CHAPTER 10
Culture Warriors, Man Your Battle Stations
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 the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.
—Patrick Buchanan, GOP presidential candidate and
conservative commentator, addressing the Republican
National Convention in Houston (August 17, 1992)
In the 1980s, human sexuality in some respects had become not just a matter of left and right but of life and death. Communities began losing legions to AIDS. Protestors took to the streets, promoting the battle cry “Silence = Death.” There was an escalation in assaults on individuals because of their sexual orientation. Meanwhile, antiabortion advocates mobilized to defend the rights of “the unborn”—a decade after the medical procedure had gained legal sanction. Operation Rescue and other groups pushed for a pro-life amendment; activists blocked the entrances to family planning clinics, and resorted to death threats, bombing, vandalism—and even murder.
With certain sexual frontiers becoming ever more politicized in public life, factions on both sides of the political, social, and cultural barricades became as polarized as their counterparts had been in the ’60s and ’70s. And many were primed for a fight.
Now came the word “war,” as in “culture war.” The phrase, coined by social conservatives, was not meant figuratively—at least not entirely. “War” implied two factions whose competing claims had deteriorated into outright conflict. To call this cultural divide a war, surely, was overreaching. But such was the terminology attached to what many on the right perceived as a precipitous downgrade in “values”: a perceived deemphasis in society on so-called family values or traditional values or Judeo-Christian values. This cultural shift, in the view of conservatives and the religious right, had been nurtured for the previous thirty-odd years by the country’s more liberal forces and constituted a threat to the moral bedrock of civilized society.
By the 1990s, pop culture had gone crude. Pornography was rampant. Casual sexual encounters were more prevalent and less stigmatized. There was an upsurge in cases of sexually transmitted disease. To compound the matter, “the divorce rate remains, stubbornly, one in two,” journalist Joe Klein would calculate in a 1992 Newsweek cover story (headlined “Whose Values?”). “The out-of-wedlock birthrate has tripled since 1970.… A nauseating buffet of dysfunctions has attended these trends—an explosion in child abuse, crime… name your pathology.”
Neither side sanctioned any of these developments. But the left and the right laid down a set of cultural demarcation lines, as if to stake out their turf and delineate the three most contentious social issues of the day. First: whether, and in what circumstances, a woman should have the legal and medical means to manage her own reproductive health and, if necessary, terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Second: how to improve the sorry state of marriage and divorce. Finally: whether someone who identified as lesbian or gay should be accorded a wider range of civil rights, including the right to a state-sanctioned same-sex union.
Bill and Hillary Clinton happened to be in the left place at the right time. In the seven months between their 60 Minutes appearance and the Republican National Convention, the couple became a lightning rod for animosity toward those who would defend one’s right to choose—and one’s right to love whomever one chose. Despite Clinton’s broad appeal in his national debut, he and his wife, proud feminists both, were being widely vilified. They were the dreaded duo of the counterculture, so said Republicans, evangelicals, right-wing radio hosts, policy journals, and secular and religious conservatives. They were viewed as the flightiest of ’60s free birds, whose liberal—even sinful—beliefs had finally come home to roost.
If that weren’t enough of a cross to bear, they were doubly resented for having voiced the desire to reverse the self-centeredness of the Me-Decade ’70s and the Reagan ’80s. “[The pair were] trying to turn around the greed of the 1980s, change the values, move the country into a new era, still unknown and still not fully defined,” journalist Bob Woodward would note. “They were paying the price of being transitional figures.”
Nineteen ninety-two, as we will see shortly, would be punctuated by a series of cultural skirmishes in New Hampshire and Hollywood, San Francisco and New York. Then, in August, came the culture-war war games in Houston, where the far right, at the Republican National Convention, officially put its commandos on a war footing.
Not until November of that year would the smoke clear to reveal that Washington, at long last, had fallen. And in the light of the new dawn, it was instantly apparent: the most divisive battles still lay ahead.
But we return, first, to March madness.
First, there had been the Gennifer Flowers flap. Next, the draft-dodging flop. Then Bill Clinton put his foot in his mouth in an altogether new way. “I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it,” he remarked at a New York forum. “I didn’t inhale, and didn’t try it again.”1
Many scratched their heads. He occasionally smoked weed… but didn’t inhale? What was the point of doing that? Surely he realized that such a comment, like his adultery concession, would come across yet again as dissembling—by a man who wanted to have his doob and smoke it too?2
And yet Clinton’s experiments with pot, to some voters, may have actually earned him points. Here was a candidate who’d hit the Boomer Trifecta. He’d admitted to sexual adventurousness. He’d resisted service in Vietnam, a war he had outspokenly opposed. And now he was copping to the occasional joint—a badge of honor to many (yet something no serious national candidate had ever dared declare). When Bush’s campaign director, Mary Matalin, later tarred him as “a pot-smoking, womanizing draft-dodger,” the label, in certain quarters, was met with nods of approval.
By the spring, Clinton would lap the rest of the candidates in the primary field, facing his only serious challenge from Jerry Brown, the former governor of California. By June, Clinton would officially claim the nomination—with a big win in Brown’s home state. But California, for all its sunshine, also reverberated with the clamor of the culture war’s war drums.
Two weeks earlier, Vice President Dan Quayle had visited the state and addressed the Commonwealth Club, up in San Francisco. Quayle was the sandy-haired, rock-ribbed conservative who’d hired the young über-con Bill Kristol as his chief of staff. Quayle relished his role as Bush’s attack dog, calling himself the campaign’s “pit bull terrier.”3 In a speech entitled “Reflections on Urban America,” the former Indiana senator had called out Hollywood for sending mixed and troublesome messages about single parenthood and proper childrearing.
There was considerable bite to his bark. Just before Quayle’s speech, CBS happened to have aired an episode of its popular sitcom Murphy Brown. The title character, an unmarried TV news reporter played by Candice Bergen, was about to give birth, having become pregnant nine months earlier by her ex-husband. And that evening, on prime-time television, she delivered a baby boy, whom she’d decided to raise on her own. The episode drew more than thirty-eight million viewers.
Quayle was appalled. To the vice president—and to a sizable segment of the American public—the network, the show’s writers, and the glamorous actress were glamorizing single motherhood. Quayle, who admitted he’d never watched an episode of the program, went on the warpath. “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” said the father of three. “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’”4
The reaction was thunderous on all sides. Some bridled at the unavoidable subtext of class war and bigotry. Many asked whether a male politician should be weighing in so forcefully on an issue best left to a woman and her physician. Others wondered how a mythical TV mom could be made the whipping gal for far more complicated social, economic, and familial issues. “I have an announcement here for the vice president of the United States,” quipped late-night TV host David Letterman. “Murphy Brown is a fictional character.” Entertainment Weekly called the attack a “Scud bombing of Murphy.… Would Quayle be appeased if Murphy gave up her fatherless child to [TV’s] Major Dad, to be raised by a proper sitcom family?” The show’s creator, Diane English, would chime in: “If the vice president thought a woman was incapable of adequately raising a child without a father, he ought to make sure that abortion remained safe and legal.” English would later posit that the government’s role in women’s health care choices would become “the tipping point in a debate that raged on throughout the summer [of 1992], pitting liberal ideas of an ever-evolving notion of family against the traditional concept of mom, dad and 2.5 kids.”
It turned out to be a spirited and instructive debate. Many sociologists and family experts defended Quayle. They believed he’d succeeded in drawing attention to the problems faced by single mothers and their children in a way that was reminiscent of a still-controversial 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a distinguished Democratic senator from New York. Moynihan, then with the Labor Department, had pointed out a cycle: in many households in which black Americans lived at or below the poverty line, there was a correlation between the single parent (typically an unwed mother) and her child’s lowered prospects for economic and social advancement.5
In an influential Atlantic article entitled “Dan Quayle Was Right,” social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead would offer hard data that supported the vice president’s premise. She observed that the statistically “increasing numbers of single-parent and stepparent families”—whether by divorce, remarriage, abandonment, unwanted pregnancy, or independent choice—“dramatically weakens and undermines society.” Whitehead wrote of a single-parent surge and a silent racial asymmetry in America: “The out-of-wedlock birth rate [had gone] from five percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1990. In 1990 close to 57 percent of births among black mothers were nonmarital and about 17 percent among white mothers.”
Quayle v. Brown dominated news and opinion outlets for weeks.6 And as the campaign percolated along, an animated Quayle (a year younger than Clinton) cranked up his “commitment to values” shpiel: “The baby boomer generation was not homogenous. A lot of people [in that age bracket] are very concerned with values.” At a rally in Louisville, Kentucky, the vice president spoke with a tremble in his voice, according to journalist Mimi Swartz in a profile of Quayle for Life magazine. He pronounced the V-word, Swartz recounted, “almost with a lover’s gratitude, his vowels grow[ing] long and melodic.… ‘I want to thank you for joining me on the crusade for family values,’ he declares, fairly seething with righteous indignation. ‘No matter what they say, I will never, never back down from talking about the importance of values.’… It is Quayle’s peculiar gift that he can convince a crowd that it takes courage to come out for values.”
In truth, what other choice did he have? Quayle could hardly run on his boss’s domestic record. The country’s economy was adrift. And although Bush had tried radical surgery (putting tax increases in play while negotiating a budget compromise in 1990; hammering out a politically convoluted budget deal with Congress in 1991), everything had fallen short. The sinking recession took a double dip, and the national tide turned against him.
The Democrats smelled fear and panic.
It was all augured in a placard that James Carville, Clinton’s field marshal, had posted at their Little Rock campaign headquarters: “The economy, stupid.”7 These became the bywords of the Clinton campaign. America’s financial concerns might be better served, they argued, by a man who, in contrast to Bush, had balanced a budget—eleven times.
America, after a dozen years of Ronnie and Poppy, seemed primed for a generational change. And Clinton, mining this vein, picked a running mate who was nineteen months younger than he. His name was Al Gore—a Tennessee senator, as his father had been. Gore, like Clinton, was a telegenic southern moderate. Yet he also helped tick off three boxes outside the Clinton column: Gore had served in Vietnam, he was straitlaced, and he gave every indication of being a thoroughly devoted husband.8 The candidates were the A.B.B. twins: Anything But Bush.
They were also a Boomer two-fer. Clinton was the younger, gentler Elvis. He and his wife were inspired to name their daughter Chelsea after hearing Judy Collins’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning.” And Gore had not only roomed at Harvard with the actor Tommy Lee Jones, but one of their school acquaintances, the author Erich Segal, had borrowed attributes of Jones and a dollop of Gore when fashioning Oliver Barrett IV, the preppie scion in the novel (and film) Love Story. Bill and Al nonetheless positioned themselves as forward-thinking populists committed to the salt of the American earth. Clinton, in choosing Gore, was making a clear break with the past and doubling down on tomorrow.
The challenge was clear. The Clinton-Gore camp believed they just might be able to win by pummeling Bush on the economy. But was that alone enough? As they set their sights on July’s Democratic National Convention in Manhattan, a secondary strategy arose: could they also find a way to reposition their candidacy and gain the upper hand in the “values” war, thereby beating the Republicans at their own game?
The Democrats descended on Madison Square Garden. Staff passes for convention floor access bore a caricature that, at a glance, looked like Elvis Presley, a riff on a recently designed stamp from the U.S. Postal Service. But instead of displaying the King with a mic in his hand, these tags bore an illustration of the Guv—with a sax. At the same time, buttons were handed out, courtesy of Zenith and AT&T, hawking an as-yet-untested technology: digital high-def TV (“I Saw the Future at the 1992 Democratic National Convention”). These tags and badges graced the proud breasts of a convention crowd as diverse as any in American history. “Separatism is not the American Way,” Barbara Jordan, the former Texas congresswoman, would say in her keynote speech. “We must profoundly change from the deleterious environment of the ’80s, characterized by greed, selfishness, mega-mergers, and debt… to one characterized by devotion to the public interest and tolerance. And, yes, love.” The Dems were feelin’ the love.
Two of the Clintons’ closest Hollywood pals, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, made a short video, The Man from Hope. It painted Bill as the small-town boy made good. And it spent a full minute discussing his father’s alcoholism. Elizabeth Glaser, active in the fight against AIDS, would talk of having contracted the disease through a transfusion and unknowingly passing it along to her late daughter, by nursing her, and to her young son, in utero. Al Gore, after striding to the lectern to the strains of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” would describe the night he held his six-year-old son in his arms after a car crash that almost took the boy’s life.
Something was being hatched here that went beyond the rainbow crowd and the Boomer references. The convention’s speakers, in offering their own accounts of adversity, were interlacing their life stories with similar strands among those watching at home. Here was a relatively untested way to express a political party’s values: let its representatives acknowledge their struggles, thereby creating an appearance of commonality through candor. These New Democrats were developing a new kind of stagecraft to connect with voters. “We live in the age of the personalization of everything,” writer Richard Todd would later remark, an age in which “our political life doesn’t depend on a direct relationship between the governed and the governing, it depends on the ability of the governing to tell stories about [themselves and] the governed, to speak as if they know us.”
On the final night, Clinton accepted his party’s nomination—and tried to close the deal. He took Quayle’s “family” fight, head-on. “Frankly,” he insisted, “I’m fed up with politicians in Washington lecturing the rest of us about family values. Our families have values. But our government doesn’t. I want an… America that includes every family. Every traditional family and every extended family. Every two-parent family, every single-parent family, and every foster family. Every family.”
He spoke of his own upbringing, partly playing off the Murphy Brown showdown, and spoke of having been born into a loving single-parent household. “I can still see [my mother] clearly tonight through the eyes of a three-year-old,” he said, repeating a story he’d told often that year, “kneeling at the railroad station and weeping as she put me back on the train to Arkansas [to stay] with my grandmother. She endured that pain because she knew her sacrifice was the only way she could support me and give me a better life.”
In articulating what he liked to call his New Covenant, Clinton hoped to effectively sweep the Republicans’ “values” monopoly off the game board: “The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal. In many ways, it is not even Republican or Democratic. It is different. It is new.”9 Mocking the dichotomy that conservatives were putting forward, he argued that “for too long politicians have told [us]… that what’s really wrong with America is the rest of us—them. Them, the minorities. Them, the liberals. Them, the homeless. Them, the poor. Them, the people with disabilities. Them, the gays. We’ve gotten to where we’ve nearly ‘them’d’ ourselves to death. Them, and them, and them. But this is America. There is no them. There is only us.… And that’s what the New Covenant is all about.” Clinton’s declaration was the first ever by a party’s national candidate to address gay rights from the floor of a convention.
Implicit was the charge that the GOP was waging not just a culture war but a war on women—a constituency that Clinton’s minions were counting on in the general election. The party was also making the case that it would govern not from the left but from the center: Democrats saw themselves as the defenders of the out-of-work, the working class, and the middle class. (The opposition was nonplussed. “I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden,” conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan would remark a month later at the GOP convention, “where twenty thousand liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists—in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.”)
And then, the July surprise. On the last day of the convention, the independent third-party candidate Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire, stunned everyone with an announcement. He was dropping out of the race, and many pundits declared that the beneficiary of his withdrawal would be Clinton, the candidate whom voters seemed to prefer as a more trustworthy change agent. (The unpredictable Perot would then reenter the race in October, a month before the general election.)
Change was word one. As the convention came to a close, a single visual was singed into voters’ minds. It was the sight of two young wives in gold (Hillary) and electric blue (Tipper), joined by their five children, ranging in age from nine to eighteen—alongside their husbands, who, if elected, would comprise the youngest ticket ever to make it to the White House. All that was missing was the dog and the Suburban. Caught up in the moment, they began dancing. And they started singing along to the campaign theme song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).”
This image of vigor and pep and marital felicity took hold. In fact, just a week before the convention, the Clinton and Gore families had stood on the back porch of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. “We all watched that scene on the balcony,” Mary Matalin would recount, summarizing the mood in the Bush trenches. “The reaction was, ‘Oh, my God.’ The Clintons, the Gores, all those beautiful kids in front of that quintessentially American red brick mansion, looking youthful and cheery… It was Nirvana, the pinnacle of political introductions. You couldn’t have made up a better visual.… They had a perfect picture for their timely message: change, youth, dynamism.…
“We were all awestruck. We were all clutching our stomachs.”
If the ’90s culture war had its death match, it was played out over four hot nights in Houston the week of August 17, 1992. The Republican hoedown, held in the Astrodome, featured a cast of forty-five thousand—all intent on diverting the Clinton-Gore Express.
Bush was pleased to be back in the state where he’d made his political hay. But the Astrodome, to be candid, hardly projected a twenty-first-century vibe. By the early ’90s, the facility was already a relic. Erected in 1965 as the world’s first domed stadium, it conveyed (as did the GOP itself, said the Democrats) an antiquated vision of what a Jetsons-esque future was supposed to look like. And outside and inside the hall, the signage set the trash-the-bastards theme. T-shirts advised: Blame the Media. Stickers urged: Smile if you have had an affair with Bill Clinton. One placard bore a cannabis logo: Bill Clinton’s smoking gun. Another: Woody Allen is Clinton’s family values advisor.
Meanwhile, a rearguard challenge had been mounted by the ultraconservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, who had secured nearly a quarter of all Republican support in the primaries. Bush, who was considered far too moderate for those on his right flank, had had to appease Buchanan’s forces (religious conservatives would make up some 40 percent of the delegates) or have his convention implode. So to shore up their base, Bush and the GOP mandarins gave over large swaths of the party platform—and prime-time airtime—to the hard-liners.
The platform would be packed with a slate of provisos related to sexual mores, cultural kashrut, and the supremacy of the nuclear family. Entire passages read like war whoops: “Elements within the media, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Democratic Party are waging a guerrilla war against American values. They deny personal responsibility, disparage traditional morality, denigrate religion, and promote hostility toward the family’s way of life.” Pro-choice Republican Tanya Melich was on hand as they hammered out the fine print. In her book The Republican War Against Women, she remembers a hush falling over the room as the committee took up the “individual rights section, the prelude to the abortion plank.” Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois at one session offered a stunning argument when discussing the need to protect the life of the fetus—at all costs. “I can’t imagine a more egregious crime than rape,” said Mr. Hyde. Even so, he added, “There is honor in having to carry to term, not exterminating the child.” And still he went on, “From a great tragedy, goodness can come.” A new concept: honor birthing.
Meanwhile, the platform identified the deviant who was hiding under every bed. It sought to ban gay marriage, adoption by gay couples, the sale of porn, and public funding that might be used to “subsidize obscenity and blasphemy masquerading as art.” It called for “a human life amendment to the Constitution”; judicial appointments for those “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life”; and state laws that would make it a criminal act to knowingly pass along AIDS. There was even a call to overhaul the entire welfare system, which itself was phrased in sexual terms. (The current system, according to the platform, constituted an “anti-work and anti-marriage” pact with the poor that “taxes families to subsidize illegitimacy.”) Instead of allowing public schools to provide birth control or abortion service referrals, the GOP pushed “abstinence education.” To combat the spread of AIDS, the platform rejected “the distribution of clean needles and condoms” in favor of education programs that would “stress marital fidelity, abstinence, and a drug-free lifestyle.”
Extreme forces had managed to commandeer the party’s blueprint at the most critical, self-defining phase in the quadrennial election cycle. According to David Brock, a right-wing investigative reporter in the ’90s (and, come the 2000s, a progressive pro-Clinton advocate and media watchdog), “The holy war broke out after four years of conservative disunity, frustration, and disappointment during the Bush presidency, in the midst of an economic downturn, a backlash against the gains of women and minorities, and a resurgent religious revival in what became known as the year of the ‘angry white male.’… Through organization and sheer force of numbers, the religious right had won control of the conservative movement, and the movement, in turn, now was dictating Republican Party policy.”
From hour one on night one, things got nasty. “We are America,” Rich Bond, the head of the RNC, proclaimed on NBC. “These other people are not America.”
The invocation, by Reverend D. James Kennedy, warned of a “godless trail to destruction” that might await the party faithful should they follow “atheists and secularists here in our midst.” Addressing the Almighty, Kennedy drew an apocalyptic picture: “We have turned our back upon Thy laws by every imaginable immorality, perversion, vice, and crime; and even now a hideous plague stalks our land.”
That was just an appetizer. The main course was offered up by Pat Buchanan, the conservative standard-bearer. Having roughed up (and then made his peace with) George Bush, Buchanan—a onetime blusterkind speechwriter in the Nixon White House—had earned enough delegate support and platform muscle to secure the evening’s prize time slot: coming on just in front of the headliner, Ronald Reagan.
When Buchanan took the stage, he was the party’s martinet. He wore a somber black suit, gestured with karate-style chops, and spoke with a preacher’s cadence as he laid out a declaration of war. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” he warned. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
He clearly defined the enemy. They were the Democrats—a collection of “malcontents,” “prophets of doom,” and “carping critics [who were hawking the] discredited liberalism of the 1960s… no matter how slick the package in 1992.” They were Clinton and Gore, “the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” They were “Prince Albert” Gore and “Teddy” Kennedy. (“How many other sixty-year-olds do you know,” Buchanan asked, “who still go to Florida for spring break?”) They were “Clinton & Clinton,” the designation meant to connote a family law firm, whom he accused of promoting an agenda that “would impose on America abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right.… And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”
In closing, Buchanan moved the fight to the streets, metaphorically, by juxtaposing his description of a “cultural war” with his depiction of National Guard units with “M-16s at the ready [who] had come to save the city of Los Angeles” during the riots that had convulsed the city and claimed more than sixty lives the previous spring. Just “as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”10
Buchanan’s words played well in the Astrodome. “They walked out of here tonight enthusiastic,” ABC’s Ted Koppel told viewers at home. “They walked out of here with something that Republicans have not had for quite a few months: a sense of optimism.” Buchanan, to many of the conservative faithful, had effectively deflected discussion of the tanking economy and focused instead on Clinton’s Achilles’ heel: public morals.
But at what price?
Even many Republicans recognized the language of race-baiting. Buchanan had stirred up images of urban riots and then pretended that liberal forces—the Democratic ticket, in particular—were fomenting “a religious war,” “a cultural war,” “a guerrilla war.” But he was the one spoiling for a face-off. His brimstone conjured tent-show revivalists, brought to mind Huey Long and George Wallace, and foreshadowed the slurry of slurs issued during Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. (Buchanan, with his hair slicked slightly back and to the side, actually looked like a taller, trimmer version of Old Joe McCarthy.)
Columnist Molly Ivins, the humorist and avowed liberal, went so far as to compare Buchanan’s rattled saber to those of the brownshirts: “It probably sounded better in the original German.” Rachel Maddow, the liberal commentator, had tuned in that night from Philadelphia. She was nineteen at the time, having publicly identified herself as lesbian two years earlier, in her first year at Stanford. She would later note that Buchanan’s appearance “hit her right between the eyes. He was, without euphemism, declaring that my own country was at war with me. I get it intellectually and strategically now, but at [that stage in my life] I only got it emotionally.” David Brock, then a muckraker on the right, was watching the Buchanan speech from Provincetown, as a closeted gay man. That evening, as he would write in his memoir Blinded by the Right, he headed out for his “nightly tour of Provincetown’s gay bars.” The disconnect was jarring. “I could see the [Republican] party was making a tectonic shift, preaching hatred of government on the one hand, and calling for government enforcement of religiously ordained standards of personal conduct on the other.… The proverbial scales were starting to fall from my eyes.”
That week, essayist Lance Morrow would file a column for Time insisting that the speech’s thesis, as well as Buchanan’s “bully mode—an appeal to visceral prejudices, not to American ideals”—had been stewing in the Republican cauldron for some twenty years. Buchanan, as a young Nixon speechwriter in the early ’70s, had drafted a memo to the president urging him to slice the nation in half “and pick off ‘far the larger half.’” Nixon indeed went after the Republican base and the sizable “silent majority” (a term the president himself had effectively used in the late ’60s) and was handily reelected, trouncing George McGovern. That long-brewing culture war—dating back to Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., and their peers—had finally come of age.
George H. W. Bush, on the convention’s final night, restored some decorum to the proceedings. In contrasting his version of change with the young Arkansas governor’s, the president implored, “Sure, we must change, but some values are timeless. I believe in families that stick together, fathers who stick around. I happen to believe very deeply in the worth of each individual human being, born or unborn.… Maybe that’s why I’ve always believed that patriotism is not just another point of view.” And indeed, the ticket left Houston with a bit of a bounce in the polls, slightly narrowing the gap with Clinton-Gore, to a slim nine points in some polls.
But the damage had been done. Bush-Quayle would never recover from what Newsweek would call “a four-day festival of fear and social antagonism.” To the television audience, the Bush “coalition” had come across as fractured, exclusionary, and extremist. Buchanan’s cavalry had in effect hijacked the convention—and the Republican Party. “Houston,” Bush speechwriter David Frum (chairman of Policy Exchange, the U.K. think tank) would observe, “is now indelibly engraved in America’s political memory as a disaster on the order of the Democrats’ Chicago convention in 1968 or the Republicans’ San Francisco convention of 1964”—not to mention Trump’s ragtag rage-fest of 2016. In the end, much of the viewing public felt that the GOP leadership (who seemed out of step with society) and the party’s functionaries (which seemed unwilling to accept people of color or of the nonheterosexual persuasion) were either politicized versions of their battier aunts and uncles or exiles from the Planet Wack.
The “Bush men,” to use Frum’s anthro-lingo, had only themselves to blame. It was not the far-right fringe, he believed, but the moderates—running the RNC, the campaign, and the convention—who had dictated the flow of the game in the Astrodome. “The convention reflected the Bush men’s own conception of smart politics,” Frum would surmise in his book Dead Right, two years after the fiasco. “Like tourists in Paris, they compensated for their lack of a conservative vocabulary and grammar by absurdly and exaggeratedly mimicking the accents and gestures of the people to whom they were trying to communicate.”
Bush Men vs. Cultural Savages. The culture war had gone into high gear.
And the young guns had the old guard in their crosshairs.
Before we move on from Houston to the general election, however, it’s time for a side trip—to Silicon Valley.