points with the legions of Armageddon, who provided a decisive base of support for the
Bush-Quayle administration during the Gulf war.
Bush himself has a very strong apocalyptic streak, which he has more often expressed in
the doomsday language of the RAND Corporation than in the theological terminology of
an R.B. Thimeme. But there is ample convergence, as shown in this interview with
Robert Scheer on the campaign trail in early 1980. Scheer started by asking Bush, "How
do you win in a nuclear exchange?" Bush's response:
Bush: You have a survivability of command in control, survivability of industrial potential,
protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on
the opposition than it can inflict upon you. That's the way you can have a winner, and the Soviets'
planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange.Scheer: Do you mean like five percent would survive? Two percent?Bush: More than that-- if everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive.
[fn 46]Bush's presidential campaign offered nothing of value. In his acceptance speech to the
Republican national Convention on August 18, 1988, Bush professed the Calvinistic
creed of a man who sees life in terms of "missions"; the mission now, he thought, was to
make sure that the crumbling "American Century" of Col. Stimson and his World War II
cabal which "lit the world with our culture" were followed by "another American
century." Bush promised to avoid war: "We have peace, and I am not going to let anyone
take it away from us." Bush harped on his theme of voluntarism-boosterism-corporatism
with his celebration of "the idea of community" and his notorious "thousand points of
light" as a recipe to deal with the human wreckage being piled up by the unbridled free
enterprise he had stood for all his life. The irreverent soon transformed that into "a
thousand points of blight."
Remarkably, Bush still had a few promises on the economic front. He went on record
once again with his "Read my lips: no new taxes." He boasted that the Reagan-Bush
forces had created 17 million jobs over the previous five years of recovery. He pledged to
create "30 in eight, 30 million jobs in the next eight years." (Non-farm payrolls were
slightly over 107 million when Bush took office, and rose to slightly more than 110
million by the middle of 1990. Then, with layoffs averaging 2,000 a day, total
unemployment sagged through the early autumn of 1991, with a net loss of about 1 1/2
million jobs. Bush is not on track to filfill this promise, which nobody has heard him
repetaing since the election. There has been no "kinder, gentler nation."
The final stages of the campaign were played out amid great public indifference. Some
interest was generated in the final weeks by a matter oif prurient, rather than policy
interest: rumors were flying of a Bush sex scandal. This talk, fed by the old Jennifer
Fitzgerald story, had surfaced during 1987 in the wake of the successful covert operation
against Gary Hart. The gossip became intense enough that George W. Bush asked his
father if he had been guilty of philandering. The young Bush reported back to the press
that "the answer to the Big A [adultery] question is N-O." Lee Atwater accused David