George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

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.
The result of the successful application of the Southern Strategy in 1968 and in the
following years has been a a period of more than two decades of one-party Republican
control over the Executive Branch, of which George Bush personally has been the
leading beneficiary, first through his multiple appointments, then through the vicepresidency,
and now through the possession of the White House itself. This has had the
decisive structural consequence of making possible the kind of continuous, entrenched
bureaucratic power that we see in the Bush regime and its leading functionaries. As we
will see, such administrators of the corporate state as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft,
for whom the exercise of executive power has long since become a way of life, appear to
themsleves and to others as immune to the popular reckoning. The democratic republic
requires the moment of catharsis, of throwing the bums out, if the arrogance of the
powerful is ever to be chastened. If there is no prospect for the White House changing
hands, this amounts to a one- party state. The southern Republican Party, including twoparty
Texas, has provided the Republican lock on the White House which has proven a
mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards authoritarian and even totalitarian rule
which have culminated in the Administrative Fascism of the current Bush regime.
Bush's opponent in that Goldwater year of 1964 was Senator Ralph Webster Yarborough.
Yarborough had been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the seventh of eleven children.
He attended public schools in Chandler and Tyler, worked on a farm, and went on to
attend Sam Houston State Teachers College and, for one year, the US Military Academy
at West Point. He was a member of the 36th division of the Texas National Guard, in
which he advanced from private to sergeant. After World War I he worked a passage to
Europe on board a freighter, and found a job in Germany working in the offices of the
American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued studies in Stendahl,
Germany. He returned to the United States to earn a law degree at the University of
Texas in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El Paso. At one point he found a job as a
harvest hand in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the late 1920's, and also served a stint as a
roughneck in the oil fields. Yarborough entered public service as an Assistant Attorney
General of Texas from 1931 to 1934. After that, he was a founding director of the Lower
Colorado River Authority, a major water project in central Texas, and was then elected as
a district judge in Austin.