George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

More generally, it would appear that Bush would be very happy to keep across the board
voter turnout at such depressed levels, since a larger vote could only threaten his results.
Dukakis was able to attract only about half of the Reagan Democrats back to their
traditional party, despite the preppy-blueblood aura of the Bush campaign, which these
voters would normally have found highly offensive. The Bush cause is therefore well
served by public scandals and media campaigns that tend to elicit widespread disgust
with politics and government, since these increase the probability that citizens will stay
home on election day, leaving George to dominate the field. It is no surprise that
precisely such scandals, from Congressional pay raises and the Keating five to the
Thomas nomination hearings have proliferated during the years of the Bush regime.
Among those Republicans who had succeeded in winning the White House in two-way
races (excluding years like 1948 or 1968, when the totals were impacted by Henry
Wallace and Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, or by George Wallace), Bush's result was the
weakest since fellow Skull and Bones alumnus William Howard Taft in 1908. [fn 50]
These patterns might also indicate that the dominant role of the electoral votes of the
former Confederate States of America within the Electoral College under the post-1968
Southern Strategy of the national Republican Party may be subjected to erosion in 1992,
especially under the impact of the Bush economic depression.
It is also to be hoped that 1988 will prove in retrospect to have represented the high-water
mark of hired gun media and campaign consultants in presidential elections. Atwater at
one time boasted that his staff contained at least 28 media experts and political operatives
who had worked in at least three previous presidential elections, many of which were also
winning efforts for the GOP. These men were drawn from New York's Madison Avenue
and from Washington's Connecticut Avenue "Power Alley," where many of the bestconnected
political consulting firms have their offices. It is clear that men like Atwater,
Ailes, Spencer, Deaver and others have performed a function in the consoldation of a
modern American leviathan state that is exactly analagous to the vital services rendered
to the Third Reich by Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels between 1933 and 1945.
There is a crime of menticide which consists in the deliberate destruction of the cognitive
powers of another human being, and the campaigns organized by these consultants have
represented menticide on a mass scale. Further: if the international economic policies
inflicted on the world by the Reagan-Bush and Bush regimes have exacted a yearly
global death toll of upwards of 50 million needless deaths, primarily in the developing
sector, it has been the image mongers and public relations men who have organized the
US domestic electoral consensus that has permitted those genocidal policies to go
forward. For all of these reasons, the media and campaign consultants are fascists. They
are virulent fascists typical of the American totalitarian state of the late twentieth century,
and this is true even if these consultants lack the bombastic trappings of the central
European fascists of more than a half century ago.
Lee Atwater celebrated the Bush inauguration by playing his electric guitar at a rhythm
and blues concert in which his gyrations bordered on the outright obscene. Although Lee
Atwater had masterminded the most racist presidential campaign in modern history, he
still had the gall during the spring of 1989 to be a candidate for a post on the Board of