As 1988 unfolded and America’s attention turned to the competition to succeed Ronald Reagan, despite widespread elation over the dramatic easing of Cold War fears, a palpable sense of exhaustion with Reaganism—a premonition of unpaid bills coming due, in more than only a literal sense—hovered over the political scene. In this way, it seemed that Reagan and the conservatism he had championed would be on the ballot once again, and that the electorate might well bring in a negative verdict. Yet Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, would prevail in 1988, winning the White House with a campaign that succeeded in smothering a brewing backlash against Reaganite economics. Bush effectively took Reagan off the ballot, and began to alter American conservatism by amplifying concerns which, while they had been components of Reaganite governance up to 1988, had received less attention than questions of economics and foreign policy. Bush focused on local controversies that were freighted with symbolic significance and that served to discredit the Democratic nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Bush’s campaign set the stage for what would become known, in the 1990s, as the “culture wars,” a political era dominated by polarizing controversies relating to race, sex, crime, and patriotism. In this way, Bush lifted the most divisive and emotionally volatile elements of Reaganism out of the realm of undercurrents and secondary themes, and fashioned them into the central thrust of a retooled conservatism.
Numerous ambitious men slugged it out to win both parties’ presidential nominations in a year with no incumbent on the ballot. Among the Republicans, the main competition was between Bush and Senator Robert Dole of Kansas. Neither was a favorite of movement conservatives. Bush, lean and tall, seemed to epitomize the fabled “eastern establishment,” historically an object of mistrust within the grassroots right. He had relocated from Connecticut to Texas as an adult, but maintained a beloved, large family estate on the Maine coast. Bush never shed his image as a preppie gone southwest, although he continued trying during the 1988 campaign, particularly by broadcasting his affection for fried pork rinds. Bush had always been a successful sportsman, but far from displaying the physical ease and self-control that some athletes do, he often appeared overexcited when under pressure, making herky-jerky movements with his long limbs, his voice rising to a whiny pitch. However, the vice president was well liked by most who knew him personally. He had cemented his standing as a faithful party man with his unwavering, usually silent, support for Reagan ever since Reagan had made Bush his running mate in 1980. While Reagan now endorsed Bush for president, he did so with little fanfare, as if Reagan were a father who felt his son needed to prove his own mettle. Bush was dogged by questions about his involvement in Iran-Contra—he said, less than honestly, that he had been “out of the loop”—and about his independence and his toughness. Bush could be petulant. He and his family were incensed by a Time magazine cover that raised what it labeled “The Wimp Factor” as a problem for Bush. Dole, an able legislator with an arm crippled by a war injury and a bitter sense of humor, won in Iowa, where Bush had prevailed in 1980. But Bush came back to win in New Hampshire. Marion “Pat” Robertson, a successful television evangelist and, like Bush, the son of a U.S. senator, made a strong showing in the caucus states of Iowa and Michigan, where campaigns relied on highly motivated supporters to do more than cast a ballot, but his appeal soon faded. As the contests moved to the South, Bush’s devotion to Reagan proved more boon than bane with Republican voters, and the vice president began to cruise toward the GOP nomination.
In a less tidy Democratic field, Dukakis emerged gradually as a palatable, if unexciting, leader. To those outside Washington, Gary Hart, the 1984 runner-up to Mondale, had seemed assured of the Democratic nomination. However, revelations of the married Hart’s philandering, rumored in Washington to be extensive, came to light and swiftly crushed his candidacy in late 1987.1 With Hart gone, seven Democrats remained in the running, each with limited appeal, mocked by some as the “seven dwarves.”2 Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, playing to blue-collar voters angry over industrial imports from countries that protected their own home markets, came in first in the Iowa caucuses, but proved unable to build on this success. Dukakis won the New Hampshire primary soon afterward, but his status as a near–favorite son diminished the importance of his victory.
Jesse Jackson, who had toured the country’s industrial heartland in recent years, marching with labor unions protesting plant shutdowns and wage cuts, ran again in 1988, and he became a bigger factor than he had been in 1984, now a true contender for the nomination. Jackson proved to have a cross-racial populist appeal among the Democratic faithful in 1988. However, just as important in bolstering Jackson’s odds this time around was the fact that no one else could compete with him for African American voters the way that Mondale had in 1984. Dukakis boasted of the “Massachusetts miracle,” an economic boom fueled by high-technology companies and military contractors, while Jackson denounced the “economic violence” of deindustrialization and mingy relief policies. In a set of primaries in March, dubbed “Super Tuesday” and designed to give more weight to conservative Southern white voters in the party, Dukakis and Jackson, frustrating those plans, finished in a virtual tie for the most delegates gained. Then Jackson shocked the nation’s political elites by winning the Michigan caucuses. Soon, white voters coalesced around Dukakis, giving him an edge in the contest. Jackson complained that even Dukakis’s staffers sympathized with Jackson’s fury against Reaganism, but believed that only a more cautious politician like Dukakis could win in November. They “were pulling for me; working for him and hoping I would keep raising the right issues,” Jackson said. “They wanted me to be the tugboat and provide the energy and wanted him to be the ship to carry them across.”3
Dukakis and Bush seemed destined to wage a contest marked by an absence of charisma. Next to Bush, Dukakis’s short stature was so notable that the Democrat’s campaign insisted he have a platform to stand on, behind his podium, during their debates. Dukakis, a graduate of Harvard Law School and the son of a Greek immigrant who had made good as a physician, simply appeared too “ethnic” for some. He had heavy, dark eyebrows and a prominent nose. He was ridiculed when, at one point during the campaign, he donned a combat helmet and drove a small tank around to demonstrate his comfort with armaments. But Dukakis’s temperament, cool verging on frigid, detracted from his appeal more than did his appearance.
Personalities aside, policy issues in 1988 seemed to be cutting in the Democrats’ favor, in contrast to 1980 and 1984. On the home front, in some ways Reaganism appeared the victim of its own successes. Conservatives had addressed the major concerns, inflation and taxes, that had powered them forward in 1978–1980. Bush pledged never to raise taxes as president, which shored up his Republican support. But the broader public did not chafe under taxation, or inflation, the way it had eight years earlier. Regarding other pressing domestic issues, Reaganism’s failings, not its successes, put Bush at a disadvantage. On the challenges of fiscal policy, neglected infrastructure, and social crises including HIV/AIDS, homelessness, and farm foreclosures, Reaganism simply had no answers to offer. On the international scene, the threat that Communist states posed to U.S. security, which had been the basis of the Republican foreign policy appeal throughout the Cold War, no longer seemed real to most Americans. Here, Reagan’s successful peacemaking with Gorbachev, whether a triumph of Reaganite doctrine or a deviation from it, removed another old card from Bush’s hand. Although Bush could boast of the incumbent administration’s achievements in superpower relations, this triumph was far less potent than the traditional GOP pledge to protect Americans from fearsome enemies. As the summer nominating conventions approached, Dukakis looked to be in a strong position if he ran hard on domestic policy and offered a plausible recipe for progress on the nation’s unmet needs.
Bush and his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, would decide how to address this unfavorable political environment. Their decision would rivet the nation’s attention, wrest command of the campaign from Dukakis, and buy time for conservatives to regroup and fight another day on new political terrain. The Bush campaign conducted standard “opposition research” on Dukakis’s record in Massachusetts, probing for vulnerabilities. Atwater’s team found two state-level imbroglios that Atwater realized were political dynamite.
One of them concerned Governor Dukakis’s veto of a bill that the Massachusetts legislature had passed, in 1976, requiring public-school teachers to lead their students in a daily avowal of the Pledge of Allegiance. Dukakis believed the Pledge bill, if it became law, would be ruled unconstitutional by U.S. courts, because of precedents that protected the rights of members of religious minorities to refuse to make oaths of any kind; thus, he saw the bill as pointless grandstanding. But many Americans surely would have little patience with such legal reasoning and would feel, as members of the Massachusetts legislature had calculated their own constituents would, that resisting this measure reflected insufficient patriotism.
But it was the second of the Bay State controversies that became the burning core of Bush’s campaign. It centered on a man named “Willie” Horton. In 1986, while serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole after a conviction for murder, Horton fled from a weekend prison furlough in Massachusetts and brutalized a Maryland couple, twice raping Angela Miller and torturing her fiancé, Clifford Barnes, over the course of a night. When Dukakis became governor in 1975, he inherited the furlough program, intended to promote good behavior by inmates who longed for a taste of freedom. First-degree murderers like Horton were not eligible. But the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that they could not be excluded from the program. The legislature, in 1976, sent Dukakis a bill defying the Court ruling and forbidding furloughs for such inmates. Dukakis vetoed the bill, seeing it—like the Pledge of Allegiance bill—as sure to be struck down in court. But after intense coverage of the Horton case in the local news media, Dukakis reluctantly signed a bill in April 1988—just as he was emerging as his party’s likely presidential candidate—removing only murderers sentenced to life without the possibility of parole from the program.
On May 26, the Bush campaign’s brain trust, comprised of Atwater, media advisor Roger Ailes, pollster Robert Teeter, chief fundraiser Nicholas Brady, and Craig Fuller, Bush’s chief of staff, visited a nondescript building in Paramus, New Jersey. Fifteen white voters, mainly middle-income and Catholic, gathered before a two-way mirror. They had voted for Reagan in 1984, but now said they planned to support Dukakis. A moderator leading the group quickly realized, however, that the participants knew little about Dukakis. The moderator then asked what they would think if they knew Dukakis had vetoed a bill requiring a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in Massachusetts classrooms. What if he had granted a furlough to a murderer who committed rape while free? With this information in hand, the focus group turned on Dukakis. “Basically, their mouths fell open,” said an executive at the research firm that conducted the focus group.4 The Bush campaign leadership knew they had found what they needed.
Atwater traveled to Bush’s Maine home to share the attack strategy against Dukakis with his candidate. Bush, seeing opinion polls showing him well behind, by all reports calmly endorsed Atwater’s plan. Horton’s crimes and the Pledge veto would be their main issues. These could discredit Dukakis and take the campaign’s focus away from the more familiar national policy agenda that seemed tilted against Bush. The vice president, far from showing squeamishness about running for the White House on a tale of rape, assault, and murder, would display what many found a surprising lustiness in leading the charge against Dukakis.
Under the unofficial rules of American politics, Bush had no obligation to refrain from using these matters against Dukakis. Crime was a major issue of public concern in the 1980s—even if the federal government’s role in fighting crime remained relatively minor—and the Horton story, as well as the Pledge-bill veto, were familiar flashpoints in Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the way Bush and Atwater used these issues—obsessively focused on the emotionally explosive details of the Horton case, and determined to make Dukakis appear alien and personally repellent, a man friendly to rapists—made their campaign a master class in demagoguery. “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it,” Roger Ailes, chief of media for the Bush campaign, told Time magazine, almost jauntily.5 Bush captained his campaign, and it became his legacy in American politics. Virtually no one outside the Bush team’s leadership could imagine that a gruesome crime story could form the essential basis for a presidential campaign. Yet it did. Bush and Atwater painted Dukakis as unpatriotic—and as Willie Horton’s patron. “What is it about the American flag that upsets this man so much?”6 Bush cried out at one campaign appearance. Floyd Brown, a political operative working for a group that produced a crude television advertisement attacking Dukakis, told reporters, “When we’re through, people are going to think that Willie Horton is Michael Dukakis’s nephew.”7 The Maryland GOP disseminated a flyer pairing photographs of Horton and Dukakis with the text, “Is This Your Pro-Family Team for 1988?”8 As the campaign wore on, Bush himself began to recount Horton’s horrible acts in “vivid detail,” wrote one reporter.9 Republicans also spread baseless rumors about Dukakis’s mental health and his wife’s political past. No one had seen national politics go this far into the gutter, no one had experienced such an atmosphere of reckless abandon at high levels of responsibility, since the heyday of Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.
The specter of racial fear was palpable in the campaign. Everyone knew that the Horton story was especially potent because Horton was a black man who had raped a white woman. One Bush campaign official said privately of the Horton story, “It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”10 Atwater told a gathering of Republicans in Atlanta, “There is a story about a fellow named Willie Horton who for all I know may end up to be Dukakis’s running mate. . . . On Monday I saw in the driveway of [Dukakis’s] house: Jesse Jackson. So anyway, maybe he’ll put this Willie Horton guy on the ticket after all is said and done.”11 Aside from the sheer outrageousness of Atwater “joking” that Dukakis might make Horton his vice-presidential pick, the only reason to mention Jackson and Horton in the same breath was that both were black men. The frequent use of Horton’s photograph in Republican campaign materials ensured that no one would be uncertain about Horton’s race. In September, a pro-Bush political action committee fielded a low-budget television advertisement about Horton’s crimes; the campaign stated it was uninvolved. But the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted, “People in the Bush campaign knew all there is to know about the various ways in which an ‘independent’ group can be made helpful to a Presidential campaign. Before it even ran, one Bush campaign official read me the text of the ‘independent’ group’s ad featuring Clifford Barnes.”12 The campaign’s spokesman would pin Horton’s police “mug shot” over his desk.13
Bush portrayed Dukakis as a liberal snob out of touch with ordinary Americans’ concerns. This thread tied together the soft-on-rapists charge and the claim that Dukakis was a deficient patriot. Dukakis’s perverse loyalties, Bush said, were part of the Democrat’s liberalism, “born in Harvard Yard’s boutique.”14 Bush, himself the scion of a wealthy, powerful blue-blood family, counteracted the potential unpopularity of his elite background by arguing that he was a man of the people in his heart, and that Dukakis was, in contrast, animated only by the rights of criminals and dissenters. Bush ridiculed Dukakis’s membership in the ACLU. “I am not a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Bush told a crowd. “I am for the people.”15 Bush also regularly criticized Dukakis for the pollution of Boston Harbor, a problem that Dukakis had taken some steps to improve. This issue helped blunt Dukakis’s effort to tie Bush to the Reagan administration’s record of lax environmental regulation.16
As the Democratic convention started, Jackson, reacting peevishly to the news that Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, a conservative choice and a skilled politician, would be the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, threatened to upstage Dukakis. Jackson addressed a simultaneous meeting of the NAACP, finishing an intense speech by saying, “I may not be on the ticket but I’m qualified!”—rebuffing a criticism he had faced throughout his presidential campaigns. Jackson then repeated, along with the crowd, “Qualified! Qualified! Qualified!” Meetings were arranged hastily, and Bentsen, who got on better with Jackson than did Dukakis, helped calm the waters. Convention speakers shifted the focus to Bush, ridiculing him as a creature of privilege. Keynote speaker Ann Richards, the Texas state treasurer, made headlines by mocking the vice president’s verbal awkwardness, saying, “Poor George, he can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Jim Hightower, another Texas liberal, called Bush “a man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Edward Kennedy roused the crowd with a taunting refrain of “Where was George?” as he delivered a speech lambasting Bush’s claim that he had been uninvolved in the Iran-Contra affair.17 Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts called the Reagan years a time of “moral darkness” in America.18
Dukakis’s acceptance speech made a positive impression—a testament to the public’s receptivity to the Democratic appeal in 1988, since the nominee’s speech took a questionable strategic approach to the contest. Dukakis spoke forcefully at the podium (which was decorated, rather oddly, in salmon, cream, and lavender instead of bold red, white, and blue) about the need for a bright future and his record of economic achievement. In his signature line, he declared that “this election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.”19 With the incumbent president’s capacities widely questioned, this was no idle concern. Yet it was strange that Dukakis basically eschewed a focus on the political issues that had dominated news headlines for some months and years. He and other Democrats criticized the Republican record on HIV/AIDS, the farm crisis, financial deregulation, deindustrialization, and corruption in government, but Dukakis attributed these failures to ineptness, not to a governing dogma of hostility to government itself. Technique, not substance, was the ground on which he laid claim to the mantle of leadership. This was a sincere expression of his managerial passions. As the commentator Sidney Blumenthal observed, Dukakis was part of the Watergate generation of Democrats who had entered high office in the mid-1970s, embodying “a curious regression to a pre–New Deal liberalism, a Yankee reformism whose energy was drawn from moral outrage at corruption and whose god was efficiency.”20 Dukakis’s belief that he could win the presidency by running a larger version of a gubernatorial campaign, where nonideological problem-solving was often rated at a premium, would prove his downfall.
Even in Dukakis’s moment of triumph in Atlanta, indications surfaced that the Republican campaign against him would be an onslaught far more personal and fearsome than anything he anticipated. Right-wing elements began spreading the story that Dukakis had received psychiatric treatment during two episodes of depression, one after his brother was struck and killed by a car and the other following Dukakis’s loss of his governorship in 1978. The Bush campaign urged the story along.21 Dukakis felt compelled to produce his personal physician to assure the press corps that the candidate never had been treated for depression. But the open talk of his mental health made an impact. One top Dukakis operative said, “We dropped eight points in a week.”22 Seeking to shift the conversation onto the outgoing Reagan administration’s record, Dukakis criticized the corruption scandals surrounding Meese and other federal officials. “The fish rots from the head down,” he said, hanging responsibility on the president. Reagan struck back, hard and low. Days later, he told a group of reporters, when asked about Dukakis, “I’m not going to pick on an invalid.” Reagan, before this moment, always had been more sinned against than sinner where accusations of incompetence were concerned. He soon expressed regret for his remark, but his retraction received little attention.23
As the Republican convention in New Orleans neared, Bush, his personal insecurities outweighing other considerations, risked his election by choosing as his running mate Senator J. Danforth (“Dan”) Quayle of Indiana, the most callow and unintelligent candidate for vice president in modern history. Quayle was the dull issue of a provincial dynasty. His family owned the most conservative newspapers in a conservative state. Bush, perfectly subservient to Reagan, chose the one potential running mate on whom he could count for a similar servility. Quayle quickly damaged himself, admitting in television interviews that “phone calls were made” on his behalf when he had sought, successfully, to gain entry into the National Guard during the Vietnam War as a way of avoiding combat. It also appeared that Indiana University’s law school had admitted him despite his poor college grades, using a program designed to benefit disadvantaged students.24 He fumbled his way through an interview with an eleven-year-old girl from a children’s newspaper. She asked Quayle about abortion rights, and he responded by telling her that he would oppose allowing her to obtain an abortion even if her father impregnated her (which was a more severe position than Bush’s). Quayle then told the girl that he would approve “a D and C,” or a dilation and curettage, in such a case. Quayle called this “a perfectly normal procedure that I would not put into the category of abortion,” although it was, in fact, a common form of abortion.25 But despite clamorous criticism of Quayle as a weak, even disastrous, choice, Bush stuck by Quayle, resisting calls to dump him from the ticket and keeping him away from the press as much as possible.
Bush maintained a glaring spotlight on Dukakis. Now emphasizing the Pledge-bill veto, Bush visited flag factories in Ohio and New Jersey on the campaign trail and concluded his speech accepting his party’s presidential nomination, in New Orleans, by leading the assembly in the Pledge. “Should public school teachers be required to lead our children in the pledge of allegiance?” Bush asked. “My opponent says no—but I say yes.” He went on, “Should society be allowed to impose the death penalty on those who commit crimes of extraordinary cruelty and violence? My opponent says no—but I say yes.” Finally Bush declared, effectively bringing Willie Horton on-stage with him at the pinnacle of his political career, “I’m the one who believes it is a scandal to give a weekend furlough to a hardened first-degree killer who hasn’t even served enough time to be eligible for parole.”26
The Republican convention intensified the GOP effort to dispute Dukakis’s patriotism. The harshest attacks on Dukakis in New Orleans came from the convention’s keynote speaker, Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey, previously known for his moderation and civility. Kean (with a touch of homophobia) ridiculed the Democrats’ “pastel patriotism,” and went on, “The liberal Democrats are trying to hide more than the colors in our flag—they are trying to hide their true colors.” Kean charged, “They want to weaken America. But they won’t admit it.”27 Bush, in addition to his flag-factory visits, stood before a bank of flags whenever he could on the campaign trail. The standards “surround him on the stump like flowers at a mafia funeral,” a reporter wrote mordantly. Appearing before the Veterans of Foreign Wars to defend Quayle’s service record, Bush said defiantly that Quayle “did not go to Canada, he did not burn his draft card and he damn sure didn’t burn the American flag.” Days later, Senator Steve Symms of Idaho alleged, falsely, that photographs existed showing that Kitty Dukakis, the governor’s wife, had been just such a flag-burner.28
In his convention speech, Bush also sought to present himself in a softer light, avowing his commitment to voluntarism as a means of creating a decent society. He invoked the metaphor of “a thousand points of light” to describe the moral illumination provided by those performing charitable works. This was a traditional conservative theme; neighborly benevolence, not government entitlement, should provide for the needy. Yet, at the end of Reagan’s presidency, even this conservative vision positioned Bush as relatively sensitive to the realities of social distress. It was aimed at moderate voters concerned over the social costs of Reaganism. “I want a kinder, gentler nation,” said Bush, implicitly criticizing Reagan’s legacy. At the same time, Bush sought to motivate his party’s conservative base to turn out strongly for him in November by reiterating his no-tax pledge. He said he knew that, once he became president, “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!’”29
Bush and Dukakis debated twice. While Bush failed to charm the public in these encounters, Dukakis emerged from them badly scathed. At first, it did not appear that this would be the result. In their first meeting, Dukakis aggressively criticized the Reagan record and tied Bush to it, placing the vice president on the defensive. When Bush said, “I hope people don’t think that I’m questioning his patriotism,” Dukakis retorted, “Of course, the vice president’s questioning my patriotism. I don’t think there’s any question about that. And I resent it. I resent it.”30 But at the second debate, Dukakis departed from this assertive tone. One of the journalists moderating the debate, Bernard Shaw, opened the event by asking Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” In reply to this astounding question, Dukakis said, with a calm that faintly suggested weariness over such antics, “No, I don’t, Bernard. And I think you know I’ve opposed the death penalty during all my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent.” Viewers were amazed at Dukakis’s failure to show anger—either at the hypothetical assailant against his wife or at a reporter seeking to sensationalize a serious occasion. At the first debate, Bush had said plaintively, after stumbling over his own practiced lines, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be perfect? . . . Wouldn’t it be nice to be the ice man so you never make a mistake?”31 This waspish lament was unattractive, resembling a child’s angry response to an argument he cannot meet. Nonetheless, in light of the bizarre exchange between Dukakis and Shaw, Bush had stuck a damaging label—“the ice man”—on Dukakis, who seemed a bloodless legalist, rational to a fault.
As Bush pulled away in the opinion polls, Dukakis finally threw caution to the winds, but in a strange manner. On the campaign trail in California, he had planned to rebut Bush’s charge that Dukakis’s liberalism was dangerous and nearly un-American. “The L-crowd doesn’t like it,” crowed Bush, when he called Dukakis a liberal. Dukakis was supposed to say he was simply a Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrat. Instead, he announced, to his staff’s dismay, “Yes, I’m a liberal,” then subsequently struggled to explain what he thought this meant. With two weeks remaining, Dukakis suddenly embraced the rhetoric of economic populism that he had previously resisted. “George Bush is on their side, I’m on your side!” he said. Dukakis hardly needed to say who “they” were; they were the wealthy. “I’m on your side” became his constant refrain in the contest’s last days, when Dukakis wore himself out with a punishing schedule of campaigning.32 This theme roused the Democratic faithful. One of them, the labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, called this the ritualized “last ten days” of presidential campaigning in this era. “Every four years,” he wrote,
the same thing happens . . . : The Democratic candidate stumbles, falls further and further behind, and then, in the last ten days. . . . he goes around like an old-time Democrat. He marches with the unions. . . . When the next presidential campaign begins, no one will have the slightest memory of the last ten days, until everything collapses again, and the next last ten days come around, and we all have to go back into Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Akron, the fleshpots of the old New Deal, and slum around for working-class votes.33
By the fall, the Pledge issue appeared to be losing effectiveness, and Bush’s campaign renewed its emphasis on the Horton case. Now, another pro-Bush group sponsored a speaking tour featuring Clifford Barnes and the sister of the man Horton was convicted of murdering in 1974.34 Barnes, in a television advertisement, said, “Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton changed our lives forever. . . . We are worried people don’t know enough about Mike Dukakis.” The original “independent” advertisement about Horton stopped airing after two weeks, in early October, but at that time the Bush campaign itself started broadcasting its own best-known television advertisement, known as “Revolving Door.” Shot in black-and-white, it showed men walking in and out of a prison; the narration and captions suggested, inaccurately, that hundreds of murderers had been furloughed in the Massachusetts program and that “many” had escaped and remained at large. Most of the actors playing the prisoners were white. Yet it stood as testimony to the powerful racial current in the Horton controversy that many viewers, primed by the extensive previous discussion of the Horton case, mistakenly recalled most of the men in the advertisement as black.35 On Labor Day 1988, Bush, campaigning in California, declared, “No more furloughs for people to rape, pillage, and plunder in the United States!”36
In late October, independent researchers conducted a set of focus groups designed to learn what information voters had taken from campaign advertisements and coverage. Of the ninety-three participants, eighty-eight noted that Horton was black, eighty-one that Angela Miller was white. One woman, a waitress in Dallas, asked to summarize what she knew of the case, stated:
Willy [sic] Horton is a killer—black—supposed to be gassed or electrocuted when Dukakis was governor. . . . But he vetoed all death penalties. . . . [Horton] broke into a home, a married home—in a small town—Maryland—and then tied up the husband. . . . He stayed there for a whole afternoon. . . . He kept raping the wife. . . . He was black and the wife was white. Even when she begged him because she might be pregnant. Her husband went crazy. He couldn’t do anything because Horton had shot him and stabbed him. . . . He still can’t forgive himself. That’s why he is against Dukakis.37
The scenario of a black man raping and terrorizing a white woman and man in their own home was so upsetting to white Americans that some embroidered the awful story with additional details drawn from some deep cultural store of imagined horrors. The Bush campaign had sliced through the media clutter and reached the “low-information voter,” a storied, elusive prey for campaign professionals.
Bush, with his relentless message that liberals posed a danger to Americans, preserved the Reagan coalition at the presidential level. Bush swept the South and the Mountain West; Reagan himself, in the end, campaigned energetically in California, helping secure that state for Bush, too. The popular vote count gave Bush a solid victory margin of almost eight points, 53.4 percent to 45.7 percent for Dukakis, yielding an Electoral College victory of 426–111. Rural areas and older voters were weaker for Bush than for Reagan in 1984, but Bush performed well in many suburbs and won convincingly among political independents and voters below age thirty. Men preferred Bush by twelve points, and Bush nosed past Dukakis among women, due to white women favoring him strongly.38 The congressional elections, meanwhile, kept the Democrats’ majorities in both the House and Senate almost exactly as they had been. Bush had no coattails at all. He had won no mandate to do anything except pledge allegiance to the flag and not free imprisoned murderers.
“The Presidential campaign of 1988 did something new to our Presidential elections,” Elizabeth Drew, who had been studiously nonpartisan during the campaign, worried when it was over. “A degradation occurred which we may have to live with for a long time.”39 The Bush campaign provided a road-map for Republicans facing inauspicious political environments, showing that furious attacks on the decency and patriotism of Democrats could carry the day. Democrats would remember the 1988 Republican campaign bitterly as merely an updated version of old Southern race-baiting campaigns. Atwater defended himself, in part, by denying that he harbored any racist intent. Many a Democrat scoffed at these protestations with a reference to Atwater’s training in South Carolina politics. The evidence suggests that Atwater was, indeed, no racist. However, this line of defense hardly put Atwater, Roger Ailes, or Bush in a flattering light. It only revealed their campaign as a monument to political cynicism. The Democrats, for their part, had missed a large opportunity. Atwater, in a postelection analysis, said he had feared the Democrats would stick to their convention theme of lambasting Bush as a wealthy highbrow. He told Time that if he had run the Dukakis campaign he would have depicted Bush and the GOP as “a bunch of rich, old snobs,” complete with footage of Bush playing tennis, accompanied by narration saying, “No wonder he wants to cut capital gains taxes on the wealthy.” This might be divisive, said Atwater, but, in his view, “It would work.”40
The highly personal attack on one’s political rival was emerging as the primary method of Republicans with their backs against the wall in the late 1980s, as events in Congress confirmed. In the U.S. House, a seemingly permanent Democratic majority had left Republicans with scant role in governance. Many House Republicans, led by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, responded by making condemnations of the House leadership almost their full-time job. Gingrich had organized a large number of younger House Republicans into the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS). Starting in 1983, its members had begun making numerous one-minute speeches, as well as longer “special order” speeches, usually late at night, on the House floor. The cable television service C-SPAN had begun broadcasting House business, with the camera staying trained on the speaker; COS members made grievous charges against House Democrats in their speeches, knowing that viewers would not see the empty House chamber to which they declaimed. Robert Michel, the House Republican leader, blanched at the Georgia upstart’s tactics and feared a challenge from him.41
Gingrich, in turn, feared Jim Wright once the Texan took over the speakership, and devoted himself to rallying opposition to what he called Wright’s corruption. “If Wright consolidates his power, he will be a very, very formidable man,” Gingrich said. “We have to take him on early to prevent that.” Gingrich knew of no corrupt practices by Wright, and some of the journalists whom Gingrich hectored to raise the alarm against Wright were unimpressed. But Gingrich persisted. He said of Wright, “He’s from Texas. He’s been in politics over thirty years. An aggressive investigator with subpoena powers might find something.”42 Eventually, reporters started looking into Wright’s personal finances, and found evidence of business deals in which Wright had been made a partner, clearly because of his public position. In late 1987, Gingrich planned to file ethics charges against Wright and prepared a dossier for the committee. Perhaps the most damaging evidence against the Speaker was an arrangement in which he received unusually high royalty rates from sales of a book of his writings and speeches, published by a company owned by a man who did contract work for Wright’s campaigns. It appeared that Wright’s campaign funds thus were laundered through this company to end up enriching Wright personally. Wright also had applied pressure against savings-and-loan regulators on behalf of Texas thrift operators.
As the inquiry dragged on, in March 1989, the Senate rejected President Bush’s nomination of former senator John Tower of Texas to be secretary of defense, by a vote of 47 to 53. A prominent conservative, Paul Weyrich, initiated the activism against Tower by airing his concerns about Tower’s excessive drinking and womanizing—well known in Washington. Senator Sam Nunn stated that the secretary of defense “must be a person suited by personal conduct, discretion, and judgment to serve second only to the President in the chain of command for military operations; to set the highest leadership example for the men and women in uniform,” concluding, “Tower cannot meet these standards.” In an acrimonious atmosphere, one observer, Chris Matthews, who had served as an aide to Tip O’Neill, said, “The Democrats got Robert Bork. The Republicans got Michael Dukakis. The Democrats got John Tower. The Republicans will get . . . Jim Wright.”43 It was a bit fanciful to link all these career flameouts as a sequence of tit-for-tat partisanship; each had distinct causes. Nonetheless, this perception made headway.
Wright found himself with few backers in the end. Although he had succeeded in steering the ship of government policy in his brief time as Speaker, he had driven his party’s members hard—harder than O’Neill had—demanding loyalty in vote after vote. His position weakened in mid-May when Pamela Small revealed that, in 1973, she had been savagely attacked and almost killed by a young man named John Mack, who then had become a reclamation project of Wright, rising from a menial post to become the Speaker’s top aide.44 By the end of May, his support having crumbled, Wright resolved to resign both his speakership and his House seat. He was quickly replaced by his deputy, Representative Tom Foley of Washington, a cerebral type whose career was untouched by any trace of scandal. Foley’s ascension had been guaranteed only days earlier, when Tony Coelho, the third-ranking House Democrat, who had risen fast through his prodigious fundraising for Democratic House candidates, had announced his own resignation following revelations he had improperly received financial largesse from Drexel Burnham Lambert. Drexel’s controversial star broker, Michael Milken, was close to Coehlo.45
But the political warfare continued. Sensational rumors concerning Foley’s relations with male teenagers suddenly raced through Washington. The talk was groundless, and its origin was obscure. Gingrich’s staff pushed the story along, but it may have started with Democrats supportive of Wright, in the hope that fears of a Foley speakership would shore up Wright’s support.46 Soon the Republican National Committee, now run by Lee Atwater, issued a press release titled “TOM FOLEY: OUT OF THE LIBERAL CLOSET.” This document compared Foley’s voting record to that of the liberal Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, one of two openly gay members of Congress. Mark Goodin, Atwater’s deputy, wrote a cover note for the release, stating that Foley was, in reality, a liberal, even if “many in the Democratic Party and the media will be portraying him as the ‘darling’ of the moderates.” Seeking to put an end to the matter, Frank contacted Michel and reportedly threatened to “out” some secretly gay Republican senators. Goodin had to resign his position, but Bush intervened to spare Atwater. When reporters asked Bush about the press release, the president said, unconvincingly in light of the campaign he had run the previous year, “Disgusting. It’s against everything that I have tried to stand for in political life.”47
As president, Bush displayed two different tendencies, each of which showed the evolution of American conservatism after Ronald Reagan’s departure from the scene. On the one hand, in some respects, primarily in fiscal policy, Bush wished to govern more responsibly than Reagan had. On the other hand, Bush continued to pursue some of his incendiary campaign themes. Bush’s drive to address the federal government’s deficits alienated him from conservative Republicans. Bush’s culture war politics, by contrast, energized conservatives, who wished to press matters that seemed politically promising and that had been neglected under Reagan in favor of economic and foreign policy.
The budget situation could not be put off. Despite agreements reached under Reagan, the final Gramm-Rudman budget targets (see chapter 9) remained unmet, and the severe spending cuts required by the law threatened to take effect. Bush also was worried that, with no serious action on the deficits, jittery bond markets might bring on a recession. After dawdling for some time, Bush, in the summer of 1990, authorized negotiations with congressional Democrats. The need for tax increases, as well as spending reductions, as part of a compact to which the Democratic leaders of the Congress would assent was obvious. Privately, Bush appeared nonplussed at congressional Republicans who had taken his no-new-taxes pledge seriously. “You don’t understand,” he said in one meeting. “I’m here to govern.”48 Reagan had corralled Republican votes for a series of tax increases following his signature tax cuts of 1981. But Bush lacked Reagan’s authority with conservatives, had never cut taxes as Reagan had, and, unlike Reagan, had made an airtight vow never to increase taxes. A majority of Republicans in the House, roused by Gingrich, repudiated the budget the White House had negotiated. After this abandonment, Bush agreed to a further compromise with the Democrats, accepting that a budget could pass only with overwhelmingly Democratic support. On the day after the 1990 elections, in which Republicans suffered a net loss of eight House seats and one Senate seat, Bush signed the budget deal. It included $140 billion in new taxes over five years, some of which would come from raising the marginal income-tax rate for top earners from 28 percent to 31.5 percent, and over $350 billion in reduced spending over the same five years.49 A recession had already begun, in mid-1990.
On other issues, Bush remained the culture warrior of 1988. He vetoed a bill that would have allowed public funding of abortions to end pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. He defended the rule that forbade any family-planning facility that received federal funds from discussing abortion with female clients.50 In 1990, he nominated David Souter to be a justice on the Supreme Court, one who ultimately would vote to uphold abortion rights. But Souter, a moderate, replaced a formidable liberal leader, Justice William Brennan, so his appointment still shifted the Court’s weight to the right. Bush also vetoed a civil rights bill intended to reverse the effects of a 1989 ruling on employment discrimination, calling it a quota measure.51 (In contrast, he happily signed the Americans with Disabilities Act; he would gain little politically by not doing so.52)
In September 1989, Bush called for a huge drug-war bill. “Drugs are sapping our strength as a nation,” he warned in a speech from the Oval Office. He brandished a bag of crack that, he said, police had confiscated from a drug-peddler right across the street from the White House itself, in Lafayette Park. “Let there be no mistake: This stuff is poison,” said the president. This was a set-up job: the dealer was enticed to the park so that Bush could portray the danger as lapping at the very door of power. Bush proposed “more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors”—urging “an almost $1.5 billion increase” in federal funds for such measures, and $2 billion over five years for interdiction and military aid to prevent drug importation from the South. He also endorsed smaller amounts, $321 million and $250 million, respectively, for expanded drug treatment and drug education efforts. This fight was truly to be like a war, said the president. “Victory—victory over drugs—is our cause, a just cause.”53 Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware gave a speech in response for the Democrats: “Not tough enough,” he said.54 The parties continued their bidding war over prison construction, police militarization, and long mandatory sentences for drug-related convictions.
Most strikingly, Bush maintained his determination to make an issue of honor for the nation’s flag. He backed a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban flag “desecration.” In October 1988, in the heat of the presidential campaign in which the treatment of the star-spangled banner had been a flashpoint, the U.S. Supreme Court had announced that it would review the case of a Texas man convicted for his involvement in the public burning of a U.S. flag in 1984. Gregory Lee Johnson had been found guilty of violating a state law prohibiting the “desecration of a venerated object,” but the Texas Court of Appeals had declared the conviction had violated Johnson’s freedom of expression. On June 21, 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision, ruling, 5–4, in Texas v. Johnson, that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment gave license to destroy the nation’s flag. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the majority but wrote an anguished concurring opinion that concluded, “The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like.”55
An embarrassing interval ensued in which members of the Congress competed with one another by offering ever more hysterical calls for the need to protect the flag against an alleged rising tide of physical assaults. One journalist reflected afterward, “I’ve worked on the Hill a long, long time . . . and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a time when people were so scared. . . . The Democrats were determined that the Republicans were not going to outflag them this time.”56 The House of Representatives passed a resolution renaming Independence Day “Take Pride in the Flag Day”; one Democrat, Representative Andrew Jacobs of Indiana, worried aloud that to “designate only 1 day a year makes you wonder about the 364, in a way, does it not?”57 Yet Congress lacked the majorities needed to pass a constitutional amendment in the face of the Johnson ruling. Democrats, looking for political cover, rallied instead behind a Flag Protection Act, a simple law, passed overwhelmingly and signed by President Bush, which the high court then, unsurprisingly, overturned in June 1990.
The culture wars beckoned, and would not be stilled for some time. Conflicts over economic inequality and social distress that had seemed ready to burst the fabric of American politics in 1988 had had their destructive energies drained and redirected toward arguments over who would keep drugs and rapists away from America’s children and women and who could salute the flag most fervently. In the shadow of the 1988 campaign, cynical posturing and triviality dominated national politics. Conservatives, however, despite their newfound methods of political success, were torn between die-hard antitax commitments and establishmentarian concerns over government debt. A recession was underway, and the Cold War was ending. As Reaganism’s heyday faded, and conservatives struggled to hold their coalition together between election contests, the largest questions of domestic and foreign policy found no response in the new formula for political power.