DC, if only briefly, for the inaugural festivities was a welcome break from my law school studies at UVA. My fellow young and single Reaganite pals and I threw on the best frocks our slender budgets could afford and headed off to the old convention center for one of the nine inaugural balls. Smiles and sequins lit up the place. We were seemingly one big happy Republican family. President Reagan had successfully passed off the presidential baton to George H. W. Bush, and now it was time to party.
The next night we were treated to an R&B concert like no other. President Bush’s chief political strategist, the late great Lee Atwater, was a blues fan and a musician in his own right. Atwater assembled numerous music legends for an inaugural concert he called “a dream come true.” Bo Diddley, Sam Moore, Percy Sledge, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Carla Thomas, Joe Louis Walker, Ron Wood, Stevie Ray Vaughan—the lineup was a virtual who’s who of R&B royalty. The diversity of styles and sounds had the gaggle of geeky but well-intentioned Republicans clapping out of time and rocking the night away. Eddie Floyd sang “Knock on Wood.” Koko Taylor did “Wang Dang Doodle.” And Stevie Ray Vaughn covered “Superstition.” It was absolutely electric.
The press, of course, tried to racialize and politicize a beautiful night, but everyone, including the performers, was there without regard for politics. When Koko Taylor’s manager tried to talk her out of playing for a crowd of Republicans, she replied, “I want to play for a president.” Guitarist Joe Louis Walker agreed; the night was bigger than partisanship. “It’s an honor for the blues to go all the way from the outhouse to the White House, no matter who the president is.”1 Classy.
At one point, Lee Atwater strapped on his guitar and ushered a tuxedo-wearing President Bush on stage holding an electric guitar with “Prez” emblazoned in red across its face. Lee shredded, Bush pretended to strum, and the crowd went nuts. It was an awesome capstone to my early days in Washington.
“Inauguration Day Massacre”
Although the patriotic sparkle of the inaugural festivities presented a unified Republican front to the nation, a different scene was unfolding in the Bush transition. In fact, shortly after Bush’s victory in November, I began hearing rumblings about the growing animosity between the Bush loyalists and the Reagan loyalists. Initially, I thought it all sounded a bit overblown and chalked it up to the normal growing pains all administrations experience during presidential transitions. It wasn’t until I started hearing stories of the mass firings of some of my old pals in the administration—talented, committed conservatives—that I really began to believe it. A friend who worked at the Department of Justice in 1988 described how the Bush team chose to summarily terminate Reagan staff and replace them with career bureaucrats, rather than retaining them until the Bush appointees were in place.
Deb Garza, a counselor in the antitrust division, noted the fairly unusual scenario during the transition given that Bush had been vice president. “[M]any of us stayed in place to give President Bush and his AG time to find replacements—or, that was our thought.” Sometime in February one of Attorney General Richard Thornburg’s assistants (Murray Dickman) made a surprise visit to her office and asked (not very nicely), “What the hell are you doing here?” She explained that she was continuing to work until, at his pleasure, the attorney general accepted her resignation and asked her to leave. “He said, in effect, resignation accepted. Leave today.”
The joke about the emissary living up to his last name will not disgrace this page.
“We always knew a stark division existed between the Bushes and the Reagans, but during the transition and its immediate aftermath, it became really clear,” recalled another former Reagan administration official. “It was ugly and felt very personal.” As one high-level official at the Department of Transportation put it: “The way we were treated, it might as well have been the transfer of power from a Republican to a Democrat administration.”
In his book Takeover, longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie recounted what came to be known as the “Inauguration Day Massacre” of the Reaganites. A well-planned purge of the Reagan conservatives who remained after the Bush victory in November 1988 was carried out even against those political appointees who were loyal to Bush.
For movement conservatives like Viguerie, this was an ominous sign of things to come:
While Bush partisans argued that the new president was justified in putting his own people in place, the 1989 “Inauguration Day Massacre” firings were more akin to political executions; lists of those to be “executed” were drawn up, and they were fired before sundown of the first day of the new Bush administration in a well-planned agenda to replace conservatives (be they Bush supporters or not) with Establishment Republicans.
While most conservative critiques of George H. W. Bush tend to focus on “Read my lips,” and Bush’s abandonment of his pledge not to raise taxes, the result of the “Inauguration Day Massacre” firings was that with no conservatives left to say “hey, wait a minute,” Bush quickly walked away from conservative principles on a long list of policies and decisions.2
Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins confirms that the Bush team purged even loyal Reaganites who had helped with Bush’s campaign. “That was the mentality of the new crowd,” says Rollins. “Reagan was gone, so who needs him?” A few weeks into the new Bush administration, Rollins ran into Bush chief of staff Jim Baker’s righthand and alter ego, Margaret Tutwiler, at a party. “That evening she made it clear to me that George Bush may have campaigned as Ronald Reagan’s designated successor, but things would be different now.” According to Rollins, Tutwiler told him: “There are a lot of us who had to suffer during the eight years of Reagan, and now it’s our turn.”3
We were Reagan people. They were Bush people. We all knew what the differences were. Many of the GOP Establishment types who behind closed doors scoffed at Reagan as a dim-witted former actor with an “ultraconservative” outlook were now working in the Bush administration.
They thought it was time to return the Republican Party to what they believed was its more genteel, respectable roots. In effect, it meant the return to power of the Rockefeller Republicans who had worked to deny Reagan the presidency in 1976. This antagonistic dynamic between the populist, small government conservatism of Reagan, versus the more idealistic, big government conservatism of the Bushes, would continue to surface in Republican politics over the three decades that followed.
“Read My Lips”
The Bush team’s aggressive purge of the Reaganites had been unnecessary and exceedingly ugly. There was nothing wrong with wanting to bring new talent aboard; every president does that. But this was something different. The Bush people weren’t just changing personnel, they were changing the philosophy, principles, and policies that had swept them into office. And there was a nastiness to it that signaled a wholesale rejection of Reaganism. As even Bill Kristol, Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff (and later NeverTrumper), noticed, “a lot of Bushies were saying, ‘We’re not going to be like Reagan.’ . . . ‘Bush isn’t like Reagan. He stays awake in meetings.’ ”4
Initially, the new Bush reality remained largely hidden from public view. Outside of political professionals and the well-connected, outward appearances seemed to indicate that George H. W. Bush intended to maintain and advance the Reagan coalition and its agenda. And why would the public doubt that? During the 1988 presidential campaign, Bush reassured the nation he would keep the country moving in the same direction Reagan had. His presidency wouldn’t be so much a shift as a continuation.
“My friends, these days the world moves even more quickly, and now, after two great terms, a switch will be made,” Bush told voters during his acceptance speech. “But when you have to change horses in midstream, doesn’t it make sense to switch to the one who’s going the same way?”5 The eloquent line was inspired by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1940 campaign slogan. President Reagan later said he felt it was Bush’s clearest crystallization of the stakes involved and his best line of the entire campaign.6
Conservatives wary of Bush’s moderate, Establishment background (he’d been a United Nations ambassador, an envoy to China, and CIA director) had also taken great solace in the now-infamous tax promise he made during his 1988 Republican National Convention acceptance speech. Speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who crafted the bulk of the speech, had asked conservative icon Jack Kemp for input during the drafting process. Kemp’s advice: “Hit hard on taxes,” he said. “Bush will be pressured to raise them as soon as he’s elected, and he has to make clear he won’t budge.”
When Noonan turned in a draft of the tax portion of the speech to OMB director Richard Darman—one of Bush’s most liberal and powerful advisers—he strongly opposed the tax promise and dismissed it as mere “populist posturing.”7 The famous passage read:
I’m the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent now says he’ll raise them as a last resort or a third resort. When a politician talks like that, you know that’s one resort he’ll be checking into. My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes, but I will, and the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”8
The “read my lips: no new taxes” line was an oratorical masterstroke. In a single sentence, the Clint Eastwood–style tax promise ameliorated long-standing criticisms that Bush was a “wimp” (he wasn’t; no World War II fighter pilot could be) and melted away concerns that he wasn’t a rock-ribbed conservative committed to advancing the conservative-populist movement Ronald Reagan built (he wasn’t). What made the tax pledge infamous was not its boldness but its betrayal.
Ultimately the buck stopped with Bush, but the man history credits with convincing the president to go along with the politically catastrophic tax hike was Richard Darman.9 As OMB director, Darman wanted President Bush to strike a deal with Democrats to reduce the budget deficit by a half-trillion dollars over several years. As usual, Democrats outfoxed and out-negotiated Republicans. Back then, it was Democratic majority leader George Mitchell doing the wheeling and dealing. “As a precondition for entering the talks, however, Democratic Senate majority leader George Mitchell demanded that Pres. George H. W. Bush renege, in writing, on his ‘no new taxes’ pledge,” recounts OMB alum James Capretta. “The president did so at Darman’s urging, and from that moment on, the president’s standing and leverage plummeted.”10
(Can’t you just see the Trump tweet, had Twitter been around in 1990? Total disaster. Worst deal—EVER! Bush + Darman = horrible negotiators. SAD!)
Contrast this moment with that of Reagan’s meeting with Gorbachev at Reykjavík. Reagan, too, had been tempted—promised a “historic” achievement of ridding the world of nuclear weapons, if only he would betray his commitment to SDI. But with the eyes of the world watching—and with incredible scorn heaped on him by the Establishment Media and the elites—Reagan said no dice, refused to violate his principles, and walked away from the negotiating table. In so doing, he won the Cold War. Indeed, the principled example Reagan set over eight years only intensified the feeling of betrayal conservatives felt from Bush breaking his “no new taxes” promise.
The reason this matters goes well beyond historical finger-pointing; the worldview Darman and others in Bush World represented was sharply at odds with the conservative-populist coalition Reagan assembled and represents one of the first big GOP fissures that widened into a chasm decades later.
A close ally of Bush wise man Jim Baker, Richard Darman was a brilliant and seasoned bureaucrat who had worked in six U.S. Cabinet departments before going on to be partner and managing director of the powerful Carlyle Group. He was self-aware enough to admit that he possessed an “excessive regard” for his own “brainpower,” and he had an almost cartoonish elitist demeanor.11 His attitudes also stand in as a good summary of the views of the GOP Establishment, which was now poised to reassert its power after eight years of populist governance. Darman had served in the Reagan administration and witnessed the electoral power of Reagan’s populism. He viewed it as a sort of rhetorical parlor trick linguistic legerdemain elites could use to get the rabble to pipe down and go along with the bureaucratic, big government policies conjured up by Ivy League elites like himself (two degrees from Harvard) who advocated for what he called the “sensible center.”
In his book, Who’s In Control?: Polar Politics and the Sensible Center, Darman explicitly stated his belief that for Bush to solve his political exigencies, the Bush team needed “to change our intended majority coalition” by eschewing a “hard-right, heavily populist, anti-government strategy” that believed in “financing a conservative vision with radical (not just substantial) reductions in existing government programs.” Instead, said Darman, he favored “abandoning a portion of the right, building a deeper and wider base in the broad American middle, and financing market-oriented reforms and investments with a combination of a politically acceptable form of consumption tax and a serious, but selective, approach to spending reduction.” Just in case he wasn’t clear enough, Darman later stated: “I have suggested that where centrism is often sensible, populism is often (although not always) angry.”12
Translation: toss the kooky right-wingers overboard and let the “adults” (liberal globalists) plan and manage the world economy.
Darman failed to kill the “read my lips” tax pledge in Bush’s 1988 acceptance speech. But he was successful in getting President Bush to abandon it in 1990. On June 26, 1990, the White House tacked a statement to the pressroom bulletin board that Bush and a bipartisan group of congressmen had agreed to. The president’s statement was short but only three words really mattered: “tax revenue increases.” Conservatives were furious, Democrats were ecstatic, and the Establishment Media launched a years-long feeding frenzy that eventually devoured Bush’s re-election chances.
The next day, the first line of the New York Times article on the tax betrayal read: “With negotiations on cutting the budget deficit stalled, President Bush today broke with his vow to oppose new taxes and said any agreement with Congress would require ‘tax revenue increases.’ ”13 The left had Bush in political checkmate, and they knew it. “President Bush’s reneging on ‘Read my lips: No new taxes’ was the most famous broken promise in the history of American politics,” said Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville.14
I remember feeling deeply disappointed and frustrated after the tax betrayal. I’ve always had immense respect for President Bush. It’s hard not to. He had heroically served his country in World War II as the youngest naval pilot at the time and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has always carried himself with dignity and decorum. Throughout his term in office, President Bush spent Christmas at Camp David because he worried about his Secret Service agents and their staffers being away from their families. My respect for the man only made my disappointment in his decision all the greater. As it turns out, the country felt the same way.
The Highest Fall
President Bush’s approval ratings plunged after he raised taxes. Then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, an act of aggression that sparked the short Persian Gulf War, which concluded on February 28, 1991. Bush’s “telephone diplomacy” and broad-based coalition of international partners resulted in a quick routing that left Saddam Hussein crippled but in power (a huge mistake, as many saw at the time). In the end, a tragic but historically low 148 U.S. service members were killed in combat (24 percent of which were due to “friendly fire”).15
As Americans welcomed home our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, Bush experienced what political scientists and pollsters call the “rally around the flag” phenomenon, resulting in the highest-ever recorded approval rating (91 percent) for any American president since the creation of modern polling. Democrats and Republicans thought Bush’s chances of reelection were a lock. “We were seriously in the doldrums,” remembers James Carville. “We didn’t have a chance. It was a really dismal time to be a Democrat.”16 But the soaring heights of Bush’s popularity turned out to be a momentary political sugar high, one that could not overcome economic anxieties about the recession and the Bush policies many believed had put the world’s interests above the people’s.
It wasn’t just Democrats who felt that way; conservatives and populists were frustrated by a Bush regime that in no way resembled the leadership they had been led to believe would be a continuation of Reagan. The violation of the tax pledge was just one of many decisions that angered the populists. Bush’s actions on trade, his inability to connect with working Americans, and his patrician demeanor made the old Reagan coalition restless.
Enter Reagan speechwriter and conservative stalwart Pat Buchanan. I consider Pat a good friend and a man who has spent much of his career trying to keep Reagan’s populist vision front and center in the GOP. The first time I met Pat Buchanan was in late March of 1982. When other college kids were going to Florida for spring break, we Dartmouth Review writers were making our pilgrimage to the Buchanan beachhead of populist conservatism. Review editor Dinesh D’Souza, publisher Keeney Jones, and I (a freshman reporter who happened to be dating the editor) drove 10 hours from New Hampshire to interview Buchanan at his McLean, Virginia, home. Buchanan was a member of our “advisory board” and stuck with us even during our most explosive controversies.
We immediately clicked. As an 18-year-old who was just beginning to understand the intolerance of the left at Dartmouth, I was drawn to Buchanan’s pugnacious yet highly intellectual brand of nationalistic conservatism, and loved reading his syndicated column. The way he skewered the national press corps for its bias and intellectual snobbery was priceless. His take-no-prisoners approach was the same one we took at the Review toward the liberal tools on campus. Looking at all the political memorabilia Buchanan and his wife, Shelley, had on their shelves—framed photos of Nixon, Reagan, Confederate army pistols, awards—I was totally hooked. How exciting it would be, I thought, to have a career like his, to be in the national political fight every day. Embarrassing revelation: At this Buchanan meeting, I wore a corduroy skirt with whales on it, kneesocks, and a blue blazer. Tragic. It’s a wonder the man ever spoke to me again.
As far back as his days working in the Nixon administration, Pat had witnessed the slow fusion of the Democrat and Republican parties into a singular ruling elite, a political class who sought above all else to maintain its own power.
Following Reagan’s example from 1976, Buchanan decided to mount a primary run against an incumbent Republican president. But Buchanan would do so with an even more populist, nationalistic platform than Reagan—and he also was a well-established national figure in government, television, and print. In those days, he was, in effect, a political reality star.
With the Cold War won, Buchanan believed it was time to focus on the home front. He made his announcement on December 10, 1991, from the New Hampshire state capital. At the time I was seven months out of law school, living in New Haven, Connecticut, and clerking for federal appellate court judge Ralph Winter. I caught the replay at night on C-SPAN. Buchanan was on fire.
We must not trade in our sovereignty for a cushioned seat at the head table of anyone’s New World Order.
The first challenge we face, then, is economic, presented by the rise of a European super state and a dynamic Asia led by Japan. The 20th Century was the American Century, but they intend to make the 21st, the century of Europe or the Century of Asia.
So, as we Americans congratulate one another on the victory for freedom that we, first and foremost, won, and won together for all mankind in the Cold War, we must begin to prepare for the new struggles already underway.
All the institutions of the Cold War, from vast permanent U.S. armies on foreign soil, to old alliances against Communist enemies that no longer exist, to billions in foreign aid, must be re-examined. With a $4 trillion debt, with a U.S. budget chronically out of balance, should the United States be required to carry indefinitely the burden of defending rich and prosperous allies who take America’s generosity for granted as they invade our markets?
. . . [I]t is time to end these routinized annual transfers of our national wealth to global bureaucrats, who ship it off to regimes that pay us back in compound ingratitude. It is time to phase out foreign aid, and start looking out for the needs of the forgotten Americans right here in the United States.
So, today, we call for a new patriotism, where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first, for a new nationalism where in every negotiation, be it arms control or trade, the American side seeks advantage and victory for the United States.
The people of this country need to recapture our capital city from an occupying army of lobbyists, and registered agents of foreign powers hired to look out for everybody and everything except the national interest of the United States.
On that day Buchanan, in essence, delivered a better, loftier version of Trump’s “America First” speech. Of course, he was realistic; he knew his odds of victory were slim. Still, he wanted to help conservatives send a signal to the GOP Establishment that Bush’s globalist designs for a “New World Order” stood in contradiction to the tenets of Reaganism. “President Bush wants to be president of the world,” said Buchanan. “I want to be president of the United States.”17
At first, the Bush campaign brushed Buchanan off as an irritating sideshow. Pat announced that his campaign theme would be “America First” (hmmm . . . where else have we heard that lately?), jabbed at the elitism of the Bushies, called the president “King George” (a royal version of “Low Energy” Jeb), and said he sought to put an end to “Skull and Bones International” (a reference to President Bush’s membership in the Yale secret society club of the same name).
“Why is he being the way he is?” Bush asked his associates. “What the hell is he after? What does he want?”18 The Bush people wanted conservatives to get in line. But Buchanan reminded the GOP Establishment that the party had strayed from its principles and demanded that conservatives have a seat at the table. Principled ideological pursuits like that were anathema to Bush World pragmatism.
“They had no real feeling for movement conservatism beyond the cosseting it required at election time,” wrote campaign journalists Peter Goldman and Thomas DeFrank. “For them, the doctrinaire right was like a petting zoo where you showed up once every four years, stroked the animals for a while and then went home to the world of affairs.”19 But conservatives were in no mood for pat-on-the-head sessions. Americans were angry about the tax lie and fed up with President Bush’s penchant for focusing on international affairs instead of the economic pain swirling in the heartland.
While out on the campaign trail in December 1991, Buchanan stopped by the James River Paper Mill in northern New Hampshire in a small town called Groveton. It was freezing cold and just before Christmas. That morning, the company had laid off 350 workers. When Pat arrived, many of the workers were picking up the free Christmas turkeys the company gave out and had their pink slips in hand. As Buchanan shook hands and greeted the workers, one man stood with his eyes toward the ground. When Pat shook his hand, the man looked up, stared him in the eyes, and said, “Save our jobs.” The comment went through Pat like a spear. Later, inside the campaign van, Pat asked, “What do you do for a guy like that?” Pat’s lovely wife, Shelley, started to cry. “We’re going to come back here, and we’re going to make things happen,” Pat told her.20
Bush beat Buchanan easily, but not before Pat racked up three million votes. His respectable showing earned him some leverage within the party and a prime-time speaking spot at the August 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. But the Old Guard remained tone-deaf to his populist message. When Pat’s sister and campaign manager, Bay Buchanan, tried to get the 1992 GOP platform to include wording supporting a border wall (“structures,” the Buchanan camp called them), Republican officials were stunned. Surely you don’t mean a fence, they told her. “We’re not talking about lighthouses,” Bay replied.21
Predictably, the Establishment Media ripped Buchanan’s speech for its focus on the culture wars and traditional Judeo-Christian values. “My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are,” said Buchanan. “It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”22
But Buchanan’s speech was also about reminding Republicans that the little guy was hurting and in need of help. After recounting the story about the paper mill worker who told him to “save our jobs,” Pat shared another story about a woman he met:
Then there was the legal secretary that I met at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who came running up to me and said, “Mr. Buchanan, I’m going to vote for you.” And then she broke down weeping, and she said, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl. What am I going to do?”
He then told the RNC crowd that even though working-class Americans may not have read the conservative canon, Republicans must embrace ordinary people and fight on their behalf:
My friends, these people are our people. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we came from. They share our beliefs and our convictions, our hopes and our dreams. These are the conservatives of the heart. They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.
Pat wasn’t finished. He explained how the people of the small California town of Hayfork were now “under a sentence of death because a federal judge has set aside nine million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl—forgetting about the habitat of the men and women who live and work in Hayfork.” He concluded by sharing a story about “the brave people of Koreatown who took the worst of those L.A. riots, but still live the family values we treasure, and who still deeply believe in the American dream.”23
In the wake of Pat Buchanan’s RNC address, Establishment Media did their best to paint the speech as a blight on Bush’s candidacy. Not surprisingly, that was total bunk. Bush’s numbers went up significantly after the convention, cutting Bill Clinton’s lead over George Bush from 18 points to 2.
Buchanan’s connection with working-class conservatives came easy. Attempts to try to humanize Bush or cast him as a pork rind-eating regular Joe often backfired. The quest for populist appeal is nothing new in politics, of course. In the early 19th century, congressmen roamed the Capitol in homespun outfits in deference to their rural constituents. Trying to “fit in” and be embraced by the masses is a time-honored political tradition. And as the old saying goes, in politics, perception is more important than reality. In the case of George H. W. Bush, his failed efforts to connect with regular folks were often the product of unfair media reports. Nevertheless, the gaffes were self-inflicted and had the effect of making Bush appear un-relatable to working-class voters.
On the campaign trail, for example, President Bush tried to quote a lyric from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. There was just one problem: he pronounced the band’s name as the “Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird.” A swing and a miss!
Then there was the unfortunate and devastating line Bush uttered during the 1992 presidential debate in Richmond, Virginia, while answering a question from a voter. A woman asked the candidates: “How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives? And if it hasn’t, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what’s ailing them?” The woman obviously meant to say “recession” instead of “national debt,” but the question frazzled the president and left him fumbling to formulate a response.
“Well, I think the national debt affects everybody,” said Bush. “Obviously, it has a lot to do with interest rates. . . .”
Debate moderator Carole Simpson interrupted the president.
“She’s saying you personally,” said Simpson.
“You, on a personal basis, how has it affected you?” the questioner pressed.
“Well, I’m sure it has. I love my grandchildren. I want to think that . . .”
The woman interrupted the president.
“How?”
“I want to think that they’re going to be able to afford an education,” said the president. “I think that that’s an important part of being a parent. If the question—maybe I get it wrong. Are you suggesting that if someone has means that the national debt doesn’t affect them?”
“What I’m saying . . .” the woman began.
“I’m not sure I get it,” said Bush. “Help me with the question, and I’ll try to answer it.”
The debate moderator later clarified, “I think she means more the recession, the economic problems today the country faces rather than . . .”24
The question was wonky, and the woman seemed a tad too eager to try to score political points. But President Bush had uttered the phrase “I’m not sure I get it” while fumbling through an answer about his ability to empathize with voters’ economic pain—a topic he should have been locked and loaded to nail and put to rest.
Even more devastating was the follow-up answer from the young Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. In a Southern accent, Clinton delivered a response brimming with emotional connection and populist appeal.
“Tell me how it’s affected you again,” Clinton said to the woman who had asked Bush the question.
“Um . . .” she replied.
“You know people who’ve lost their jobs and lost their homes?” Clinton asked her.
“Well, yeah, uh-huh.”
“Well, I’ve been governor of a small state for 12 years. I’ll tell you how it’s affected me,” said Clinton. He then launched into a pitch-perfect debate answer oozing with warmth and populist resonance:
Every year Congress and the president sign laws that make us do more things and gives us less money to do it with. I see people in my state, middle-class people—their taxes have gone up in Washington and their services have gone down while the wealthy have gotten tax cuts.
I have seen what’s happened in this last four years when—in my state, when people lose their jobs there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them.
And I’ve been out here for 13 months meeting in meetings just like this ever since October, with people like you all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance.
What I want you to understand is the national debt is not the only cause of that. It is because America has not invested in its people. It is because we have not grown. It is because we’ve had 12 years of trickle-down economics. We’ve gone from first to twelfth in the world in wages. We’ve had four years where we’ve produced no private-sector jobs. Most people are working harder for less money than they were making 10 years ago.
It is because we are in the grip of a failed economic theory. And this decision you’re about to make better be about what kind of economic theory you want, not just people saying I’m going to go fix it but what are we going to do? I think we have to do is invest in American jobs, American education, control American health care costs and bring the American people together again.25
Clinton’s answer was everything Bush’s wasn’t. He connected on a human level with a people-first response. His closing sentence advanced an America first strategy. Bill Clinton was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. He understood populism’s appeal and signaled that he would pursue an agenda based on American interests (which turned out not to be the case). In short, Bush hadn’t just blown the debate moment, Clinton had seized it.
And of course who could forget the infamous grocery store scanner episode wherein the mainstream media reported that President Bush was fascinated and surprised in a checkout line by how grocery store scanners work—a metaphor for a president out of touch with everyday Americans. The truth is that the story was fake news. Bush was visiting the exhibition hall at the National Grocers Association and was seeing never-before-seen technology that had yet to be released to the public. “These weren’t everyday grocery scanners; no one had seen these, the President and the press included,” explained Bush campaign strategist Mary Matalin. But the media-created gaffe morphed into a “cultural stun gun.” “The story was such a compelling metaphor to make their point, that it took hold in campaign mythology. From then on it was an article of faith with much of the public that Bush was out of touch.”26
That “Giant Sucking Sound”
In the remaining months of the campaign, President Bush took on Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton and a moderate Republican billionaire populist by the name of Ross Perot—one of the most eccentric figures ever to enter American presidential politics, and in retrospect, a harbinger not only of the rising populist movement, but of the kind of candidate these voters ultimately preferred.
Perot was short, quirky, had large ears and a squeaky voice, was pro-choice on abortion, and supported gun control. Perot’s own campaign manager, Ed Rollins, later said, “Perot is insecurity incarnate” and that he would “have been a disaster in the White House.”27 Ouch.
So how in the world did a political novice like Ross Perot manage to win an impressive 19 percent of the popular vote and over 25 percent in nine states?28
Like Buchanan, Perot tapped into the vexation roiling the country, an economic anger that stunned President Bush the first time he saw it firsthand. The Bush campaign ran a series of taped focus groups with suburban voters who had voted for Bush in 1988 and then showed the president the sessions during a weekend at Camp David. President Bush was shocked by what he saw. “He doesn’t get it,” said one person. “Doesn’t care,” said another. “Out of touch.” “Doesn’t have a clue.” Another stinger: “More interested in foreigners than America.”29
Perot harnessed that economic outrage and honed in on the insanity of American leaders brokering trade agreements wherein we “get our pockets picked” and ship American jobs south of the border. “We own this country. It belongs to us,” Perot said in his March 1992 speech at the National Press Club. “Government should come from us. . . . We have abdicated our ownership responsibility. . . . You’ve got to send them a message: you work for us, we don’t work for you. Under the Constitution, you are our servants. . . . We’ve got to put the country back in the control of the owners. And in plain Texas talk, it’s time to take out the trash and clean out the barn, or it’s going to be too late.”30
Perot then attacked a forthcoming trade treaty that President George H. W. Bush had worked hard to advance, something called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—this was another populist theme he co-opted from Buchanan:
The White House is all excited about the new trade agreement with Mexico. This agreement will move the highest paid blue-collar jobs in the United States to Mexico. This is going to create serious damage to our tax base during this critical period.
We have got to manufacture here and not there to keep our tax base intact.31
He may have been a kooky billionaire, but on NAFTA, Perot was a prophetic kooky billionaire.
NAFTA, of course, is the trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada negotiated by George H. W. Bush and signed into law by Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993.32 A majority of Republicans supported it. Clinton strongly embraced it and lobbied Democrats hard to overcome objections from many in his party and its labor union base. NAFTA supporters like Clinton promised the trade deal would benefit America economically by removing tariffs, accelerating trade, boosting exports to Mexico, and generating U.S. jobs—a million in the first five years, Clinton promised.33 Populists like Pat Buchanan warned NAFTA would create dozens of new bureaucracies, diminish U.S. sovereignty, mandate billions in foreign aid and loan guarantees, create reams of regulations, and ship hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs and businesses to Mexico in pursuit of cheaper labor and bigger profits.34 With Buchanan out of the race, Perot picked up the populist mantle and opposed NAFTA in memorable fashion.
In October, during the second presidential debate that included all three candidates, Perot hammered the folly of “one-way trade agreements,” said “we have got to stop sending jobs overseas,” and dropped his famous line.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border . . . pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care—that’s the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.35
“A giant sucking sound.” Perot hit a rhetorical home run. NAFTA wasn’t signed into law yet, but Perot and millions of Americans—the kind who don’t worship at the Wall Street Journal’s altar of globalism and internationalism for profit’s sake—knew it was a raw deal for workers and bad for America. The biggest “tell” that NAFTA was going to be a boon for elites and a bust for everyone else was the fact that George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton (as well as their Donor Class pals) all supported the monstrosity.
Ross Perot ran a disorganized and zany campaign. But the same working-class disgust with the political class that fueled Buchanan’s run coalesced into Perot winning nearly one out of every five votes. In the four years since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, people realized no one was looking out for them any longer. “Read my lips: no new taxes,” the condescending elitism, a lopsided focus on international relationships to create a “New World Order,” a looming NAFTA deal to cede even more American sovereignty and ship away even more American jobs . . . the people had finally had enough.
Personally, I found George H. W. Bush to be rather uninspiring, to put it politely. I had met him on a few occasions when he was vice president and thought he was a nice man but had little of the Reagan appeal. The Reaganites knew that while he was a loyal and patriotic man and a fine vice president, he wasn’t one of us.
On Election Day, Bill Clinton captured 43 percent of the popular vote to Bush’s 37 percent. The 19 percent Perot poached represented nearly 20 million votes. Clinton beat Bush by over 200 electoral votes (370–168). The wartime president who just two years earlier had hit the all-time high in presidential popularity lost the presidency to a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, serial philanderer.
A few months after his 1992 defeat, George H. W. Bush admitted that his decision to break the tax promise had been a colossal mistake. Bush had bought into the old Washington lie that if you’ll just feed the government beast a crumb, it will be satisfied.
“I thought this one compromise . . . would result in no more tax increases,” said Bush. “I thought it would result in total control of domestic discretionary spending. And now we see Congress talking about raising taxes again. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t do what I did then. . . . I did it and I regret it.”36
In 2014, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation gave George H. W. Bush a “Profile in Courage Award” for his decision to break his promise not to raise taxes. For the kids playing along at home, you know you’ve sold out conservative principles when progressives give you high-profile awards.37
While Bush apologized for shattering his tax promise, he remained defiant and nasty about Americans’ opposition to NAFTA. During a 1999 speech in Canada, the former president blasted anyone who dared to criticize the trade deal:
Some people are using uncertainty and ambiguity of the moment to create a momentum for turning America selfishly inward away from the world. And even though they deny it, they advocate policies that amount to protectionism and isolationism. There are slogans—“Come Home America,” “America First.” This is selfish! This is beneath the history of our great country. But it’s out there and it worries me, this coalition of left and right. I simply think these views are wrong. On trade, that odd coalition that fought me early this decade—the far-left joined by the far-right—remains intact.38
That is an astounding statement, and one that did not receive much public attention at the time because Bush had been out of office for six years when he uttered it. But did you catch that? Anyone who wants to put “America first” is “selfish.” Desiring Americans to have jobs instead of shipping them to other countries is “beneath the history of our great country.” Anyone who dares to stymie rich elites from driving down labor costs so they can bag more cash, add another wing on their mansions, or park a new Bugatti in their garage is “far-right” and a mouthpiece for—wait for it—“isolationism” and “protectionism.”
This is globalism in all its smug, know-it-all, “shut up, peasants!” ugliness. Globalism is fundamentally anti-American because it aims to raze American sovereignty by atrophying our ability to take independent actions that are in our nation’s best interests. The elites declare mutiny on our national sovereignty by anchoring our ship to the lead weight that is the United Nations, allowing multinational trade deals to attach themselves like barnacles to slow our speed. The undermine and degrade our traditions and values by allowing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) packed with radical activists to commandeer our ship of state in the name of international unity. When the ungrateful commoners start getting mouthy or overly empowered, globalists administer a verbal beatdown and trash the peasants as angry, “selfish,” and xenophobic.
Is it any wonder Bush lost?
Is it any wonder that, after years of globalists deriding Americans for having the temerity to put working people’s economic interests first, Donald Trump chose “America First” as his campaign slogan—a thumb in the eye to the bilge elites proffered for decades?
By the time Donald Trump arrived on the scene, the people were well past the point of no return with finger-wagging globalist lectures and faux moral superiority. Before the people reclaimed their power, however, the Establishment would continue heating the populist pressure cooker with disastrous policies that enriched elites and sacrificed millions of American working-class jobs on the altar of globalism.
In the end, George H. W. Bush stalled the conservative-populist engine that powered Reaganism. “George Bush was the beneficiary of the greatest baton pass in presidential history in 1988, and he and his people tossed it away,” said Ed Rollins. “He did more than any other Republican to roll back the Reagan Revolution. Worst of all, he gave the country he loved to Bill Clinton.”39
Why did it happen?
Pat Buchanan put it this way after Bush’s defeat, “Republicans did not lose in 1992 because Pat Buchanan gave a blazing speech at Houston. They lost because Ross Perot walked off with one-third of the Reagan coalition. And Mr. Perot tore those voters away because Big Government Conservatives ‘compromised’ their principles, spent four years in an orgy of spending, raised taxes, and aborted a seven-year recovery.”40
“Bush and his people never understood the coalitions that Reagan had handed down to them,” said Rollins. “They did everything possible to piss them off.”41