was so manifestly unwilling and unable seriously to oppose Bush. Many are the
indications that the Massachusetts governor had been selected to take a dive. The gravest
suspicions are in order as to whether there ever was a Dukakis campaign at all. Well
before Dukakis received the nomination, one of the authors of the present study authored
a leaflet which called the attention of convention delegates to the indications of personal
and mental instability in Dukakis's personal history, but the Democratic Convention in
Atlanta chose to ignore these highly relevant issues.
As the leaflet pointed out, "there is strong evidence that Michael Dukakis suffers from a
deep-seated mental instability that could paralyze him, and decapitate our government, in
the event of a severe economic or strategic crisis. This is a tendency for pyschological
breakdown in a situation of adversity and preceived personal rejection." [fn 50] The best
proof of the validity of this assessment is the pitiful election campaign that Dukakis then
conducted. The NDPC leaflet had warned that the GOP would exploit this obvious issue,
and Reagan soon made his celebrated quip, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid,"
focussing intense public attention on Dukakis's refusal to release his medical records.
The colored maps used by the television networks on the night of November 8 presented
a Bush victory which, although less convincing than Reagan's two landslides,
nevertheless seemed impressive. A closer examination of the actual vote totals reveals a
much different lesson: even in competition with the bumbling and craven Dukakis
campaign, Bush remained a pitifully weak candidate who, despite overwhelming
advantages of incumbency, money, organization, years of enemies' list operations, a free
ride from the controlled media, and a pathetic opponent, just managed to eke out a
hairsbreadth margin.
Bush had won 53% of the popular vote, but if just 535,000 voters in eleven states (or
600,000 voters in 9 states) had switched to Dukakis, the latter would have been the
winner. The GOP had ruled the terrain west of the Mississippi for many moons, but Bush
had managed to lose three Pacific states, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Bush won
megastates like Illinois and Pennsylvania by paper-thin margins of 51%, and the all-
important California vote, which went to Bush by just 52%, had been too close for
George's comfort. Missouri had also been a 52% close call for George. In the farm states,
the devastation of GOP free enteprise caused both Iowa and Wisconsin to join Minnesota
in the Democratic column. Chronically depressed West Virginia was having none of
George. In the oil patch, the Democrats posted percentage gains even though Bush
carried these states: in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana the Democratic presidential vote
was up between 7 and 11 percent compared to the Mondale disaster of 1984. In the
Midwest, Dukakis managed to carry four dozen counties that had not gone for a
Democratic presidential contender since 1964. All in all half of Bush's electoral votes
came from states in which he got less than 55.5% of the two-party vote, showing that
there was no runaway Bush landslide.
Exit polls showed that less than half of Bush's voters were strongly committed to him,
underlining the fact that Bush has never succeeded in winning the loyalty of any
identifiable groups in the population, except the spooks and the bluebloods. At the time