George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

By the autumn of 1989, Bush was facing a crisis of confidence in his regime. His
domination of Congress on all substantive matters was complete; at the same time he had
nothing to propose except vast public subsidies to bankrupt financial and speculative
interests. Except for exertions to shovel hundreds of billion of dollars into Wall Street,
the entire government appeared as aparalyzed and adrift. This was soon accentuated by
colossal upheavals in China, eastern Europe, and the USSR. On Friday, October 13,
timed approximately with the second anniversary of the great stock market crash of 1987,
there was a fall in the Dow Jones Industrial average of 190.58 points during the last hour
of trading. This was triggered by the failure of a labor-management group to procure
sufficient financing to carry out the leveraged buyout of United Airlines. The stage for
this failure had been set during the preceeding weeks by the crisis of the highly-leveraged
Campeau retail empire, which made many junk bonds wholly illiquid for a time. The
autumn was full of symptoms of a deflationary contraction of overall production and
employment. For a time Bush appeared to be approaching that delicate moment in which
a president is faced with the loss of his mandate to rule.
October has been one of the cruellest months for the Bush presidency: each time the
leaves fall, each time the critical third-quarter economic statistics are published, a crisis
in public confidence in the patrician regime has ensued. In two out of three years so far,
the reaction of the Bushmen has been to lash out with international violence and mass
murder.
October, 1989 was full of anxiety and apprehension about the economic future, and
worry about where Bush was leading the country. Included in the many mood pieces was
an evident desire of the Eastern Liberal Establishment circles to spur Bush on to more
decisive and aggressive action in imposing austerity at home, and in increasing the rate of
primitive accumulation in favor of the dollar abroad. A typical sample of these October
elucubrations was a widely-read essay by Kevin Phillips (the traditional Republican
theoretician of ethnic splitting and the Southern Strategy) entitled "George Bush and
Congress--Brain-Dead Politics of '89." Phillips faulted Bush for his apparent decision "to
imitate the low-key, centrist operating mode of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But
imitating Ike in the 1990s makes as little sense as trying to imitate Queen Victoria in the
1930's." [fn 20] Phillips pointed to the way in which Bush was restrained by his evident
committment to continue all of the essential policies of the Reagan years, while denying
the existence of any crisis: Bush did "not seek to identify national problems because in
doing so, [he] would largely be identifying [his] party's own failings." "The Republicans
at least know they have a problem on the 'vision thing,'" Phillips noted, while the
Democratic opposition "can't even spell the word." All of this added up to the "cerebral
atrophy of government." Phillips catalogued the absurd complacency of the Bushmen,
with Brady saying of the US economy that "it couldn't get much better than it is" and
Baker responding to Democratic criticisms of Bush foreign policy with the retort: "When
the President is rocking along with a 70 per cent approval rating on his handling of
foreign policy, if I were the leader of the opposition, I might have something similar to
say." Phillips's basic thesis was that Bush and his ostensible opposition had joined hands
simply to ignore the existence of the leading problems threatening US national life, while
hiding behind an "irrelevant consensus" forged ten to twenty years in the past, and