by Curt Smith
On the stump Bush began to even the score. What kind of man would oppose a mandatory Pledge? Why had “this card-carrying member of the ACLU” furloughed—released—“a hardened first-degree killer who hadn’t even served enough time to be eligible for parole”? Bush, in his acceptance speech, was referring to convicted murderer Willie Horton, who then committed a rape and assault in Maryland. Horton became the poster child for Dukakis caring more about hoods than victims. Bush was an outdoorsman—“a Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” he said. Why had Dukakis let corporate greed dirty Boston Harbor? The campaign paired attack with Bush’s crusade for conservation, family, and a more ennobling culture. Usually the challenger controls the agenda. Here the incumbent—Bush, as Reagan’s surrogate—did. In his acceptance Dukakis tried to flee his record by saying, “This is an election about competence, not ideology.” By late August Bush led in both.
That month I joined an ad hoc group of about a dozen people from within and outside the Reagan administration to plot speech ideas, propose scheduling events, and write one-line phrases for the campaign. We met or spoke by phone after office hours—no cheating the taxpayer—once a week with ex–Nixon and Connally scheduler David Parker, Bush speechwriter Bob Grady and policy expert Jim Pinkerton, and other writers, consultants, and analysts. Some material was used; most probably not. I am not sure how much it helped. I do think it helped me become a speechwriter to Bush. I sent numerous memoranda to Parker, Grady, Pinkerton, and other aides. Those excerpted here recall the photographs and memories—above all, the general state—of the campaign.
On September 15 I warned that with Bush peaking; “the press may say ‘he has run out of gas.’” To avoid his being tarred for preferring superficiality to substance, I urged that he repeat Nixon’s 1968 use of nighttime network radio: ten speeches, each thirty minutes, addressing issues from drug abuse and health policy to spending and the work ethic, given successive nights October 25–November 3, on CBS’s then 220-outlet network. In addition, Bush could discuss 1990s national defense and traditional values germane to Billy Graham Democrats in the South and Richard Daley Democrats in the North. Speeches might include “American Values” to the Catholic Youth Organization; “Foreign Policy,” Council on Foreign Relations; “The Perils of Appeasement,” Ford Library; and “Our Judeo-Christian Tradition: America’s Timeless Treasure,” University of Notre Dame.
The national media would despise this tactic; Reagan Democrats, love it. The memorandum said, “In summary, we must keep the press from claiming: ‘The Force now lies with Dukakis. The Bush campaign has stalled.’” Bush’s Gallup and Harris lead had stabilized at 5–7 percent. The veep held a large lead in the South—an estimated 150 electoral votes of the 270 needed. My memo urged Bush to appear on The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Cynics had mocked the Yalie’s genuine love of country music, Dukakis needed a mid-South upset somewhere, and the Opry’s WSM radio and TV network reached millions. “To us, the Opry means America,” Bush could say. “There are those—my rival and his friends in the Harvard-Cambridge crowd—who deride its values. I am proud to uphold them. As president, I will act on their behalf.”
Inevitably, attention turned to the first presidential debate, September 25 in Winston-Salem. His campaign still at sea, Dukakis increasingly focused on America’s drug epidemic—and the veep’s inability to stem it as head of the White House anti-drug task force. Drugs were the sole social issue on which Democrats held a polling edge, so I urged that during the debate Bush say that if elected he would name 1984 Summer Olympics head Peter Ueberroth to a new cabinet position of drug czar. Ueberroth had assailed drug traffickers, was famously tough-minded, and boasted the highest favorable rating in the history of California’s Field Poll. The announcement would have left Dukakis groping to respond.
Bush never made the proposal—grandstanding, he doubtless thought. Instead, the first debate left a viewer schizophrenic. Which registered? Dukakis’s “solid content” or “stolid persona . . . not just cool and detached but smug and smirky”? asked Charles Kraut-hammer. Or, in the words of John Buckley, “George Bush’s genuine humanity, goofy as he can sometimes be,” his “Everyman quality that creates empathy”? Dukakis provided what Gerald Ford dubbed “a smart-alecky manner.” Bush could treat English like a high schooler totaling his car. Someone dubbed the debate “the Ice Man” vs. “the Nice Man.” The Nice Man thought he had let his team down: “I didn’t do very well tonight,” Bush said. His aides left the debate smiling. It lasted till Dan Quayle compared himself with another once U.S. senator.
An October 4 memorandum critiqued the next night’s Quayle-Bentsen vice presidential debate. “Quayle must be calm, poised, above all, Presidential,” I wrote. “If so, since expectations are so low, the Hoosier can’t help but score.” By the time Quayle had finished further lowering expectations, Justice Scalia looked like Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Coherent if robotic, Quayle was holding his own in the debate when he did what aides had warned against. “I have as much experience in the Congress,” he began, “as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.”
Bentsen, sixty-seven, adopted the look of a sad father about to ground a hapless son. “Senator,” he fixed Quayle, “I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Quayle looked frozen. “That was really uncalled for, Senator,” he said.
“You’re the one who was making the comparison, Senator,” snapped Bentsen. The debate finally ended with Quayle having increased the number of those who thought him not ready for prime time or the presidency.
On October 12 Bush and Jim Baker went to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to see the home-team Dodgers win the National League pennant, blanking the New York Mets, 6–0. Next night the veep hoped to seal his own deal in the final TV joust—the horse race now competitive (Poppy up four to six points, depending on the poll) but the Electoral College a semi-lock (320 to 410 votes). On a pre-debate stage tour, the Nice Man, seeing Dukakis and aide Bob Squier, comically waved to them at Ailes’s urging. Unnerved, the Ice Man glared. Bush’s campaign, which began with the candidate’s getting Bob Dole to snarl, “Stop lying about my record,” ended with his getting inside his other main rival’s head. Woody Allen said famously that 90 percent of success was just showing up. Mind control had become 90 percent of politics.
More than two decades later, interviewing Dukakis at length for a book, I found him a literate, knowledgeable, and thoroughly engaging person. In 1988 he entered the last debate inexplicably having been unable to use issues like Quayle, AIDS, the homeless, or the national debt doubling since 1981 to $2.6 trillion to dent the GOP. He was still reeling from a recent Republican TV spot which used a Democratic photo op to balloon Bush’s already huge polling lead in national defense. Desperate to show Dukakis hadn’t fallen off a turnip truck, his campaign had put the Korean War veteran in an M1 Abrams tank outside a General Dynamics plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan. The Republican ad used footage showing Dukakis helmeted, standing in one of the tank’s hatches, smiling, and waving to the crowd. “Dukakis in the Tank” became almost as ridiculed as Quayle.
Braving the flu, Dukakis spent much of the last debate’s day in bed. More painful was his divided staff. Smile. Don’t smile. Be strong. Be likeable. Be a next-door neighbor. Don’t be too common. Be yourself. Please don’t. Moderator Bernard Shaw of CNN asked the opening question—whether Dukakis would still oppose the death penalty if his own wife were raped and murdered. The governor might have mentioned that his own brother had been killed by a hit-and-run driver or that his father had been mugged at the age of seventy-seven in his office. Instead, emotion gone, he answered like a student trying to pass the bar, even omitting wife Kitty’s name. By the time Dukakis finished, some in his headquarters on Chauncey Street in Boston were likely planning a post-debate wake in a different kind of bar.
Shaw tried a similar ploy with Bush, asking a hypothetical question about Quayle becoming
president upon his death. Bush interrupted with a mock one-word reply—“Bernie!”—conveying natural reluctance to address his own mortality. Dukakis did not tell one story in ninety minutes, fixed on fact like a CPA on numbers. Bush told many, leaving his first debate’s fondness for numbers back at the hotel. Ahead, he was gracious. Asked if he could find something to praise about Dukakis, Poppy smiled: “Listen, you’re stealing my close. I had something very nice to say in that.” Behind, trying to be warm—“I think I’m a little more loveable these days than I used to be back in my youth”—Dukakis must have found Bush like punching at a pillow. After the first debate, a Time poll showed that voters thought Dukakis had won but that by 44 to 38 percent Bush was more likeable. The last debate turned perception into steel.
Six days before the election, James Baker, said Newsweek, held a senior staff meeting. “We need to be very careful. This [negative] thing has been pushed right to the limit.” He was right, but so was Atwater: you dance with the one who brung you, and us vs. them had brought Bush to the brink. Hating negative campaigning, Bush hated losing even more. In late October Dukakis, rising from the crypt, began using the L for Liberal word, appeared on every TV show but Emeril Lagasse’s, and nearly caught Bush in Bob Teeter’s polls. Was Mr. Smooth’s fall a blip or trend? The former, as it occurred.
Dukakis’s only hope was what aides called an eighteen-state strategy—focus on the states where Bush’s late lead was not “insurmountable,” including California, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Washington. The Democrats had to win each, drawing what Atwater dubbed “an inside straight”—more hope than game plan, foretelling Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama in 2012. Dukakis’s problem was Bush’s more than two hundred electoral vote firewall: the 155-vote Confederacy, farm and Rocky Mountain states, and likely the California to which Grapes of Wrath Okies had trekked, where Nixon and Reagan had evangelized, and of the Orange County birthplace of Goldwaterism. To them Bush would add New Jersey, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Michigan, among others.
On one hand, the Republican “presidential electoral lock”—former LBJ aide Horace Busby coined the term—was so strong at this time that “Mother Goose could have beaten Dukakis,” said a Democratic aide, hyperbolically. On the other, Bush’s image had been so defaced—it was only a year since Newsweek’s “wimp” cover—that the mere possibility of victory amazed. That magazine now hailed “a brilliant achievement—owed . . . in . . . part . . . to his paid handlers, the cosmeticians who had made a mild man look hard and the armorers who had made a genteel man sound like a schoolyard bully.” No “recent President had been, or been presented as, so completely an artifact of packaging and promotion.”
If the artifact was more electable than the man, the man was more presidential than the artifact. We now return to both as the campaign ended and a presidency in waiting began.
In October 1988 Bush had told Ailes, “I want to get back on the issues, and quit talking about him”—Dukakis. That fall Congress debated the federal seven-day waiting period before someone could buy a handgun, a provision backed by many police officers. “I wish the police chiefs and the gun owners could figure out a compromise,” Bush said. “I’m for both sides”—the Second Amendment and the rule of law.
Increasingly, people grew to like a person who viewed politics less cynically than bemusedly. Once Poppy termed Dukakis an excellent debater, adding, “I’m lowering expectations.” He began a speech by asking as an aside, “Is this the time we unleash our one-liners?” Calling from a phone bank to benefit photographers, he told a startled listener, “I’m just doing a little show-biz phoning here.” A friend recalled how Bush walked across Yale’s campus in 1948 to be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, humbly noting that he was not a real intellectual. Perspective made Bush a pragmatist, a problem solver. What mattered was honor, right and wrong, and at every juncture, how things worked.
In 1988 what worked was to make the election a referendum on Dukakis’s liberalism. Bush said that the approach was political, not personal. Lloyd Bentsen attacked him as “all hat and no cattle.” Other insults were meaner. Bush did not respond. Another fellow Texan, House majority leader Jim Wright, was under investigation for financial hanky-panky. Bush barely touched it—too busy ballyhooing that his and not Dukakis’s ideology worked. In the end Poppy won a handsome if not quite Gipper-size landslide: 53.4 to 46.6 percent of the popular vote and 426 to 112 Electoral College vote. Dukakis won Massachusetts, next-door New York, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota’s Middle America outlier—a mere ten states and Washington DC.
I was at the Houstonian Hotel on election night as Bush, having lost in the past and knowing Dukakis’s pain, phoned his rival. He then came down to the ballroom to thank the crowd and, over television, share an outcome that had seemed improbable less than four months before. Few had expected such a pasting of Dukakis even twenty-four hours earlier. Bush won the election, paraphrasing the Beatles, getting by with a lot of help from his friend. For tens of millions, he came as close as they could get to reelecting the Gipper.
More than 85 percent of voters who approved of Reagan, thought he had made them better off, and liked his course supported Bush. According to NBC News, Bush also got 46 percent of the blue-collar vote, equal to Reagan in 1980. He narrowed the gender gap to four points vs. Reagan’s ten in 1984 and took a majority of women in the South. On the other hand, he won men by ten points vs. the Gipper’s twenty-five. Bush won rural America, 58–42 percent, and suburbia, 54–46, 43 percent of the electorate. Dukakis won the cities, 57–43; Catholics, 52–48; and blacks and Hispanics easily. Poppy narrowly won baby boomers, retirees, and white-collar workers, 51–49; professionals and managers, 56–44; and crucially, independents, 58–42. The better educated and more affluent, the more decisively Bush won.
Other polling suggested Bush as safe and experienced—an agent of “cautious change.” In the South, said political scientist Earl Black, Willie Horton and the Pledge made Dukakis “seem someone who isn’t ‘one of us.’” Elsewhere, the federal deficit, drug abuse, and programs for the middle class were more discussed. Bush led among people wanting competence, experience, strength, and trustworthiness in a crisis. Dukakis led among those interested in domestic issues. In the NBC poll, a 50–44 percent majority said yes to the question, “Does the country want change?” Bush won overwhelmingly among the 44 percent wanting no change—and narrowly among an additional 18 percent wanting minor change. Ideologically, he may have been the ideal Republican to follow the Gipper.
Looking back, Bush’s victory was seminal, though it cannot be said that many realized it then. He was the last Republican to win each of ten states today known as “blue,” voting Democratic for president: Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and California—152 electoral votes in 2012. No candidate in either party has equaled his 1988 electoral or percentage vote total. On election night Bush spoke of telling Dukakis that he wanted to be president of all the people, including those who had not supported him.
“When I said I wanted a kinder and gentler nation, I meant it—I mean it. My hand is out to you and I want to be your president too.” A campaign is a disagreement, he continued, “and disagreements divide. But an election is a decision. And decisions clear the way for harmony and peace.” He must have felt as Dukakis, winning the nomination, said: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Not everyone felt Poppy’s bliss. According to Time, “For Bush it was a victory without drum rolls, a majority without a meaningful mandate. The promise of a Bush Administration lies in the hope that the new President will soon forget the manner in which he won.” Conceding Democratic ineptitude, Walter Shapiro put greater onus on “Bush’s angry scripts as he launched fusillades of demeaning attitudes against the hapless Michael Dukakis.”
In such a fever swamp, many expected lib
erals from Bill Moyers to Mario Cuomo to try to discredit Poppy’s legitimacy before Bush took the oath. There would be no honeymoon until Democrats respected—feared—the president-elect’s potency and resolve. In 1949–50, bitter over Thomas Dewey’s 1948 debacle, the congressional GOP placed its feet—“Korea, Communism, and Corruption”—squarely on Harry Truman’s throatlatch. If permitted, Democrats would do the same. Furious at Dukakis, incredulous at blowing a sure thing, they blamed the Duke, voter naiveté, Willie Horton, the Pledge, or the turpitude of the GOP Right—anything but the ideology Bush campaigned against.
In a landmark book, Presidential Power, historian Richard E. Neustadt concluded that the public’s opinion of a chief executive “takes shape for most executives no later than the time they first perceive him as being President (a different thing than seeing him as President).” Bush had vowed to be an activist president, sustain Reagan’s legacy, and make his presidency matter. This demanded he be streetwise and aggressive, acting quickly against forces determined to disembowel him. It also meant he must affirm the three themes of the electorate that had chosen him: economic opportunity, a strong defense, and traditional values.
As we shall see, in 1992 independent candidate H. Ross Perot was backed by nearly one in five Americans—traditional in outlook, raised on American preeminence, and taken from Bush’s base. In election week 1988, not knowing of Perot, I submitted a memo, as many colleagues did, I hoped, to fuel the diversity of opinion every administration needs.
My memo focused on how the new administration might tie Bush and the Silent Majority, eliminate any need for a third party, and secure a second term. Following is a sampling: