George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

among these. The entire apparatus will require super-majorities of 60 votes to change in
the future. Naturally, this package was of no use whatever in deficit reduction, given the
existence of an accelerating economic depression. In Bush's famous New World Order
speech on September 11, he had frightened the Congress with the prospect of a deficit of
$232 billion. In October of 1991, it was announced that the deficit for the fiscal year
ending September 31, 1991, the one that was supposed to show improvement, had come
in at $268.7 billion, the worst in all history. Predictions for the deficit in the year
beginning on October 1, 1991 were in excess of $350 billion, guaranteeing that the 1991
record would not stand long. Bush's travail of October, 1990 had done nothing to
improve the picture.
Bush's predicament was that the Reaganomics of the 1980's (which had been in force
since the period after the Kennedy assassination) had produced more than a depression:
they had engendered the national bankruptcy of the United States. That bankruptcy was
now lawfully dismembering the Reagan coalition, the coalition which Bush had still been
able to ride to power in 1988. Since Bush refused to replace the suicidal, post-industrial
economic policies of the last quarter century, he was obliged to attempt to smother
irrepressible political conflicts with police state methods, and with war hysteria.
But in the interval before he could start the war, Bush would pay a heavy political price.
According to the Newseek poll, Bush's job approval rating had dropped from 67% during
the Gulf scare of August to 48% at the end of the October budget battles. The 20-point
free fall was a reminder that Bush possessed no solid base of support among any
numerically significant group in the US electorate. Now, the Carteresque Bush found that
his own party was turning against him. A split had opened up in the GOP which
threatened that party with the fate of the degenerate Federalists.
In the midst of the budget upheaval Bush, ever true to his family's racist creed, had
impudently vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990. To make the symbolism perfect, he
signed the veto after an appearance at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Award
ceremonies in Washington. Bush was playing the card of racism for 1990 and 1992. "I
deeply regret having to take this action with a bill bearing such a title," said Bush,
"especially since it contains provisions that I strongly endorse." But he was adamant that
this bill "employs a maze of highly legalistic language to introduce the destructive force
of quotas into our national unemployment system." Bush claimed that this was a quota
bill, and since equal opportunity was thwarted by quotas, "the very committment to
justice and equality that is offered as the reason why this bill should be signed requires
me to veto it." An attempted override fell short by one vote in the Senate, 66-34, even
though Minnesota Republican Rudy Boschwitz, who had been against the bill, switched
sides to oppose Bush's veto. Boschwitz was doomed to defeat in the November election
in any case.
A most dramatic sign of the repudiation of Bush even by the Republican party apparatus
was the celebrated memorandum issued on October 15 by veteran political operative Ed
Rollins of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Rollins had been given a
four-year, million dollar contract to help the GOP win a majority on the Hill. He was