5 Men Who Really Fucked America Over Part 2: George H.W. Bush
In Part 2 of our five-part series on the men most responsible for fucking America over, we take a look at an often-overlooked President. Maybe it’s because he was a single-term president. Maybe it’s because he limped out of office and made way for one of the most dynamic Commanders in Chief since Kennedy. Whatever the reason for it, the first Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, is given pretty much a free pass by critics. Despite going into the 1988 election having been exposed as a liar and political milquetoast, he hired another man on this list to run his campaign, and in doing so opened the Pandora’s Box that pretty much landed him on this list.
He gave rise to the new Republican Presidential Campaign, forged in Nixon’s mold, but then bent and shaped into what we have now: issue avoidance and a healthy dose of Quixotic attacks on the morality and character of the opposing candidate. You know, thanks to the complete ineptitude and utter foolishness of his son’s presidency, people tend to forgive the sins of his father. But yet, if it wasn’t for George Bush The First, there’d have been a) No repeat performance for his son and b) No reason to go into Iraq searching for the elusive “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
But why would anyone be surprised that GH Bush would on this list? After all, he was one of the liars that told some awful lies about the Iran-Contra Affair. And if that wasn’t enough, he was single-handedly responsible for bringing the next guy on our list into the forefront of American politics, and there’s a pretty good argument that that decision was tantamount to dropping an atomic bomb on political discourse in this country.
The 1988 presidential election, as it turns out, had massive ramifications that we’re only just now realizing, and it was all down to who GHW Bush chose to run his campaign. Things got ugly in that campaign, uglier than they’d been in years. His campaign manager was a power-hungry southerner who got off on being seen on TV playing his guitar as much as he did on running a presidential campaign.
Bush Sr. unleashed Lee Atwater onto the American political scene and the genie never did get put back in the bottle, even after Atwater’s death. Bush knew he was soft on the issues, so made two strategic decisions. One, he pledged to never raise taxes, ever, we even read his lips when he said it. (Of course, in typical Bush fashion, he went back on his word, but what can you do?) Secondly, he decided to attack Democrat Michael Dukakis, his ’88 opponent on very personal grounds, forsaking an argument about actual issues, and instead focusing on cultural mores and morality.
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