Takeover (16 page)

Legend has it that there was a lot of debate in the Bush inner circle about whether or not this commitment should be included in the acceptance speech.

But the debate wasn’t about whether or not Bush intended to keep the commitment not to raise taxes, or what the ramifications of breaking the commitment might be—the debate was about whether the phrase “read my lips” was undignified and inappropriate for inclusion in such a weighty address by the Republican nominee for president.

The lone conservative voice questioning Bush was Barry Goldwater, who, while introducing Senator Quayle at a speech to a Rotary club in Phoenix, admonished Bush’s running mate, “I forgot something that I had to say, and I hope you take this kindly. But I want you to go back and tell George Bush to start talking about the issues, okay?”

According to the Associated Press, Goldwater did not elaborate, and afterward he avoided reporters, saying, “I’m not talking. I want to get the hell out of here.”

But the dig appeared aimed at Bush’s capture-the-flag campaigning, including his pillorying of Governor Dukakis for vetoing a 1987 mandatory Pledge of Allegiance bill for Massachusetts schools. Quayle laughed and said only, “I wish Barry would just say what’s on his mind.”
⁴

Goldwater may have had his doubts about the tone of the Bush campaign, but when George H. W. Bush finished his acceptance speech and the balloons dropped in New Orleans, whatever doubts about the nominee’s commitment to conservative principles others had were mostly kept them to themselves. Bush campaigned on conservative themes and relentlessly hammered Dukakis’s liberal values from the Right.

Bush may not have
been
a conservative, as events would later prove, but unlike Mitt Romney in 2012, in 1988 Bush
ran
as a conservative. He nationalized the election, and much as Obama countered Romney’s technocratic campaign with a values campaign
from the far Left, Bush hammered Dukakis’s technocratic campaign with a values campaign from the Right.

It was no contest in either election.

Bush and Quayle defeated Dukakis and Bentsen by over seven million votes, garnering 53.37 percent of the popular vote and 426 Electoral College votes. Then-Libertarian candidate Ron Paul and his running mate didn’t even break half a million popular votes.

But Bush’s huge popular and Electoral College victory did not have any coattails—unlike Reagan’s 1980 win, Republicans actually lost seats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, where four incumbent Republican senators were defeated, while Republicans picked up three Democratic seats, giving them a net loss of one.

And there were clues that what Bush had in mind was not the third term of Ronald Reagan, as Nancy Reagan expressed her disappointment with Bush’s messaging by asking, “Kinder and gentler than who?”

George H. W. Bush’s relationship with conservatives may be best illustrated by his response to a CBS television interview Howard Phillips and I had with Dan Rather at the 1984 Republican National Convention. We pounded Bush for his lack of commitment to conservative principles and what we saw as his “inside the White House” fifth column against Reaganism. The following evening, Rather interviewed Bush and said in so many words, “Mr. Vice President, last night I had Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips on the show, and they say you’re not a conservative. Mr. Vice President, are you a conservative?” Bush replied, “Yes, Dan, I’m a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.”

I’m proud to say that I was then and am now a “nut” about liberty.

It was later shown that what George H. W. Bush was a nut about was growing government, and driving all conservatives out of the White House, the executive branch of the federal government, and the Republican Party.

S
ome of us who have been around conservative politics for a while remember the smirk on Democratic senator George Mitchell’s face when he conned Republican president George H. W. Bush into abandoning his “read my lips” promise to oppose new taxes.

If “Read my lips: no new taxes,” was the most memorable line of the 1988 campaign, George H. W. Bush’s decision to abandon that commitment was, politically, the most momentous act of his presidency.

The decision to go back on his pledge not to raise taxes didn’t take place until well into his term. But Bush’s betrayal of the Reagan Revolution started the minute he took the oath of office. Within hours of Bush’s inauguration establishment Republicans, such as James Baker III, who had opposed many of Reagan’s initiatives from within the administration, were promoted. But throughout the government Reagan’s conservative appointees, many of whom were loyal Republicans who had supported Bush, were forced to resign, were stripped of their duties, or were summarily fired by a new administration that wanted no part of the relatively few
movement conservatives left in the government on the day Ronald Reagan departed Washington for California.

During Reagan’s presidency conservatives frequently said, “Personnel is policy,” and Bush’s Inauguration Day massacre was a sure sign that he intended to abandon Reagan’s policies, and his principles.

While Bush partisans argued that the new president was justified in putting his own people in place, the 1989 “Inauguration Day Massacre” firings were more akin to political executions; lists of those to be “executed” were drawn up, and they were fired before sundown of the first day of the new Bush administration in a well-planned agenda to replace conservatives (be they Bush supporters or not) with establishment Republicans.

While most commentators tend to focus on “Read my lips,” Bush quickly walked away from conservative principles on a long list of policies and decisions.

• Bush reversed himself and imposed a temporary ban on semiautomatic rifles—so-called assault weapons—after first opposing the idea.

• He signed and advocated the Americans with Disabilities Act, creating a whole new realm of litigation nightmares for businesses large and small.

• He bailed out the troubled savings and loans banks.

• He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, making it easier for employees to sue employers.

• He bought into global warming by signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

• He created a “no net loss of wetlands” policy out of whole cloth, with little legislative authority, outraging farmers and landowners across the country.

• And in what was perhaps his most lasting and damaging betrayal of conservatives, he appointed an obscure state judge, David Souter of New Hampshire, to the Supreme Court.

The appointment of Souter, whose only obvious qualification to sit on the Nation’s highest court was that he was a crony of former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff John Sununu, was a disaster from which the damage haunts us to this day.

We could go on—the point is, establishment media commentators tend to focus on “Read my lips” to sum up Bush’s administration, but there were a host of policies where Bush deviated not just from Reagan’s principles of government, but from conservative policy goals that had broad grassroots support.

While it was hard for Bush and his advisers to believe that he could go from over 90 percent approval when Operation Desert Storm ended in 1991, to getting just 37.5 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 election, it is easily explained when you look at the litany of me-too policies he backed and the liberal bills he signed.

Support for the Second Amendment and property rights, imposing moral hazard, instead of government bailouts for failed business transactions and investors, and opposing the creation of new “protected classes” of potential litigants were all broad conservative, and Republican, principles that predated Ronald Reagan.

Bush walked away from all of them and in the process not only abandoned the policies of Ronald Reagan, but he destroyed the Reagan coalition, and did serious and long-lasting damage to the Republican brand.

What’s more, Reagan’s character was such that he was utterly confident in himself—like Lincoln, he was not afraid to build the Party and strengthen his coalition by bringing in one of his primary opponents as vice president.

Bush was just the opposite—he was tentative and thin-skinned—so the very idea of having Jack Kemp, Senator Bill Armstrong, or
one of the other leading New Right conservatives as his running mate never seriously entered into his calculations.

One reason Bush had such a strong election in 1988 was that, particularly after his acceptance speech, voters thought they were voting for the third term of Ronald Reagan. Once he got out from under Reagan’s shadow and voters saw the real George H. W. Bush, they decided they didn’t particularly like Bush and his establishment Republican administration.

Who you walk with says much about who you are. Reagan surrounded himself with conservative leaders and the self-made California entrepreneurs who formed his old kitchen cabinet; Bush filled his administration with people from the Yale Alumni Association and the Social Register—the contrast was obvious and telling.

Much as when Teddy Roosevelt introduced “progressivism” into the Republican Party, and made it the creed of establishment Republicans, President George H. W. Bush’s kinder, gentler Big Government Republicanism made it difficult for voters to differentiate between the parties and their policies.

Were Republicans for lower taxes and fiscal discipline, or were they for more spending? Were Republicans the party of less government and more personal freedom, or were they the party of more government regulation and lawsuits from the Americans with Disabilities Act and “no net loss of wetlands”?

No one knew, and if there’s not a bright, clear line and a clear contrast drawn between the parties and their candidates, as Democratic president Harry S. Truman so memorably put it, “why vote for a dime store Democrat when you can have the real thing?”

Establishment Republicans led by George H. W. Bush had ignored the profound wisdom of the Bible: “For if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will gird himself for battle?” (1 Cor. 14:8).

Millions of center-right voters decided they wanted no part of Bush’s dime-store Democrat policies, so they walked away from Bush and the Republican Party to support Ross Perot’s independent run for president. Millions more just stayed home. In 1992, Bush’s
popular vote fell off from his 1988 total by some eight million votes; he garnered fewer votes than the man he beat four years earlier and earned less than half the votes he won in the Electoral College landslide he booked in 1988.

Republicans on Capitol Hill had not seen any coattail effect from Bush’s 1988 victory, but they were not trounced in his defeat. Bill Clinton and Al Gore swept into office with a gain of one seat in the Senate and a net loss of nine Democratic seats in the House and what they thought was a liberal mandate to roll back the Reagan Revolution.

Had the hapless President George H. W. Bush been reelected, it is a near certainty that the Democrats would have made major gains in the 1994 midterm elections. They probably would have gained congressional seats in 1994, and picked up the White House in 1996. It would have been a wipeout down ballot as well. Someone like Al Gore might have been in the White House on 9/11.

T
he damage George H. W. Bush did to the Republican brand was severe, but it was about to be reversed with the help of the same tools that had helped launch the New Right and the Reagan Revolution a decade earlier—the new and alternative media, now augmented with the growing talk radio phenomenon.

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton and Gore had made the economy their priority, as Southern political sage James Carville plastered around their campaign headquarters, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

But Clinton and Gore did not ignore the larger liberal agenda, and at the top of their list once they were elected was “giving” the American people health care, as Clinton once put it.

President Clinton placed First Lady Hillary Clinton and liberal policy wonk Ira Magaziner in charge of the effort to draft, build support for, and pass a national health care plan, and with Democrats holding decent majorities in both houses of Congress, it looked as though it should be easy.

What Clinton and Gore failed to understand going into what became known as the “Hillarycare” fight was that there was a change brewing in Congress and in how public opinion was being molded.

The change brewing in Congress was that the old go-along, get-along establishment Republicans who accepted that the GOP was destined to be a permanent minority in the House were being replaced by new, aggressively partisan conservative Republicans, led by House minority whip Newt Gingrich.

While the gentlemanly deal-maker Bob Michel of Illinois remained House minority leader, the rest of the House Republican leadership team was made up of conservatives: Minority whip Newt Gingrich, chief deputy whip Robert Smith Walker, House Republican conference chairman Richard Armey, conference vice-chairman Bill McCollum, and conference secretary Tom DeLay.

While Gingrich, Walker, Armey, McCollum, DeLay, and Sen. Bob Dole ultimately joined the battle against “Hillarycare,” they weren’t really there at the beginning—Dole even had his own Big Government national health care bills.

The real leadership of the effort to defeat Hillarycare came from outside Congress—conservative grassroots organizations, commentators, and journalists who pressured Republicans to fight the Clinton health care bill on conservative principles—and who demanded that there be no deal and no compromises.

While talk radio has become one of the main media of choice for conservatives, back in 1992 it wasn’t obvious that talk radio would be almost strictly a conservative domain.

In the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton had “played talk radio like a piano,” said
Talkers Magazine
editor and publisher Michael Harrison.