Sabin wrote:
That said, he ran the Willie Horton ad. I don’t know how involved he was in his 1988 campaign but he bears responsibility for the rise in racist fear-mongering in campaigns.
This is kind of the Rosetta Stone for understanding Bush 41, his party, what preceded and followed him.
Bush, by all testimony, was personally decent. But he came from a noblesse oblige tradition, one that believed People Like Him deserved to be leaders and it didn't matter how they got there. I think he thought the Willie Horton campaign was simply a means to a proper end, and that it would be forgotten once he was inaugurated. Instead, it poisoned the well for his entire presidency and beyond. There are two ironies: 1) Lichtman argues -- and I agree -- that Reagan's second term had been so successful that Bush would have won easily anyway, if he'd just been willing to wait out mid-summer convention-influenced polls; and 2) a particularly devastating development of his putative re-election year 1992 was the Rodney King verdict and subsequent LA riots (he was leading polls, if shakily, prior to the event, but, somewhat thanks to Perot, fell behind immediately after, and never got back on top). You could argue that the cops' defense attorneys in that trial got their acquittal by, essentially, turning Rodney King into Willie Horton: a big scary black man from whom you had to let the cops protect you.
When I say "somewhat" about Perot: I think Perot was more vehicle than catalyst for Bush's re-election failure. The ongoing sluggish economy had made Bush very unpopular; it was only Clinton's own scandal issues that masked that in early 1992. Perot's voters were "we don't like what's happening but we're a bit leery of Democrats right now". When it's an incumbent running, those votes tend in the end to go against the administration regardless (as the undecided swung for Reagan in 1980, despite their qualms about him). Best proof of this: when Perot dropped out in mid-summer, Clinton inherited his polling numbers en masse. Perot didn't cause Bush's defeat; he just greased the skids for what would have happened somehow.
I think Bush would have been a better president had he won the nomination in 1980 -- before Reagan's troglodytes took over the party. He was never the hard-core rightie the party base wished him to be, but he had to try and appease them (which led to his worst moments, like Clarence Thomas). Had he been elected in 1980, he might have been in Gerald Ford mode, and the GOP might never have gone off the cliff it's now clear they've leapt from.