There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
THE 1985–1986 BIPARTISAN AGREEMENT ON THE BUDGET, TAXES, and immigration was applauded by mainstream politicians and the press, but the extremes in both parties viewed it as capitulation to the other side. Conservative activists, especially, thought the new tax cuts had not gone far enough. Liberal activists believed conservatives had gone too far. The brief period of bipartisanship following the 1984 election posed a real threat to the polarizers. Neither side had the slightest interest in reaching consensus. Both were itching for a fight, and they found one in Nicaragua.
In 1979, the socialist Sandinista movement seized control of Nicaragua. The Reagan administration, in a classic Cold War reaction, feared the Sandinista ideology would spread to neighboring countries. President Reagan went so far as to declare “a red tide is spreading in the Americas.” The administration asked Congress for money to help the Contras, an anti-Sandinista militia group.
After a long and contentious debate, Congress approved aid to the Contras in August 1986. The Contras demonstrated little prowess on the battlefield and even less skill in accounting for how they used U.S. taxpayers’ money. Congress eventually became wary of a commitment that might repeat the debacle in Vietnam a decade earlier and halted military aid to the Contras.
Contra supporters in and out of government were outraged. The Contras had become a central rallying cry for Reagan administration hawks, as well as a celebrated cause for several conservative think tanks and wealthy conservatives. A private fund-raising operation was initiated by Colonel Oliver North, who worked on President Reagan’s National Security Council staff. Substantial private funding initially kept the Contras going, but even with aid from these deep pockets, Contra supporters couldn’t fund a war.
A scheme was hatched within the White House to raise money from the illegal sale of American weapons to the regime of Iranian mullah Ayatollah Khomeini. The proceeds would be used to subsidize the Contras. This operation was also coordinated by North, with the knowledge of Reagan’s NSC adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and with the suspected knowledge and complicity of CIA Director William Casey.
The plan unraveled after an obscure Beirut newspaper revealed the arms sale the day before the 1986 midterm elections. The story seemed so outrageous that only a few press outlets pursued it. Selling arms to Iran in itself was a blockbuster story, but when Attorney General Edwin Meese confirmed the sales, the story rose to the level of the bizarre.
Not only had weapons been supplied to Iran, which had held U.S. embassy employees hostage only six years earlier, but the weapons were transported by Israel from its stockpile of American missiles. Meese then dropped this blockbuster: the proceeds from the missile sales had been laundered through European bank accounts and sent to the Contras.
Within a month, Poindexter and North were gone, and President Reagan had appointed a commission to investigate Iran-Contra. It was chaired by former Texas Republican senator John Tower. But congressional Democrats, now in control of the House and Senate, conducted their own hearings. Unlike Watergate, the Iran-Contra hearings had a far more partisan tone. The Democratic committee staff ignored their Republican counterparts, infuriating GOP members.
Many Republicans believed, with good reason, that the Democrats used the hearings as a platform for attacking Republicans before the 1988 presidential election. Vice President Bush, the front-runner for the 1988 Republican nomination, came under heavy fire from Democrats for attending meetings on Contra funding.
Iran-Contra led to the appointment of an independent prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, to determine if any laws had been broken. The Walsh appointment was the result of a law, enacted after the Watergate scandals, that allowed federal judges to appoint a prosecutor independent of the Department of Justice. The Independent Counsel Act would become one of the prime contributors to polarization.
Walsh proceeded to prosecute and convict key players, including North, Poindexter, and Weinberger, the latter shortly before the presidential election of 1988. President Reagan’s approval ratings, which had been in the high sixties, plummeted to the forties. On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 508 points, or 23 percent of its value, in the largest single-day decline in the history of the stock exchange. Legislation in Congress began to stall as partisanship, ignited by Iran-Contra, deepened.
The rancor generated by Iran-Contra carried over into Ronald Reagan’s second Supreme Court nomination. Reagan nominated the former solicitor general in the Nixon administration, Robert Bork, who was to replace retiring justice Lewis Powell. Bork was the type of strict constructionist the conservative movement had been longing for. Reagan’s first selection, Sandra Day O’Connor—who became the first female jurist on the high court—was historic, but many on the right did not consider her conservative enough.
For most conservatives, Bork was the ideal choice. Not only was he conservative, Bork was also vocal in his opposition to “activist judges.” He believed that nothing in the Constitution permits abortion, and he was not afraid to mix it up in his confirmation hearings. Rather than kowtow to senators, Bork was blunt.
It was his bluntness that would cause him trouble. Democrats saw his unsmiling persona as arrogance. Bork’s demeanor was more likely caused by his anger following an unprecedented assault by Senate liberals and outside liberal interest groups. On the day Reagan announced the nomination, Senator Edward Kennedy went to the Senate floor and gave a scathing denunciation of Bork. Kennedy’s “In Robert Bork’s America” speech infuriated Bork and his conservative supporters.
Bork was defeated in October by a vote of 58–42 with virtually all Democrats and a handful of Republican senators voting no. The Bork battle rewrote the rules for future nominees. No longer were a potential jurist’s qualifications paramount; ideology and personal issues were now fair game. After Bork, no Supreme Court nominee (or for that matter any federal judicial nominee) would be as candid in confirmation hearings as Bork had been.
The Bork defeat, as much as any other event, helped launch a new era of “the politics of personal destruction.” A new verb emerged from the Bork debacle. From the day of his defeat until today, whenever political nominees for the courts or high administration posts were denied confirmation, they were said to have been “Borked.”
G. H. W. Bush and the Willie Horton Diaries
Of all the politicians associated with the politics of personal destruction, George Herbert Walker Bush seemed the most unlikely. The senior Bush had developed many friendships, including some with Democrats, during his long tenure in Washington. Before becoming president, he had been a member of the House of Representatives, director of Central Intelligence, chairman of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the United Nations and China, and vice president under Ronald Reagan.
Bush was the clear front-runner in 1988, but Iran-Contra and sagging poll numbers for Reagan raised serious doubts that any Republican could win the presidency that year. That didn’t stop a full field from trying. Among them were Kansas senator Bob Dole and a preacher who had never been elected to public office named Pat Robertson. Robertson was the head of the Christian Coalition, a grassroots organization of conservative, mostly Protestant churches.
Running a far-flung religious organization while simultaneously seeking the presidency seemed both improbable and audacious. Robertson, however, was host of a daily Christian television show, The 700 Club, and was comfortable with the most influential medium in contemporary politics. He was a curiosity who generated large press coverage. The media seemed to love covering religion and politics and the resulting debate over the separation of church and state. The Robertson campaign was good for ratings, but the church–state battle it spawned contributed mightily to polarization.
Bob Dole was thought to be the front-runner in Iowa, but Bush had a superior ground operation and the support of many in the Iowa Republican establishment. At a minimum, the Bush campaign expected a strong second-place finish with a shot at beating Dole. Bob Beckel was in Iowa the day of the caucuses in 1988. “I was covering the race for a number of television outlets with my Republican counterpart, Haley Barbour, now governor of Mississippi. We had gone to a large caucus site in Des Moines to get a feel for the Dole–Bush race and noticed dozens of church buses in the parking lot. I asked Haley about all the church people. Since Haley had been involved in several Iowa presidential caucuses over the years, I assumed there was an explanation. Haley said, ‘I’ve never seen that crowd before.’ What we were seeing was an upset in the making by Pat Robertson.”
As expected, Dole won the caucuses, but in a stunning and embarrassing defeat for George Bush, Pat Robertson came in second. Bush was a distant third. Far from ending the contest early, Bush now had to slug it out for several months. He won the New Hampshire primary, but he “won it ugly.” Bush had to go negative, something he didn’t like and wasn’t accustomed to. The negative attacks were directed at his principal opponent, Bob Dole, who was not afraid to “go ugly” himself.
Bush finally got the Republican nomination he had sought his entire political life, but he was battered and bruised by the time of the Republican convention in New Orleans. Meanwhile, Bush’s Democratic rival, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, benefited from a rarity: a united Democratic Party and a thirty-point lead in the polls heading into the fall campaign. Perhaps if the Republican nominee had been Dole and not Bush, the negative campaign that followed would not have surprised or angered Democrats as much as it did…but this was George Bush, Mr. Nice Guy, a consensus player. However, the campaign he ran was anything but nice. His manager was the legendary hard-knuckled veteran of political combat, Lee Atwater (who would die tragically from a brain tumor only two years later). Atwater was an expert at destroying political opponents.
Dukakis’s inexperience at national politics caused him to repeatedly stumble. It especially showed in the way his campaign refused to respond to the Bush camp’s negative attack ads. Dukakis was put on the defensive on several fronts, but none had the impact of Willie Horton.
Massachusetts had a state law that allowed criminals to take furloughs from prison to explore employment opportunities following release and to be with their families. The law was passed under Republican governor Francis W. Sargent in 1972. Republicans connected Dukakis to the law because in 1976 he vetoed a measure that would have made inmates convicted of serious crimes ineligible for furloughs. One of the prisoners furloughed while Dukakis was governor was convicted murderer Willie Horton. While home in Maryland on furlough, Horton committed a brutal rape. A Maryland judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, fearing he might be released again. Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus eighty-five years.
In a TV commercial produced by a committee supporting Bush, responsibility for letting Horton out of prison was placed squarely on Dukakis. The impression left with voters was devastating. Dukakis lost the race, but the Democrats didn’t lose their resentment over the Bush campaign’s negative tactics. If George Bush would go down this trail, the Democrats surmised, they could, too.
Shortly after Bush was elected, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. Employing his consensus-building experience and foreign policy expertise, Bush assembled a coalition to force Hussein out of Kuwait. Nicknamed Desert Storm, the war lasted a phenomenal one hundred hours. Hussein was routed and Bush was exalted. For a brief time, the Democrats rallied to Bush in a show of bipartisan support. It wouldn’t last.
Clarence Thomas, an African-American, was nominated to be an associate justice by George Bush in 1991. The liberal establishment, led by the National Organization for Women, furiously attacked Thomas. The left accused Thomas of sexual harassment when he was a lawyer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Reagan administration.
One of his employees at the EEOC, Anita Hill—also an African-American—accused Thomas of sexually harassing her and engaging in lewd sexual behavior while they both worked there. Hill, a professor of law, became the liberals’ key witness against Thomas. Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee assailed Hill. They wanted to know why she had come forward at virtually the last minute when she might have spoken up sooner. Hill’s supporters claimed that she had little to gain from appearing before the committee (other than defeating the nomination of a conservative justice). They cited authorities on sexual harassment who say most women don’t come forward out of fear and embarrassment.
What about Clarence Thomas? Hill might well have lied. There was no significant evidence produced at the confirmation hearing or during the FBI background check on Thomas that came close to proving him guilty of the sexual harassment of Anita Hill. Thomas suggested he was the victim of “a high-tech lynching,” a rejoinder that put even some white liberals in fear for their political lives. An article by David Brock in the conservative magazine the American Spectator ravaged Hill, underscoring how polarized the political climate in Washington had become. In the article, Brock called Anita Hill “a little bit nutty, and a little bit slutty.”
Cal Thomas talked to former president Bush in October 2006 for this book. The senior Bush was decrying the state of polarization today. His answer reflected how polarization had played out in the Clarence Thomas nomination.
You take the judges, Cal, and it’s almost like when you send up the first nominee, batten down the hatches because we’re going to destroy people. That seems to me to be the attitude a lot of them are taking. And I’m not sure it’s all one-sided, either. We have some hip-shooters on our side as well.
The euphoria over Desert Storm made President Bush a heavy favorite for reelection in 1992. But the good feelings about the war gave way to concerns about the economy. The Democrats mounted a furious attack on the president’s economic policies, particularly budget deficits. The Bush budget pending before the Democratic Congress was in trouble, and he was forced into a deal with them. While Bush’s intention was to cap spending, part of the deal included a tax increase.
Republican activists were apoplectic. Tax cuts were the hallmark of Renaldo Maximus (as talk show host Rush Limbaugh affectionately nicknamed former president Reagan, who, by the way, also raised taxes after first cutting them—we guess he must have been against them before he was for them). The right never fully trusted Bush, viewing him as a member of the party’s moderate “Rockefeller wing.” They regarded his deal with Democrats as a sellout and confirmation of everything they had feared about him.
The last two years of the Reagan presidency and the four years of the Bush 41 term will be remembered for a successful war in the Middle East and the breakup of the Soviet Union. But it will also be remembered for Iran-Contra, titanic battles over the federal budget and tax policies, and bitter division over judicial nominees, especially the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
On October 15, 1991, Clarence Thomas was confirmed by the Senate 52–48, giving Bush a much-needed victory. Despite the Thomas success, conservatives were still burning over the Bush deal with the Democrats allowing tax increases. By the time the 1992 presidential campaign began to heat up, Desert Storm and Clarence Thomas were almost an afterthought in a political year dominated by bad economic news. The reelection of president Bush was no longer a sure thing.
After the polarizing battles over Iran-Contra and Bork, voters appeared ready to turn the Republicans out of the White House in 1988. However, Dukakis turned out to be the wrong Democrat to take advantage of the public’s discontent. In effect, the race was a referendum on Dukakis, not a mandate for George Bush. But in 1992 Bush faced a very good Democratic candidate in Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Texas billionaire Ross Perot entered the race as an independent who focused on the dangers of the exploding federal deficits under Reagan and Bush. With voters generally tired of Republicans, Democrats desperate for the White House after a twelve-year drought, and Perot drawing a surprising 19 percent of the vote, Bush faced too many obstacles to win a second term.
Clinton won the election with only 43 percent of the vote, a historic low for a victorious presidential candidate, while George Bush also set a record for a sitting president, getting just 38 percent. Clinton’s victory enraged an already polarized conservative base. They were appalled that a man they believed lacked family values, and was on the wrong side of the culture war, would occupy the Oval Office. The right never considered Clinton a legitimate president and immediately set out to prove it. The political climate, already ugly, was about to get a lot uglier.