Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald Read Free Book Online Page B

away from prison.
    Leading into the 1988 election, it appeared that after eight years of rule by Ronald Reagan the Republicans were in deep trouble. For most of the race, Dukakis maintained a huge polling lead on George H. W. Bush. And ironically, much of Bush’s unpopularity was due to the widespread perception that, after years of remaining meekly in the background loyally supporting Reagan, he was an effeminate wimp.
    From the outset of the campaign, Bush’s primary liability was the perception that he—unlike the cowboy-dressing Reagan—lacked true manly attributes. He was regarded as a Connecticut patrician, scion of a wealthy and politically connected family, son of an aristocratic senator who preferred holidays in Maine and on Cape Cod. One of the most damaging “controversies” occurred during the primaries when it was widely reported that Bush visited a New Hampshire diner and, surrounded by blue-collar male voters, asked for a “splash more coffee.” That event merely confirmed the damaging perception that had long been dogging Bush, a perception that led Newsweek, upon Bush’s 1987 announcement of his intention to run for president, to proclaim on its cover that Bush was “Fighting the Wimp Factor.”
    Professor Ducat, in his book named after that cover story, comprehensively chronicles the “wimp” and “effeteness” problems that plagued the first George Bush and threatened his political future:
     
“There you go with that fucking hand again. You look like a fucking pansy!” media advisor Roger Ailes bellowed at his client, the Republican presidential aspirant in 1988.
    Unfortunately for then vice president George Herbert Walker Bush, political pundits and other opinion makers of the 1980s, like those of the 1880s, did not take kindly to aristocratic manners, generally seeing them as feminine….
    This was a perception held as much—if not more—by Republicans as by Democrats. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s close friend Senator Paul Laxalt, and even Reagan himself regarded Bush as effete and unmanly. Newspaper articles appeared describing his life as one devoted to pleasing others. Conservative columnist George Will dismissed Bush as “lap dog” with a “thin tinny arf.”
     
    There are multiple levels of irony here, beginning with the fact that Ronald Reagan, depicted as the epitome of salt-of-the-earth, manly courage, avoided combat during World War II, remaining instead in Hollywood as a coddled actor, while George H. W. Bush, by all accounts, heroically served his country during that war as a fighter pilot. Yet, as has been proven true so many times since then, the ability to playact as a tough guy is far more important in American political contests than reality, and Bush’s brave military service did not shield him at all from being cast as a soft and unmanly weakling, just as Reagan’s combat avoidance did not preclude his being hailed as a warrior-defender of Freedom.
    Faced, then, with a losing candidate whose very manhood was in question, Bush 41’s campaign handlers launched a two-pronged strategy: (1) they expertly staged multiple events designed to make Bush look like a tough guy and, more important, (2) they launched attack after attack against Dukakis intended to depict him as the wimp.
    One of the first orders of business in “masculinizing” Bush and converting him into a “regular, normal guy” was to highlight his connections to Texas while downplaying his real roots in aristocratic Connecticut. The campaign frequently staged events where Bush would don a cowboy hat, attend rodeos, and incorporate Texas colloquialisms into his speech.
    Atwater and Ailes understood that central to their prospects for victory was ensuring that their candidate was perceived as a swaggering tough guy, someone who exuded what were perceived to be the virtues of traditional American masculinity and, when necessary, was capable of striking a warrior pose. And even in light of how little