Skip to main content

Bushwhacked

By


If Historians are looking for a key moment that redefined the American political landscape, the election of George W. Bush as governor of Texas has to be it.  Nearly 20 years later, it remains a mystery to me how "Boy George" beat a very popular incumbent governor.  Texas Monthly sized up the situation by saying that Ann Richards underestimated Bush, waiting until it was too late to go after him.  She seemed to think that her record spoke for itself.

She was also the victim of a profound demographic shift in Texas, which turned what had been a traditional Democratic state into a solid Republican state virtually overnight and the legacy lives on with Rick Perry in his 13th year as Governor.

It was also a signal change in Republican campaign tactics, spearheaded by Karl Rove, which used "character assassination" to undermine a much stronger candidate.   A technique Rove would use mercilessly in the subsequent presidential elections.  The most amazing being the attempt to discredit John McCain's Vietnam war record in the 2000 primaries, and later the Swift Boat ads he helped choreograph to undermine Kerry's Vietnam war record, when it was Bush who skipped out on Vietnam by joining the National Guard, which he infrequently attended.

At the same time, Rove presented Bush as a "compassionate conservative," appealing directly to conservative religious voters without turning off mainstream voters.  The result was that half-million new Republican voters pitched up in 1994, who hadn't voted in 1990, turning a gubernatorial election that was too close to call into an 8-point rout.

Of course, Molly Ivins did a great job of reporting on Bush as governor and later president, summing her thoughts up in Bushwhacked.  But, it seems a forgotten chapter in the meteoric rise of the least promising of the Bush sons.

Comments

  1. TripplerJune 6, 2013 at 7:56 PM

    I agree that character assassination is a strategy employed quite well by the Republicans. Case in point: Swift Boating.

    But the problem is the failure of the Democrats to do the same. They could just as easily used the Downing Street Memo to bring down the Bush regime just like the opposition did to Tony Blair in the UK (and like earlier Democrats did with the Pentagon Papers). But the Democrats were just too timid to do so. For some reason - make that for some stupid reason - the Democrats repeatedly choose to bring a pea shooter to a gun fight. This is why Bush won the second election and why his Republican supporters did so as well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more