George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography

(Frankie) #1

One of the continuing projects of George Bush's life has been the extirpation of precisely this
populist and sometimes dirigist group of DRepublican ideologues, or financier Democrats of the Lloyd Bentsen variety. emocrats, and their replacement with "free enterprise"


The Texas and Oklahoma populist Democrats must be distinguished from their colleagues of the
Old South of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But for the Eastern Liberal Establishment, it has
proven more convenient to lump them all together under the purveyed image of the racist, bourbon-swilling southern Congressional committee chairman conspiring in cigar-clouded rooms to defy the
popular will as expressed by the television networks. All southern Democrats of the old school
tended to have crippling weaknesses on the race issue and on the question of union-busting. But on
the other side of the ledger, many southern Democrats had an excellent grasp of infrastructure in the
broadest sense: internal improvements like highways, canals, water projects, rural electrification,quality accessible public education, health services, electric power generation.


The nascent southern Republicans of the fifties and sixties, by contrast, were generally as bad or
worse than the Democrats on race and labor relations, and were at the same such fanatics of Adam
Smith's "free market" mystification that all government committment to maintaining infrastructure,health care, and education went by the boards. The only positive point left for some of these
emerging southern Republicans, such as those who folllowed Barry Goldwater in 1964, was a
patriotic rejection of the machinations of the Eastern Liberal Establishment as embodied most
graphically in the figure of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Bush was indeed a Goldwater
man in those days, as we will see. But since Bush was himself an organ of that same hated EasternLiberal Establishment, he stood utterly bereft of redeeming grace.


The enterprise in which we now find Bush engaged, the creation of a Republican Party in the
southern states during the 1960's, (including the so-called post-1961 "two-party Texas") has proven


to be an historical catastrophe. In ordenecessary to smash the old FDR New Deal constitutent coalition of labor, the cities, farmers, blacks,r to create a Republican Party in the south, it was first (^)
and the Solid South. As Bush complains in his campaign autobiography:
"The state was solidly Democratic, and the allegiance of Texans to the 'party of our fathers' became
even stronger during the lean years of the Depression. The Democratic campaign line in the 1930'swas that the 'Hoover Republicans' were responsible for unemployment and farm foreclosures;
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were said to be the only friends the people had."
[fn 1]
But as far as George Bush was concerned, all this was of no consequence: "Philosophically, I was aRepublican...." [fn 2] After Bush had declared his candidacy for Yarborough's seat, the veteran
political writers at the state capital in Austin shook their heads: Bush had "two crosses to bear -
running as a Republican and not a native Texan." [fn 3]
The method that the southern Republicans devised to breach this solid front was the one theorizedyears later by Lee Atwater, the manager of Bush's 1988 Presidential campaign. This was the
technique of the "wedge issues," so called precisely because they were chosen to split up the old
New Deal coalition using the chisels of ideology. The wedge issues are also known as the "hot-
button social issues," and the most explosive among them has always tended to be race. The
Republicans could win in the south by portlearned to be a cunning and vicious practitioner of the "wedge issue" method in the school of Stromraying the Democratic Party has pro-black. Atwater had (^)
Thurmond of South Carolina after the latter had switched over to the Republicans in the sixties.
Racial invective, anti-union demagogy, jingoistic chauvinism, the smearing of opponents for their
alleged fealty to "special interests"-- none of this began in the Baker-Atwater effort of 1968. These
were the stock in trade of the southern strategy, and these were all Leitmotivs of Bush's 1964 effort

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