George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

ide 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 allimportant
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
of the election, the official statistics of the Reagan regime were alleging a yearly
consumer inflation rate of 5.2% and an unemployment figure of 4.1%. Exit polls that
53% of all voters through that the economy was getting better. As the economic
depression worsens into 1992, all of those figures will belong to the good old days. A
comparison of Bush's victory in the Iowa caucuses of 1980 with his wretched third-place
finish there in 1988 is a good indicator of how utterly support for Bush can collapse as a
result of a dramatic deterioration in economic conditions, given once again that Bush has
no loyal base of political support.
The voter turnout hit a new postwar low, with just 49.1% of eligible voters showing up at
the polls, significantly worse than the Truman-Dewey matchup of 1948, when just 51%
had deemed it worthwile to vote. This means that Bush expected to govern the country
with the votes of just 26.8% of the eligible voters in his pocket. Bush had won a number
of southern states by lop-sided margins of about 20%, but this was correlated in many
cases with very low overall voter turnout, which dipped below 40% 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 the Senate in
1986. With Dukakis capturing 90% of the black vote, a bigger black turnout would have
created some serious problems for George. Bush knows that victory in 1992 will depend
on keeping the black turnout low, and this is part of the rationale behind his "wedge
issue" nomination of the black rightist Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, which
successfully split national black organizations in such a way that Bush hopes he will be
able to ignore them in 1992.