But as far as George Bush was concerned, all this was of no consequence:
"Philosophically, I was a Republican...." [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
theorized years 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 portraying
the Democratic Party has pro-black. Atwater had learned to be a cunning and vicious
practitioner of the "wedge issue" method in the school of Strom 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 against Yarborough.
From the vantage point of the police state conditions of the early 1990's, we can discern a
further implication of the southern Republican project of which Bush was in several
moments of the 1960's a leading operative. As the southern GOP emerged out of the play
of gang and counter-gang between McGovernite left liberal investment bankers and
Nixon-Reagan right liberal investment bankers (and Bush has been both), it made
possible that Southern Strategy which elected Nixon in 1968 and which has given the
Republicans a virtual lock on the electoral college ever since. The Watergate-Carter
anomaly of 1976 confirms rather than alters this overall picture.
The Southern Strategy that Bush turns out to have been serving in the sixties was not
called to the attention of the public until somewhat after the 1964 election in which
Goldwater had garnered electoral votes exclusively in the south. As William Rusher
wrote in the National Review: "The Democrats had for years begun each race with an
assured batch of delegates from the South." "The Republican Party strategy," argued
Rusher, needs refiguring, given a chance to break into this bloc once denied them...." His
conclusion was that ""Republicans can put themselves in the position of having the
Southern bloc as a starting handicap; after that, they can compete for the rest of the
country, needing only that 50 per cent minus (say) 111 [of the electoral college votes]."
Doing all this, Rusher contended, would allow Republican Presidential candidates to
ignore the " traditional centers of urban liberalism," especially in the northeast. [fn 4]
These ideas were further refined in Richard Nixon's brain trust, presided over by Wall
Street bond lawyer John Mitchell at 445 Park Avenue, and received their definitive
elaboration from Kevin Phillips, who in those years advanced the thesis that the "whole
secret of politics" is in "knowing who hates who," which is of course another way of
speaking of wedge issues.