by Keith Boykin
By the time he stood at the podium of the 1988 Republican National Convention in the New Orleans Superdome, Bush sounded almost nothing like the 1964 version of himself who had campaigned against the civil rights bill. “I’ll try to be fair to the other side,” he said. He promised to help “urban children” who live and play amidst “shattered glass and shattered lives” and assured Americans that he would be guided by the tradition that “we must be good to one another.” Bush spoke of an America with a “brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” And, coming after the Reagan administration had been caught trading arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair, his speech tried to distance the candidate from scandal by reminding his convention audience that night that he still believed that “public service is honorable” and that it broke his heart whenever there was a breach of the public trust. He even acknowledged that America had lived through “a sin called slavery” and cautioned against materialism and blind ambition. “Prosperity has a purpose,” he declared. “Prosperity with a purpose means taking your idealism and making it concrete by certain acts of goodness.” In words and phrases that seemed uncommon for a Republican in the Reagan era, Bush spoke in broad, poetic language that many Democrats could easily embrace, as well. “I want a kinder and gentler nation,” he told the convention.
Yet sandwiched between various points of light in Bush’s lofty rhetoric was the familiar right-wing agenda of the modern Republican Party—fear and loathing of a changing America. Bush contrasted his American family values as a transplanted Texan against what he framed as the unorthodox values of his Greek American opponent from Massachusetts. The Republicans represented “old fashioned common sense” and “tradition,” Bush said repeatedly in his speech. On the other hand, “the liberal Democrats”—another phrase he used repeatedly—would undermine the existing social order. And Bush—who was born in Massachusetts, raised in Connecticut, and summered in Maine—would spend much of the campaign denouncing Dukakis as being a “Massachusetts liberal” whose Northern values didn’t match those of the rest of America. He rattled off a list of examples in his speech to prove his point.
“Should public school teachers be required to lead our children in the pledge of allegiance? My opponent says no—but I say yes,” Bush said. This was an attack on Dukakis for vetoing an unconstitutional 1977 bill that would have required teachers to lead schoolchildren in reciting the pledge of allegiance.
“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.” This was a response to Dukakis’s well-publicized opposition to capital punishment, a principled opinion that did not poll well but also had little practical impact in a federal government that in 1988 had not executed anyone in a quarter of a century.
“Should our children have the right to say a voluntary prayer, or even observe a moment of silence in the schools? My opponent says no—but I say yes.” This was an absurd distortion of Dukakis’s views. No prominent Democratic elected official had ever advocated the abolition of the first amendment right to prayer. Any student in America’s public schools has the right to pray voluntarily. The question was always whether those public schools and their employees of various faiths should be required to lead such prayers and whether students should be coerced into participating in them.
Bush continued, sometimes fairly and sometimes otherwise, in contrasting his views with his opponent on gun control, abortion, and taxes. That’s when he made an infamous promise. “My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes,” he said. “But I will. And 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.’” It was the sound bite of the evening, receiving thunderous applause and replayed on television news broadcasts for days. Then, just two years later, Bush would break his promise and sign a bill raising taxes. He would eventually pay a steep price for his reversal, but in the meantime, it bolstered his argument that his opponent was out of step with America—and under the surface, many of us knew his argument was rooted in race.
For most voters, school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, the death penalty, gun control, and taxes did not appear to be racial issues. Tax cuts and “values” issues had become standard Republican talking points in the 1980s. But the debate over “traditional values” had itself been racialized in a country where Black Americans and people of color were often depicted as un-American for challenging the existing order. The absence of school prayer, for example, posed no real threat to white America, but it represented something that did. It represented a withering away of old traditions that had long served the dominant class. It represented the disappearance of an established but antiquated social order, where people knew their place. School prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and standing for the national anthem had all become symbols of a deeper struggle, serving as battle flags to be carried into a theater of war, just as the “Make America Great Again” slogan would come to symbolize that struggle decades later. The details of the issues mattered less than the lines of demarcation they represented. It was our team versus the other team, us versus them, the past versus the future.
By 1988, Bush was able to reap the political benefits of poisonous seeds that had been sown decades earlier by his own party. One had been planted firmly by Richard Nixon. When Nixon ran for reelection in 1972, he resurrected his “law and order” theme to win by the largest electoral vote margin of any president since Franklin Roosevelt in his first election. Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts. At the same time, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Francis Sargent, was moving in what appeared to be a different direction from Nixon and his party. In 1972, Sargent signed into law a weekend furlough program allowing inmates a brief and temporary respite from prison for good behavior and time served. Such programs were adopted in other states as well, and they became particularly popular during holiday seasons. By Christmas of 1974, New Jersey’s furlough program reported a success rate of nearly 99 percent, according to the Associated Press (AP). “The state feels that the furloughs reduce tensions in the prisons by giving inmates hope for freedom,” AP reported.
While the furlough programs grew, Nixon’s fortunes diminished. In August 1974, the embattled president boarded Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House and waved his final farewell to his staff. But less than three months later, the failed leader became “popular” again, the Dallas Morning News reported, as trick or treaters dressed up in Nixon masks. A few days before Halloween, a tragic incident had taken place that would reverberate for years. A seventeen-year-old gas station attendant was robbed and stabbed to death in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The suspects were convicted and sentenced to prison. No one had any idea at the time that the fate of one of those suspects would determine who would become the president of the United States fourteen years later.
William Robert Horton, one of the men convicted in the 1974 gas station murder, was released from the Northeast Correctional Center in a rural stretch of Concord, Massachusetts, on a weekend furlough on June 6, 1986. It was his tenth furlough since being incarcerated. He had dutifully returned to prison nine times before. But this time, Horton never returned. Instead, he remained at large for ten months, finally surfacing more than four hundred miles away in Maryland on April 3, 1987, when he reportedly terrorized a couple, assaulting a man in his home and then raping the man’s fiancée when she returned home hours later. The couple managed to escape and called the police. Horton fled, but he was caught, arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned in Maryland.
Senator Al Gore of Tennessee was one of the first national political figures to raise concerns about the case during the 1988 Democratic presidential primary campaign. The critique barely registered, and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis went on to beat Gore and his other Democratic opponents
on his way to his party’s presidential nomination. Republicans were not as forgiving. They took the Horton story, slapped it into a campaign commercial, and attacked Dukakis relentlessly. In the skilled hands of the Republican attack machine, William Robert Horton suddenly became “Willie Horton,” and the grainy mug shot image of the menacing Black man with a beard was indelibly attached to the Democratic candidate.
“The fact is, my name is not ‘Willie,’” Horton told The Nation in 1993. He argued that the fictitious name was part of “the myth of the case” that “was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, Black—‘Willie.’” As a Black man convicted of raping a white woman, Horton admitted he provided “the perfect scapegoat” for the Bush campaign. Along with a Bush campaign television ad that compared the Massachusetts furlough program to a “revolving door prison policy,” the message of fear was clearly communicated. If you vote for Dukakis, a scary Black man will come to your home, attack you, and rape your partner.
The dog whistle political messages of the Republican Party in the post–civil rights era were inaudible only to those who chose to pretend they did not exist. In 1972, the Nixon campaign ran a television ad depicting a white construction worker in a hard hat taking a lunch break while perched on an elevated steel beam. The offscreen announcer critiques a litany of Democrat George McGovern’s welfare proposals as the worker watches the crowd below. “And who’s going to pay for this?” the announcer asks. “Well, if you’re not the one out of two people on welfare, you do.”
By 1990, in the middle of the Bush administration, North Carolina’s notorious Republican senator Jesse Helms used a pair of white hands in a television ad to convince voters that his Black Democratic opponent, Harvey Gantt, would give jobs to unqualified Blacks instead of hiring qualified whites. “You needed that job,” the announcer says. “And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” As the announcer concludes his message, the white hands are shown crumpling up the rejection letter. It was the ultimate culmination of the reassignment of victimhood, allowing Republican politicians to appeal directly to white resentment by embracing a duplicitous notion of racial neutrality. But no one needed a political science degree to understand the message. George Bush’s “kinder, gentler” Republican Party left plenty of room for family-friendly racism.
By the summer of 1990, the country was suffering through a recession that would eventually cost Bush his own job. American jobs were moving overseas. Labor unions were being attacked and weakened. Long-promised corporate pensions began to evaporate. And through it all, the Reagan-Bush economic policies exacerbated the nation’s rising income inequality, transferring billions of dollars of wealth from government programs for the poor and the middle class to programs giving tax cuts for the wealthy. The social contract that had governed the nation for decades after World War II was quickly being dismantled. Working-class Americans of all races felt the suffering, but it was easier for demagogic politicians to demonize working-class Black and brown Americans than to hold wealthy white America and corporate America responsible. It was a divide-and-conquer strategy as old as time. Yet Black Americans were suffering even more. As unemployment spiked, unemployment among Blacks rose even more sharply than in the white community. By June 1992, five months before the presidential election, the white unemployment rate topped out at 6.9 percent. That same month, the Black unemployment rate reached 14.6 percent.
During Bush’s term in office, the world changed rapidly in both domestic and international affairs, but many of these dramatic changes made existing powers uncomfortable. In China, courageous young protesters defied their government in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In Germany, the Berlin Wall fell and reunited East and West for the first time in decades. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was released from prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration. And in Russia, the Soviet flag was finally lowered from the Kremlin in Moscow. Meanwhile, back at home, Black Americans celebrated as David Dinkins was elected the first African American mayor of New York City and Virginia elected Doug Wilder the first Black governor of the state that had once been the capital of the Confederacy. It was not quite the “new world order” that Bush spoke of in his address to a Joint Session of Congress on September 11, 1990, but for a brief moment in time, it felt like anything was possible.
Each time someone strikes out against injustice, they send forth “a tiny ripple of hope,” Robert F. Kennedy once told a college audience in apartheid South Africa. As those ripples cross each other from a million different centers of energy, they build a current, “which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance,” he said. That’s what it felt like in the early years of the Bush administration. All across the planet, the spirit of change soared in the air.
It started in China, where the world watched in inspired amazement as a brave man, in a solitary act of civil disobedience, stopped an entire column of Chinese tanks. I wondered if I would ever have the courage to do the same in those circumstances. I was riveted by the images of young people standing, sitting, and partying on top of the legendary Berlin Wall while celebrating their freedom. And I wept as the beaming South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela raised his fist in the sky as he confidently walked out of prison. It felt like time was finally on the side of righteousness, and I allowed myself to believe that the world was evolving. If people in other countries are tearing down the walls that divided them, then surely change will soon come to America, I thought. But in between the uprising in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, politics were carrying on as usual back in Washington. And as I began my first semester in law school, the president had found a new racist dog whistle to blow.
When George Bush sat at his desk in 1989 and delivered his first nationally televised address from the Oval Office to discuss what he called “the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today,” he not only relaunched Nixon and Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” he also launched yet another battle in the ongoing racial resentment wars. Holding a clear, sealed plastic bag in his left hand, Bush announced: “This is crack cocaine, seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House.” It was a memorable and dramatic moment, meant to illustrate the pervasiveness of narcotics in American life. But the White House story began to unravel a few weeks later, when the Washington Post reported that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents actually had to lure the suspect to Lafayette Park to make the undercover crack buy. So unusual was the drug sale in the park that the teenage suspect seemed not to know where to go to meet the DEA agent posing as a buyer. “Where the fuck is the White House?” he asked the undercover agent. A special agent in charge of DEA’s Washington field office admitted it wasn’t easy to get the teen to come to the park. “We had to manipulate him to get him down there,” the agent said. And the commander of criminal investigations for the US Park Police, which patrols the park, told the Post that there was no record of any crack dealing in the park ever before. “We don’t consider that a problem area,” he said. “There’s too much activity going on there for drug dealers.… There’s always a uniformed police presence there.”
The Black high school senior entrapped by the White House plot, Keith Jackson, was arrested and put on trial in federal court. The jury could not reach a verdict. A microphone that was supposed to record the drug transaction did not work, and a cameraman who was supposed to videotape it failed to do so. “This is like a Keystone Kops thing,” the presiding judge said in a reference to the incompetent police featured in silent film comedies. After a mistrial in December 1989, the student was retried in January 1990. In the second trial, once again the jury could not reach a verdict on the botched sting operation in Lafayette Park, but they did convict him of unrelated charges to the actual drug bust. As a result of the federal conviction, this eighteen-year-old with no prior criminal record, lured to the White House by the Bush administration, w
as sentenced to ten years in prison. Even the judge in the case felt the sentence was too harsh, according to the Washington Post, but he told Jackson, “I’ve got to follow the law.” That law was a 1988 measure signed by President Reagan requiring mandatory minimum sentences, and as a result of it, a young Black male who had been exploited by the Bush White House as a political prop, would be sent to jail for a decade. It was a sign of things to come, as the racial grievance strategies and mass-incarceration policies of the seventies and eighties would now place a target on the heads of Black and brown bodies.
The success of Kevin Phillips’s Southern strategy and Lee Atwater’s scorched earth tactics taught both major political parties unfortunate lessons that would last for decades. Republicans learned there was a very small political price to be paid, and enormous political benefit, for increasingly blatant racial division. As these tactics proved more successful, the politics of racial resentment became more blatant. Until Donald Trump, no mainstream modern politician better expressed the cause of white racial resentment than Pat Buchanan. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Buchanan announced at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the cold war itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
Buchanan challenged Bush for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination and made enough of an impact to win a speaking role at the convention. There he argued that the country needed a leader who would be a “champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded.” He complained that an openly gay man—whom he called “a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement”—had the audacity to speak in public at the Democratic National Convention, and he accused Hillary Clinton of promoting an agenda of “radical feminism.” In Buchanan’s eyes, the Clintons, if elected to office, would usher in a world of “abortion on demand,” “homosexual rights,” and “women in combat units.” “That’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs,” Buchanan said. “It is not the kind of change America wants,” he continued. “And,” he added, “it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”