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Bush and the Conservative Challenge
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20494 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1992 |
1,827 Words |
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Major Garrett
Major Garrett is a national reporter for the Washington
Times. |
On election night 1988 George Bush won a landslide victory over Michael Dukakis.
As political comebacks go, it was better than most.
Bush pumped himself with enough rhetorical steroids to deliver the speech of his life at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, and, earlier, pulled off a miraculous ambush of Dan Rather by shifting a nationally televised interview away from his role in Iran-Contra (which history will remember) to the propriety of Rather's leaving the news set in a huff over a tennis match (which history has long forgotten).
Bush came from a solid 15 points behind in the fall of 1988 and triumphed over a man he said was the living embodiment of every liberal hobgoblin Republicans and conservative Democrats had been running from since the reign of Jimmy Carter. Bush sold himself as the true conservative and trounced a liberal technocrat bent, he said, on handing over the nation's military, schools, courts, businesses, and churches to a permissive clique of peaceniks, unionists, ACLU-types, regulators, and secularists.
But inside the cavernous George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on election night in 1988, the new president's victory party packed not one iota of a spunk or verve. It was a monotonously polite affair with well-groomed and exquisitely dressed men and women gliding gracefully into and out of conversations and to and from the wet bar--hardly ever turning an interested eye to big-screen televisions tabulating the fate of their standard bearer or any other Republican battling for a seat in Congress or a desk in a governor's mansion.
About a half an hour before Bush was to arrive, the big brass band tried to resuscitate the crowd. After that failed, someone leaped on stage and tried to shout some life into the crowd. This man, no doubt the unluckiest Bush loyalist in the entire building, flapped and shouted to absolutely no effect. He tried to get the audience to scream Bush's name. Few complied. After 20 minutes, the poor enthusiast gave up and let the crowd return to its passionless buzz of self-satisfaction.
The point is that though the Bush campaign appeared to be about ideas--liberal versus conservative, our values versus their values--it was more about tactics. And few Bush fans in Houston that election night appeared transported by the knowledge that their tactics gave them keys to the
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