Anything for a Vote

by Joseph Cummins

  No matter. Mondale just lacked Reagan’s charisma, and Ferraro’s novelty as a woman candidate for high office wore off very quickly when she stumbled on the issue of releasing her real-estate-developer husband’s tax returns to the press.

  THE WINNER: RONALD REAGAN In a landslide that hearkened back to FDR’s annihilation of Alf Landon in 1936, Reagan took every state except Mondale’s home bastion of Minnesota. The popular vote margin was 54,455,075 to 37,577,185, second only to Richard Nixon’s victory in 1972. In the Electoral College, Reagan triumphed 525 to 13. Ouch.

  GEORGE H.W. BUSH

  VS.

  MICHAEL DUKAKIS

  “I will strip the bark off the little bastard!”

  —Lee Atwater, George Bush’s campaign manager, speaking “off-the-record” to reporters about Michael Dukakis

  On the face of it, 1988 should have been a campaign about issues. After eight years of Reaganomics, the budget deficit had skyrocketed, the trade deficit was on the rise, and homelessness had become a serious problem in America. On the other hand, inflation had peaked and the Cold War was coming to an astonishing end—almost as if the Gipper himself had scripted the movie.

  Plenty of substantial issues for each candidate to sink his teeth into, right? Wrong, punk—and by the way, you sound like you’re soft on crime! As it turns out, 1988 devolved into one of the bitterest, dirtiest, meanest elections ever held in this country—an election that set the tone for much of the vicious mudslinging that characterizes Republican-Democrat contests right up to this day.

  THE CANDIDATES

  REPUBLICAN: GEORGE H.W. BUSH George H. W. Bush had a long resume—rich New England kid, hero of World War II, ambassador to the UN, CIA head, vice president—but Americans didn’t feel like they knew him. This was partly because many couldn’t understand what the man was saying. He not only mumbled, but he was prone to such elegant malapropisms as “I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism and anti-racism” and “I’m going to make sure that everyone who has a job, wants a job.”

  However, he was tall.

  DEMOCRAT: MICHAEL DUKAKIS Michael Dukakis, on the other hand, was short—about five-feet-eight-inches—thus proving the truth of the ancient proverb: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a short dude to enter the White House.” He did have a pretty good record: as governor of Massachusetts he had turned around that state’s faltering economy by bringing in high-tech companies while resurrecting social programs to help the Commonwealth’s neediest citizens. (In this he was aided by his far-more-charismatic lieutenant governor, John Kerry.)

  But in addition to being short, Dukakis was boring—stiff, straight-laced, sincere to a fault—and sported the worst five o’clock shadow since Richard Nixon, the kind that looks like you’ve just smeared charcoal over your face before going out to trick or treat.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  While Bush called for “a kindler, gentler nation” and “a thousand points of light,” his campaign manager Lee Atwater pursued a strategy of “raising the negatives” by churning out a series of attack commercials. The advertisements portrayed Dukakis as being too liberal on drugs and crime and too much of a girly-man on defense.

  Dukakis tried to fight back, but what did he have to propose? Massive cuts in defense spending? Programs for society’s needy and disadvantaged? In a decade that made heroes of Rocky and Rambo, the Dukakis platform just wasn’t sexy enough. And while the Democrats struggled to formulate a counterattack, Atwater unleashed a sleazy ad campaign to end all sleazy ad campaigns.

  It focused on a thirty-nine-year-old black convict named “Willie” Horton. During Dukakis’s tenure as governor, Horton had taken part in a weekend furlough program in Massachusetts. Instead of returning to prison, however, Horton fled to Maryland, where he raped a white woman and stabbed her white fiancé. The colors matter here because the Republicans proceeded to make the most racist series of attacks in modern American electioneering history.

  To begin with, Republicans renamed Horton. His real name was William. He was known to his mother, family, friends, enemies, cops, and parole officers as William. Newspaper accounts of his crimes referred to him as William. And yet the Republican attack ads called him “Willie.”

  What kind of attack ads? A few samples:

  • “Get Out of Jail Free Card”: Modeled after the Monopoly card and distributed to 400,000 Texas voters, this tiny mailbox stuffer read: “Michael Dukakis is the killer’s best friend and the decent honest citizen’s worst enemy.”

  • “Pro-Family Letter”: This was the Maryland Republican party fund-raising letter that featured photographs of Willie Horton and Michael Dukakis over the headline: “Is This Your Pro-Family Team for 1988?”

  • “Weekend Passes”: A sixty-second television spot with side-by-side pictures of Horton and Dukakis, looking remarkably alike—and no wonder, since the ad makers used a dark photograph of a weary and unshaven Dukakis with his hair disheveled.

  • “Revolving Door”: Perhaps most famous of all, this stark black and white TV spot showed convicts marching through a turnstile into jail and immediately back out again. No matter that the “convicts” were out-of-work Republicans instructed not to shave for the day. The point had been made.

  THE WINNER: GEORGE BUSH

  With the lowest voter turnout since 1924, Bush took the popular vote 48,886,097 to 41,809,074 and won by a landslide in the Electoral College, 426 votes to 112.

  Oops, that’s actually 111. One Democratic elector from West Virginia was so disgusted with Dukakis that he cast his vote for vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen.

  BUT WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU, TOO? Many Democrats tried to suggest that Bush had indulged in extramarital affairs and pursued shady oil connections, but these charges had no real impact on the campaign. In the end, the most scandalous charge uttered against George Bush came from George Bush himself, speaking in Detroit just weeks before the election: “I have worked alongside [President Reagan] and I am proud to be his partner. We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex … I mean, setbacks!”

  PRESIDENT QUAYLE Building on fears that vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle was not qualified to be president, Democrats created a television ad that began with grainy footage of vice presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as president. The voiceover intoned: “One out of five American vice presidents has to rise to the duties of commander-in-chief. After five months of reflection, Bush’s choice: J. Danforth Quayle. Hopefully, we’ll never know how great a lapse of judgment that really was.” The soundtrack was an ominously thumping heartbeat.

  REALLY TANKING Sometimes even the best attempts at publicity can backfire—like the time Michael Dukakis, in an attempt to prove that he was no softie on defense, visited a General Dynamics plant in Michigan for a photo op with a tank. (Memo to future candidates: when poking your head out of the hatch of an M1 tank, do not grin and wave, do not wear a tie as well as a silly helmet, and do not, whatever you do, bear a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman.) The photo op was such a disaster, Republicans recycled the footage for an attack ad. “Tank” showed Dukakis riding around and around in circles as a narrator intoned, with more than a touch of incredulity: “Now he wants to be our commander-in-chief? America can’t afford the risk.”

  MOST CONCERNED LETTER FROM A SERIAL KILLER After the Bush campaign claimed in an ad that Chicago mass murderer John Wayne Gacy would be released on furlough if Dukakis were elected, Gacy dispatched an angry missive from prison: “It is an insult to the voting public that [Republicans are] exploiting the name of John Wayne Gacy to scare people into voting for George Bush.”

  Sometimes candidates do the worst damage to themselves. This Michael Dukakis photo op tanked big time.

  WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON

  VS.

  GEORGE H.W. BUSH

  “All I’ve been asked about by the press are a woman I didn’t sleep with and a draft I didn’t dodge.”

>   —Bill Clinton

  Just after the successful completion of his one-hundred-hour Gulf War in the fall of 1990, George Bush’s approval ratings reached an astonishing 90 percent; he seemed unbeatable. After twelve years of prosperous Republican rule, coupled with extremely weak Democratic presidential candidates, some pundits began to wonder whether the Democratic Party was heading toward political extinction, just as the Whigs or the Federalists.

  But as the Bush administration progressed, the approval rating slowly started to fall. War may have made Bush a hero, but he never earned the fanatically loyal following of a Ronald Reagan. He broke his famous 1988 pledge of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” which left him open to Democratic attack. Reagan’s legacy of a staggering $4 trillion national debt (up $3 trillion since 1980) didn’t help much, either. There may have been an explosion of wealth in the top 1 percent of the American population, but one in ten Americans was living on food stamps, and one in eight lived below the poverty level.

  The relatively obscure field of Democratic candidates included Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas. But Bush had more than Democrats to worry about. Conservative Christian columnist and former Nixon speech writer Pat Buchanan ran well in the primaries, showing that the religious right would not be denied its share of the action. And the fourteenth wealthiest person in the United States, billionaire Texan H. Ross Perot, decided to hell with federal matching funds, he’d pay for his own campaign—and mounted the most successful third-party challenge since Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party in 1912.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT: WILLIAM “BILL” CLINTON If there could be such a thing as a “log cabin” presidential candidate in the late twentieth century, that candidate was William Jefferson Clinton. He was born poor in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946. His father had died in a car accident when he was only three months old, and his stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. Clinton triumphed over all these circumstances to become a Rhodes scholar, attend Yale Law School and, in 1978, become the governor of Arkansas at thirty-two years old.

  Married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton was extraordinarily charismatic—six-foot-two, handsome, empathetic (“I feel your pain”), and a brilliant “policy wonk” with an impressive memory for details. However, according to Republicans, there was the little problem of his being “a pot-smoking, philandering, draft dodger.”

  Clinton’s running mate was another southerner, Tennessee Senator Al Gore.

  REPUBLICAN: GEORGE H. W. BUSH By the time the election heated up in the summer of 1992, Bush’s approval ratings had dropped to roughly 40 percent. Twenty-one years older than his Democratic opponent, he tried to run on his success in foreign affairs while glossing over his tax increase and the country’s huge deficit, but he lacked both charisma and empathy. While Clinton “felt” the country’s pain, Bush said, in his weird verbal shorthand, “Message: I care.” Focus groups commissioned by the Republican National Committee found that his wife, Barbara, now had higher approval ratings than the president—and his dog, Millie, wasn’t far behind.

  Even though Bush was told that dumping his hapless vice president, J. Danforth Quayle, would generate a net gain of as much as six points in the approval ratings, Bush wouldn’t give up the guy.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  Gossip had swirled around Clinton’s womanizing for years, and it provided plenty of fodder for the campaign. Republican sleaze-meisters whispered that Clinton had had a child with a black woman, and the rumors only got worse from there. He was a rapist. He was a sexual predator. He felt up a woman in the bathroom at his own wedding. And on and on.

  The only sexual misconduct charge that stuck with Clinton in 1992 was an affair he supposedly had with nightclub chanteuse and former Arkansas state employee Gennifer Flowers (of whom he reportedly said, “She could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose”). Flowers revealed all in the Star tabloid in the winter of 1992. She claimed that their sexual relationship went back twelve years; when Clinton denied this, Flowers held a press conference and played phone conversations she had taped with Clinton, in which they refer to each other quite cozily as “honey.” In New Hampshire, the Arkansas governor was now met at every campaign stop by what his staff called “the clusterfuck”—a semicircle of reporters with microphones shouting leading questions.

  Clinton worked quickly to control the damage. He appeared on the television news show 60 Minutes with Hillary, admitted only that he caused “pain in my marriage,” and managed to escape unscathed—as he was to do on the issues of smoking marijuana (incredibly, he said he “didn’t inhale”) and draft-dodging back in the sixties (“dodge” was perhaps too strong a word, but he had avoided military service until he lucked into a high draft lottery number). No wonder Republicans dubbed him “Slick Willie.” They hated him passionately and almost hysterically, the same way Democrats loathed Richard Nixon. One wealthy Republican businessman spent $40,000 at the beginning of the campaign digging for dirt that would torpedo Clinton. It did little good.

  Bush had another problem, and that was the irrepressible Ross Perot. The historian Richard Hofstadter has written that American third parties are “like bees—once they have stung, they die.” In 1992, Ross Perot put a pretty good sting on George Bush.

  Perot was quite a character. Born in 1930, the son of a Texarkana, Texas, cotton picker, he founded a data retrieval firm called EDS in 1962 and turned it into a billion-dollar company. Ignoring all traditional avenues of running for president, Perot announced his candidacy on the “Larry King Live” show. He called his campaign organization United We Stand America and crusaded mainly against national debt. With his squeaky drawl, jug-handle ears, and love of pie charts, he was a little like everyone’s old high-school math teacher. In some polls he began to lead both Clinton and Bush.

  But Perot’s campaign began to falter after he made an address to the NAACP in which he referred to them as “you people” and then falsely denied he knew about the case of an Orthodox Jew who had been fired from EDS for having a beard. In July, he abruptly withdrew from the race but returned in September alleging that Republican dirty tricksters had wiretapped his office and threatened to publish nude pictures of his daughter before her wedding. “There has been a ninety-day effort to redefine my personality by a group called opposition research,” Perot said. “They’re generally known as the dirty tricks crowd.”

  After Labor Day, Clinton jumped out to a thirteen-point lead in the polls. Desperate Republican strategists even sought advice from two aides to Great Britain Prime Minister John Major, who had won despite a weak economy and poor personal ratings. (Their only suggestion was to plaster pictures of Gennifer Flowers on huge billboards all over the country above the words, “AND NOW HE WANTS TO SCREW THE COUNTRY, TOO.”)

  Bush tried, in his own way, to attack Clinton and the Democrats. They were “cultural elitists” and “tree huggers” and atheists (they “don’t have the three letters G-O-D in their party platform”). With high absurdity, he claimed that if Harry Truman were alive, he would vote Republican, something Truman’s daughter Margaret vehemently denied. (Republicans since Ronald Reagan had adopted Truman as a plain-spoken paragon of the presidency, conveniently forgetting how viciously they had attacked him in the 1950s.)

  Bush also proclaimed that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than those two bozos,” referring to Clinton and Gore. But it was “THE ECONOMY, STUPID”—as the famous sign plastered in the Clinton-Gore “War Room” read—that the American people were really interested in.

  THE WINNER: WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON

  Election Day saw the largest voter turnout since 1960, with Clinton winning 44,908,254 votes to Bush’s 39,102,343. Perot, running as an independent, had pulled in nineteen million votes, or almost 19 percent of the total vote—the most of any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. He didn’t pull in any electoral votes but noneth
eless managed the neat trick of hurting Bush and helping elect Clinton—albeit with the lowest percentage of popular vote (43 percent) since Woodrow Wilson beat Taft and Roosevelt (with 41 percent) in 1912. Who knows what would have happened had Perot not dropped out of the race in midsummer?

  The forty-six-year-old Clinton, the youngest president since JFK (his boyhood hero), was ecstatic. He couldn’t have foreseen that his name would soon become synonymous with JFK for screwing in the White House.

  OPPO “Oppo”—short for opposition research—had become a separately funded part of the Republican Party by the election of 1992. The program was started by Lee Atwater, briefly chairman of the Republican National Committee, before his death in March of 1991. The opposition resources center, located at the RNC headquarters in Washington, boasted a large room with state-of-the-art data-retrieval computers, a staff of some sixty people, and its own separate budget of six million dollars. Operatives had developed huge files on the likes of Mario Cuomo, when it was assumed he would be Democratic candidate. They also investigated Pat Buchanan, fire-breathing conservative Republican, although it was not considered quite kosher to snoop around in the private lives of fellow Republicans.

  Then, of course, there was Bill Clinton.

  Oppo men went all over Little Rock, Arkansas, searching for dirt on Slick Willie. They brought twenty years’ worth of microfiche on Clinton from Arkansas newspapers and filled thirty file drawers with speculation on his sex life. The problem was that, after the primaries, George Bush wouldn’t let them use the sexual gossip they had gathered—some felt he was taking the high road, others wondered if the president felt vulnerable to rumors of his own alleged adultery.