Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (17 page)

And this is what the Bush campaign did.

The primaries played out as Atwater had predicted. The three movement conservatives who were on the ballot—Representative Jack Kemp for the
supply-siders, Pat Robertson for the religious right, and Governor Pierre S. “Pete” du Pont of Delaware for libertarian-light conservatism—got in each other’s way and could not claim the direct ties to Reagan that Bush had by virtue of his office.

Bush’s victory was a tactical marvel. He dispatched Bob Dole, his main opponent, by accusing him of harboring a wish to raise taxes—Bush pledged that he would never do such a thing—and labeling Dole a “straddler” on the issue that was the conservative litmus test. In the primary in New Hampshire, one of the most tax-sensitive states in the country, this was enough. Dole never recovered.

In the general election, Bush embraced Reagan’s successes but tried to soften Reaganism by promising to be “the education president” and “the environmental president.” For good measure, he pledged to create a “kinder, gentler” America. But toward Dukakis there was neither kindness nor gentleness. Proving there was still some juice in the old conservative social issues, Bush relentlessly went after Dukakis as a “liberal”—it had become a bad word in the 1960s—who favored repealing the death penalty, had vetoed a bill requiring students to say the pledge of allegiance, and backed gun control. To undermine Dukakis’s national security credentials, the campaign also featured an ad that included footage of the Massachusetts governor waving from a tank and wearing what the journalist Dorothy Wickenden diplomatically called an “unfortunate helmet.” Atwater gleefully said it made Dukakis look like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

The most emotionally resonant assault of the campaign involved the oldest kind of racial politics, conveniently tied to crime policy. The Bush forces assailed Dukakis for sponsoring a weekend prison furlough program that a convicted killer named Willie Horton had taken advantage of. While out of prison, Horton committed assault, armed robbery, and rape. Horton was African-American. Susan Estrich, Dukakis’s campaign manager, said flatly what many (including most Democrats) believed. “It was very much an issue about race and racial fear,” she told the Harvard conference. “Look, you can’t find a stronger metaphor, intended or not, for racial hatred in this country than a black man raping a white woman. And that’s what the Willie Horton story was.” Atwater, a southerner well schooled in the politics of race, was
fully aware of the ad’s implications but denied the ad was about race. He insisted that the furlough program itself “defied common sense.”
But in an interview shortly before his death, Atwater apologized for the whole thing. “In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate,’ ” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”

But at the time, it worked. Bush’s attacks on Dukakis kept the movement conservatives in line, even if he never inspired them. Bush swept the South and held on to enough of the Reagan Democrats to carry the key industrial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. It helped Bush that the economy was on track again: GDP growth hit 4 percent in 1988.

Viewed one way, Bush’s 53 percent of the popular vote was the Reagan Coalition at sustainable cruising speed. He didn’t win by the blowout Republican margins of 1972 or 1984, but he won solidly enough.

Yet especially in retrospect, Dukakis’s showing can be seen as the beginning of a Democratic recovery. His nearly 46 percent of the popular vote was the second-best Democratic showing in two decades (after Jimmy Carter’s narrow 1976 victory). In the Midwest, Dukakis won back about 60 percent of the Reagan Democrats, and about half of them in the Northeast. But in the South, the Reagan Democrats split toward Bush, a sign of the continuing realignment.

Bush’s 426–111 Electoral College margin was depressing for Democrats, yet the contours of future Democratic victory maps began to come into view as Dukakis picked up states the Democrats would need in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. This, however, can only be seen in retrospect. At the time, Democrats simply saw their fifth defeat in six presidential elections. It pushed many of them—notably a young governor in Arkansas named Bill Clinton—toward intense rounds of introspection.

Bush’s presidency might have ushered in a more moderate and durable form of conservatism, and for much of his time in office, this seemed an entirely
realistic possibility. His two main domestic achievements, a new Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, were broadly progressive and they passed with Democratic support. His management of the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany was masterly. And in moving a huge American fighting force to the Middle East to reverse Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait, he won acclaim across the partisan and ideological divides.
Bush’s approval rating hit an astonishing 89 percent in a Gallup poll completed in early March 1991 and remained in the 60s and 70s through late October.

It was a paradox: although the vote to authorize the intervention closely divided Congress, the Gulf War proved to be an unusually unifying conflict. No doubt some of its popularity owed to a simple fact: the fighting to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s forces ended quickly, and in an unambiguous American victory. But it’s also true that the first President Bush was respectful in how he approached Congress in seeking ratification of his policies. He did not ask for a war vote during the 1990 midterm election campaign but waited until afterward, thus keeping it out of electoral politics. While he was seeking authorization, he never used the war as a domestic political cudgel. And Bush himself showed resolve, discipline, and restraint. Once he declared in August 1990 that Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait “will not stand,” he patiently built up American forces in the region—to a peak of over 500,000. There was never an imbalance between American ends and means. His secretary of state, James A. Baker III, painstakingly built broad international support for the American mission.

And after the victory in Kuwait, Bush resisted calls to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam.
His reasoning was explained best by his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, who would take a different view of the matter a decade later. “We’d achieved our objective,” Cheney said in 1992, “and we were not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”

But in the end, it was not the war but domestic politics that defined Bush’s political standing.
After his 1991 highs, Bush’s approval rating fell steadily from the fall of 1991 onward, hitting a low point of 29 percent in early August 1992. His central problem was a recession that began in July 1990.
Economists placed its end date at March 1991, but the recovery was very slow, and when the Democrats held their convention in July 1992, unemployment still stood at nearly 8 percent. It’s no wonder that James Carville, Bill Clinton’s brilliant and offbeat political maestro, became known for a quip that was also a strategic insight: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Almost as damaging, and far more consequential to the future of conservatism, was Bush’s decision to reach a budget deal with Democrats who controlled Congress. With the deficit spiraling upward again, Bush sought spending cuts. To get Democrats to agree, he was willing to raise taxes. Bush’s presidency never recovered from his decision to make this concession, and the conservative movement has never been the same.

Bush’s efforts to defeat Dole and to paint Dukakis as a liberal—or, as Atwater liked to put it, “the typical, New Deal, northeastern, Kennedy-type liberal”—included his firm pledge never to raise taxes. Perhaps the most memorable and certainly the most concrete line of his 1988 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination was
“Read my lips: No new taxes.” For supply-side conservatives who remembered Bush’s assault on Reagan’s “voodoo economics,” it was a signal of Bush’s conversion to the true faith.

But Bush was never a real convert, and he felt a sense of responsibility that had long been a characteristic of old-guard conservatives: it was worth breaking a campaign promise to bring the budget closer to balance and avert a crisis.

His mix of tax increases and budget cuts seemed to fall under the traditional definition of fair and balanced, and Bush thought the deal he initially worked out ought to appeal to supply-side conservatives because it excluded any increases in taxes on income or capital gains. It resembled nothing so much as the tax increase Reagan had agreed to in 1982. The initial deal included nearly $300 billion in spending cuts, notably in Medicare, and $133 billion in tax increases on gasoline, alcohol, expensive cars, boats, jewelry, and furs. It also reduced tax deductions on upper-income taxpayers.

By that time, Representative Newt Gingrich had been narrowly elected as House Republican whip. He was best known as a bomb-thrower who had derailed the Democratic Speakership of Jim Wright in 1989 and spent much of his energy assailing Democrats with words such as “bizarre,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “cheat,” “corrupt,” “sick” and “traitors.” Gingrich sat with Bush administration
officials, including the man he would make his nemesis, Budget Director Richard Darman, as they negotiated with Democrats. (Darman, also old-fashioned about responsible budgeting, had tried and failed to knock the “no new taxes” pledge out of Bush’s 1988 speech.) And then, when the deal was reached, Gingrich denounced it and corralled Republicans to buck their own president on the House floor.

The result on October 5, 1990, was a humiliation for Bush. A president whose approval rating was still positive saw his budget design overwhelmingly rebuked in the House, 254–179, and it was opposed by majorities in both parties. Only 71 of Bush’s own Republicans supported it, while 176 of them joined Gingrich in voting no. Only 108 of the 258 Democrats supported the deal. Most of them voted no because they opposed the cuts, or saw the tax package as regressive—or both.

Given Republican opposition to any tax increases, Bush was forced to make further concessions to Democrats to get a deal through. The final package, signed by Bush in early November, violated a core Republican commitment by increasing the top income tax rate from 28 percent to 31 percent. And the final roll call in the House reflected this political reality: Only 10 of the 173 Republicans voting supported it.
Democrats, on the other hand, backed it 217–40.

It was a watershed moment. Gingrich earned the lifelong disdain of George H. W. Bush, who, thirty-two years later, would allude to the episode when he endorsed Mitt Romney over Gingrich in the 2012 Republican primaries.
The elder Bush didn’t directly mention the events of two decades earlier. He simply described Romney as “mature and reasonable—not a bomb-thrower.”

But Gingrich’s move was, in personal terms, political genius. He set himself up as the leader of conservative forces in the House, the essential step toward his Speakership after the 1994 elections. More important for the long run, he and his conservative troops had transformed Republican and conservative politics. It was no longer possible to balance the movement’s two priorities—fiscal prudence and lower taxes. Taxes were now a trump card.

The right could not forgive Bush for a sin they had barely noticed when
Reagan committed it because conservatives believed—no, they
knew
—that the Gipper did not have his heart in it. If Reagan did such a thing, it absolutely had to be the last resort. Of Bush they believed no such thing. Many on the right had always suspected him of being a moderate who had adjusted rightward only because he was an able judge of political reality. To them the budget deal showed that Bush had never really recanted his condemnation of “voodoo economics.”

It’s said that Reagan established tax-cutting as a central—perhaps
the
central—tenet of Republican and conservative dogma. That’s only partly true. As on so many matters, Reagan himself was not dogmatic on taxes. It was the ritual political punishment of George H. W. Bush on the tax issue by conservatives that established there could be no heresy of any kind on the question. The line was drawn on October 5, 1990, in a House vote that might be seen as the first Tea Party roll call. For more than three decades, it would define the GOP.

Paradoxically, given Reagan’s flexibility, that moment also established what it meant to be a true Reaganite. George H. W. Bush and his aides saw his administration’s task as the
consolidation
of Reaganism—by correcting it in certain areas such as education and the environment; by establishing long-term fiscal solvency, preferably through consumption taxes, while leaving in place, as much as possible, Reagan’s commitment to relatively low taxes on income and capital; by preserving Reagan’s devotion to pro-business entrepreneurialism; and by emphasizing the achievement of social welfare through voluntarism, thus Bush’s “thousand points of light.”

One might see Bush’s approach as the old “modern Republicanism” of the Eisenhower era pushed a bit further right. And, indeed, Bush’s father and George W.’s grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, had been a champion of the Eisenhower approach.
“It is a philosophy of progressive moderation, as the president has called it, or of moderate progressivism, as others name it,” Prescott Bush explained in a Lincoln Day speech in the 1950s. Neither word—“progressive” or “moderate”—was popular anymore in the GOP, and George H. W. Bush’s effort to inject some moderation into Reaganism failed.