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between the Bush and Dole camps for the purpose of maintaining correct GOP
decorum even amidst the acrimony of the campaign. / Note #1 / Note #3
Evans and Novak opined that "Atwater and the rest of the Bush high command,
convinced that the rumors would soon be published, reacted in a way that
spelled panic to friend and foe alike." On June 17, 1987, Michael Sneed of
the "Chicago Sun-Times" had written that "several major newspapers are
sifting ... reported dalliances of Mr. Boring." / Note #1 / Note #4 But
during that summer of 1987, the Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones
networks were powerful enough to suppress the story and spare Bush any
embarrassment.
In the end, the greatest trump card of Bush's 1988 campaign was Bush's
opponent Michael Dukakis. There is every reason to believe that Dukakis was
chosen by Bush Democrat power brokers and the Eastern Establishment bankers
primarily because he 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, supporters of Lyndon LaRouche in the National
Democratic Policy Committee called attention to the indications of per
sonal and mental instability in Dukakis's personal history, but the
Democratic Convention in Atlanta chose to ignore these highly relevant
issues.
As the NDPC 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 psychological breakdown in a
situation of adversity and perceived personal rejection." / Note #1 / Note
#5 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," focusing 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 hair's
breadth margin.
Bush had won 53 percent of the popular vote, but if just 535,000 voters in
11 states (or 600,000 voters in nine 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 percent, and the all-important
California vote, which went to Bush by just 52 percent, had been too close
for George's comfort. Missouri had also been a 52 percent close call for
George. In the farm states, the devastation wrought by eight years of GOP
free enterprise 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 percent of the two-party vote, showing that there was
no runaway Bush landslide.
The voter turnout hit a new postwar low, with just 49.1 percent of eligible
voters showing up at the polls, significantly worse than the Harry
Truman-Thomas Dewey matchup of 1948, when just 51 percent had deemed it
worthwhile to vote. This means that Bush expected to govern the country
with the votes of just 26.8 percent of the eligible voters in his pocket.
Bush had won a number of southern states by lop-sided margins of about 20
percent, but this was correlated in many cases with very low overall voter
turnout, which dipped below 40 percent in Georgia and South Carolina. A big
plus factor for George was the very low black voter turnout in the South,
where a significant black vote had helped the Democrats retake control of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]