Fault Lines

by Kevin M. Kruse

  Between the fight over AIDS, the ongoing struggle over the Supreme Court, and the closing of the Cold War, the Reagan era ended on a mixed note. Working with congressional Republicans, the president had been able to push public debate to the right and had made some important decisions that severely limited the ability of government to grow. His national security policy initially reenergized a defense establishment that had languished and, in an unexpected turn, his presidency ended with a major arms agreement with the Soviets. But conservatives did not get everything on their agenda. Politically, the country remained divided, and on social issues the Right often found itself losing out.

  Equally important, liberalism did not go away. Indeed, Reagan’s presidency served to illustrate the durability of specific programs like Social Security and general support for the welfare state. While Americans welcomed tax cuts, they also clearly expected the federal government to maintain its presence in their lives, on issues ranging from classic concerns like the economy to newer crises such as AIDS. In the same vein, even though Americans had rallied to the Republicans’ message of patriotism and supported increased spending on national defense, they nevertheless resisted more aggressive calls to militarism.

  In the end, both sides—Right and Left—emerged from the Reagan years with a renewed sense of purpose. Conservatives now demanded more than ever before, refusing to accept another leader who would not press their agenda fully. Liberals, meanwhile, had been buoyed by their success in limiting the Reagan Revolution and remained determined to continue the fight.

  CHAPTER 9

  New World Orders

  IN THE BEGINNING, THE REAGAN ERA HAD BEEN MARKED by confident certainties—a politics painted with “bold colors,” as the self-assured president liked to say, rather than “pale pastels”—but the years following his administration seemed much less so. The Reagan Revolution, as his supporters called it, did not provide America with the kind of long-term stability that the nation had experienced after World War II and during the Cold War. It had been much more fragile from the start, and that fundamental fragility quickly became evident as the nation wrestled with the challenges of the new decade.

  For starters, the race to replace Reagan in the White House emerged as one of the ugliest presidential campaigns in American political history. In sharp contrast to the sunny optimism of the two Reagan campaigns, the race run by his vice president, George H. W. Bush, was dominated by dark themes that took negative campaigning to new lows. The campaign not only deepened the already severe fault lines between the two parties, but also alienated much of the electorate, who increasingly felt the political system no longer spoke to them.

  Meanwhile, international affairs were thrown into a similar state of confusion soon after with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. For all the tensions that it had inspired at home, the long Cold War had managed to bring Americans together in a state of common defense against a common enemy. With its end, Americans not only searched for a new sense of meaning in the world at large but also succumbed to greater internal bickering at home. As America moved into the 1990s, political systems and assumptions that had seemed so central just a decade before once again came crashing down.

  The 1988 Campaign

  Vice President George H. W. Bush entered the 1988 campaign with an impeccable record as an establishment Republican. A veteran of World War II and the son of a former senator, he won a House seat in the 1960s and then held prominent roles in the 1970s as ambassador to the United Nations, head of the Republican National Committee, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, before serving two terms as Reagan’s loyal vice president. He was well respected in both parties and known as someone who valued civility in politics. Bush could be tough when necessary, but his approach had generally avoided the kind of sharp-elbowed politics that so many of Reagan’s inner circle seemed to love.

  Despite his distinguished record and conservative agenda, Bush found it difficult to win over the Republican faithful. In the Iowa caucuses, he finished an embarrassing third, behind Kansas senator Bob Dole and, more surprising, televangelist and political newcomer Pat Robertson. The preacher’s stunning victory in the first contest of the campaign indicated that the Religious Right had transformed the party even more than experts thought. “Conservatives with whom I have spoken are filled with foreboding about the result,” reported Tom Bethell of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not that they dislike former television evangelist Pat Robertson, or that they will not vote for him. But they can foresee the no-holds-barred, Bork-style onslaught that his candidacy will no doubt soon arouse.” 1

  Fears that the culture wars would consume the Republican primaries were short-lived, however. The GOP establishment had shown resilience throughout the previous decade, pushing back against social conservatives when necessary, and they did so again. With superior funding and a stronger organization, Vice President Bush edged out his rivals in the New Hampshire primary a week later and had the nomination effectively in hand by the end of March. Along the way, Bush proved that he could be much tougher than most pundits had assumed and play dirty when needed. His rival Bob Dole became so frustrated about the Bush campaign’s many misrepresentations that, in a joint interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, Dole snapped at the vice president: “Stop lying about my record!” 2

  At the Republican National Convention that summer, Bush sought to find a balance between his personal centrism and the party’s conservatism, which had steadily increased under Reagan’s leadership. Though he was often mocked as an inarticulate speaker—Texas’s Democratic governor Ann Richards liked to joke that Bush had been “born with a silver foot in his mouth”—the vice president delivered an impressive acceptance speech in which he promised to smooth the rougher edges off the Reagan Revolution and transform America into a “kinder and gentler nation.” Despite such comments, Bush worked to assure social conservatives that he would not cede any ground in the culture wars. Most significantly, he selected a favorite of the Religious Right, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, to be his running mate. “He gives us what we’re looking for,” conservative activist Paul Weyrich noted. “We’ll definitely have a place at the table.” 3 During his acceptance speech, drafted by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Bush made it clear that he understood the key economic principles of the so-called Reagan Revolution. He brought the delegates to their feet when he assured everyone in the convention hall: “Read my lips, no new taxes!” If anyone thought that Bush was suffering from what Newsweek had once called the “Wimp Factor,” the speech sent a signal that he could take a stand.

  The Democrats, in sharp contrast, sought to downplay the polarizing issues of the culture wars at all costs. Notably, their presidential nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, had positioned himself as part of a generation of new Democrats who were not tied to the orthodoxies of the 1960s and could appeal to independents and moderates. In his three terms as governor, Dukakis had earned a reputation as an intelligent and efficient administrator, a “technocrat” who could solve problems coolly and calmly. Behind the scenes, Dukakis was stirred by partisan emotions, confiding to friends that Republican actions during the Iran-Contra scandal had inspired his entry into the race. But publicly, he gave no sign of such passions. Indeed, if the nation was becoming more polarized, Dukakis made it clear he wanted nothing to do with it. “This election is not about ideology,” he insisted in his acceptance speech; “it is about competence.” As veteran political reporter Bill Schneider noted, “Democrats are following a calculated strategy: ‘Sell management. Sell competence. But for God’s sake, don’t try to sell liberalism.’ ” The appeal worked, with voters giving Dukakis an impressive 17-point lead over Bush after the Democratic National Convention. “No major party nominee with that kind of a July Gallup poll margin has ever been defeated in November,” former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips noted, “least of all by a rival saddled with Mr. Bush’s record-breaking negative perceptions.” 4

 
; To rescue his campaign, Bush fully embraced the culture wars. Though he had defeated the social conservative candidacy of rival Pat Robertson, he learned from the experience that he could not afford to isolate himself from such activists. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, he hired some of the most aggressive consultants in the business. His chief strategist Lee Atwater had made his name in the 1980s as a practitioner of a no-holds-barred style of politics. (His boss in the 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign, Ed Rollins, characterized Atwater as a “ruthless” attacker who “just had to drive in one more stake” even after his political target was already dead.) Searching for wedge issues that would revive the Republican campaign, Atwater held a series of focus groups at a shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey. Swing voters who were considering Dukakis were told that: (1) as governor, he had vetoed a bill requiring teachers to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance; (2) he had called himself a “card-carrying member of the ACLU”; (3) he opposed the death penalty; and (4) through a furlough program for Massachusetts prisoners, a convict named Willie Horton, sentenced to life without parole, had raped and stabbed a Maryland woman. After hearing these things, half of these voters said they had changed their minds about Dukakis and wouldn’t vote for him. Atwater had found the issues that would dominate the 1988 presidential election. There would be a “Bork-style onslaught” in the campaign after all, but from the right, rather than the left, painting the centrist Dukakis as a far-left radical who didn’t believe in traditional American values.5 Even Reagan joined in the game. When reporters asked the president whether candidates like Dukakis should be required to reveal their medical records to the public, Reagan stoked rumors about Dukakis’s mental health, noting: “Look, I’m not going to pick on an invalid.” 6

  The strategy Atwater crafted for the Bush campaign pushed the practices of negative campaigning to new depths. The overall plan for Dukakis, Atwater later noted, was a brutal assault meant to “strip the bark off the little bastard.” The comment didn’t sound like one from a typical political consultant, but Atwater was anything but that. Famously, he had long been a fan of professional wrestling, which he insisted was the only “honest sport” there was, because everyone involved—the producers, the performers, the announcers, and the audience—all knew it was entirely scripted and thoroughly fake. The world of politics, in contrast, may have seemed wholesome on the surface but, behind the scenes, was full of cheaters. “He was basically saying that politics is phony, the government is phony, that a lot of personal life is phony,” reporter Howard Fineman recalled. “And ‘phony’ was a big word with him.” While Atwater respected wrestling for its honest dishonesties, he also learned a great deal about stagecraft and storytelling from the sport. As his biographer later noted, wrestling shows were “where he learned the importance of bombast, and how to immobilize a larger opponent.” In the 1988 campaign, he took those lessons to heart, presenting his candidate to voters as the crusading hero and his opponent as the untrustworthy heel.7

  The most infamous ads of the cycle focused on Willie Horton and the furlough program in Massachusetts, an issue Senator Al Gore Jr. had first raised in the Democratic primaries. Even though Dukakis had nothing to do with the case itself and the program had been launched by his Republican predecessor, the campaign strategist sought to link the candidate to the convict’s crimes. “By the time we’re finished,” Atwater bragged to his associates, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.” One ad depicted criminals moving through a revolving door at a Massachusetts prison, while another lingered on a close-up photo of Horton, an African American man, in unsubtle racist appeals. The media picked up on the Republican themes, most famously during a presidential debate when CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis if he would still not favor the death penalty if his own wife were “raped and murdered.” In the debate, as on the campaign trail, Dukakis seemed unwilling or unable to respond to the attacks. “No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.” The once-competent technocrat now seemed like an unfeeling robot, and his commanding lead in the polls vanished.8

  As the campaign turned increasingly negative, reporters and voters recoiled with disgust. The presidential contest, a Washington Post writer noted, had become “one of those morning dreams where it’s not quite a nightmare, but things just keep repeating and repeating . . . Willie Horton . . . silver foot in his mouth . . . a thousand points of light.” Equally uninspired, only 50.1 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, the lowest level of voter participation since 1924. “We had abysmal, vacuous elections,” noted the head of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, “and the people responded accordingly.” For the Bush campaign, however, lower turnout was a boon. As independents dropped out of the race, partisans moved to the forefront, giving the more unified Republicans an advantage. And so, George H. W. Bush won the presidency with 53 percent of the popular vote to his opponent’s 46 percent, with a more commanding 426–111 edge in the Electoral College.9

  Operation Desert Storm

  The culture war concerns that had dominated the 1988 presidential race largely faded from view in the first years of the Bush presidency, as foreign policy moved to the forefront. The new president’s own preferences for international affairs dovetailed with dramatic developments overseas to force the national agenda in a different direction. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Bush administration was busy adjusting the United States to its new role as the world’s lone superpower and helping create new relationships across the globe. The president was extraordinarily cautious as these events unfolded, refraining from using the kind of bombastic or boastful rhetoric that might trigger a backlash from old Soviet hard-liners. In November 1989, when Germans dismantled the Cold War icon of the Berlin Wall and began the process of reunification, Bush used his diplomatic skills and promises of collective security arrangements as a way to diminish opposition to such changes inside Russia.

  But as the long Cold War finally came to a close, a hot war emerged in the Middle East. On the morning of August 2, 1990, approximately 120,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, annexing the territory and establishing a provisional government. Despite the boldness of the move, the Iraqi government believed that the invasion would not prompt international outrage; a week earlier the American ambassador had told them the United States had “no opinion on Arab-Arab disputes such as your border disagreement with Kuwait.” But global outrage was swift. The United Nations Security Council convened an emergency meeting, calling for an “immediate and unconditional” withdrawal. America intervened quickly, stationing 100,000 ground troops in Saudi Arabia within a week of the invasion. President Bush, not wanting to politicize the conflict, waited until after the midterm elections to seek a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of military force in the region. Once he had it in hand, the president sent in another 200,000 troops and sought Senate authorization for military action, which was granted in January 1991 by a narrow vote of 52–47.10 The congressional vote, Bush asserted, was the “last best chance for peace.”

  When war came, it proved to be a bit anticlimactic. “Operation Desert Storm” lasted only six weeks, from January 17 to February 28, 1991, with a surprisingly low casualty count for the United States and its allies. Secretary of State James Baker helped assemble an impressive multinational coalition that belied Saddam Hussein’s arguments that the attacks against him were simply an effort by the United States to assert its imperial power. Notably, the coalition included Russia and Middle Eastern states that traditionally would not have partnered with America against their neighbors. It offered an example of what Bush called a “New World Order” might look like: collective security arrangements that collaborated to achieve diplomatic breakthroughs
and were able to use military force when necessary against sources of instability. The overwhelming force of the coalition quickly routed the Iraqis.

  Only 148 Americans died in the conflict, while the larger coalition forces lost slightly more. Iraqi losses were considerably higher, with estimates of 20,000 to 100,000 soldiers and 1,000 to 3,000 civilians killed. The Washington Post marveled at the “absolute victory” for America: “Not since the Spanish-American War—perhaps never in this nation’s nine previous wars—has the United States waged such a relentlessly successful military campaign as the 42-day juggernaut that was the Persian Gulf War.” Both the short duration and light cost of the war (for the allies, at least) stemmed from the fact that US leaders limited their plans to driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Though battered and chastened, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was allowed to stay in power.11 Bush insisted on sticking to the original mission by limiting the objectives of the coalition and refusing to use force to achieve changes beyond the scope of the original mandate.

  In the aftermath of the brief conflict, Bush boasted that the nation had finally overcome the crippling legacies of the Vietnam War that had long made elected officials reluctant to use force. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” the president proclaimed. Moreover, in the midst of the fighting, Bush set forth a new vision for the world that would emerge in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the Cold War before it. In his State of the Union Address on January 29, 1991, the president spoke in grand tones. “What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law,” he announced. “Such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children’s future.” 12