Brief Notes On the Price of Political Pandering July 2021

It's become clear in 2021 that the Republican Party still kneels and begs for table scraps at the foot of the eternal Shitgibbon known as trump.

As the near-unstoppable cycle of election campaigning kicks up for 2022, a number of high-profile Republican candidates at the state and Congressional level have spent a lot of effort playing to trump's unstable world-views and conspiracy rants. Noticeable among these sycophants is George P. Bush, son of... one of the Bush brothers, hold on let me check the Wikipedia biography oh yes it's JEB! - who is entering the political stage by running for state-level office in Texas. Specifically for State Attorney General, running as a challenger against the incumbent Ken Paxton.

Normally, intraparty challenges are rare outside of the purity-test extremists taking their shot at the office-holder they deem insufficiently RINO. It's kind of hard to paint Paxton as a RINO given all the crazy-ass stuff he's done as AG... and that's just the legal stuff. Another big reason for Bush's challenge is that Paxton is currently indicted on corruption and securities fraud charges, something that ought to have driven an honest crook to resign for the good of the party. It's just with this modern Republican Party, corruption charges is now a goddamned badge of honor to these guys.

In order to win, George P. has spent his early days campaigning even further to the right than Paxton, going so far as to openly worship at the foot of trump (party kingmaker) himself. All of this in spite of the open contempt the Bush family itself has towards trump, whom they view as destroying a Republican Party they built and once dominated themselves.

But hey, one of the things about the Bushes, if you ever watched them from Bush the Elder from the 1960s on through to Bush the Lesser in the 2000s to weak Fredo uh Jeb! the Exclamation Point: A Bush running for office will pander and debase themselves as much as needed to win that office.

So where did all of George P.'s love affair for trump lead him?

trump still went with the openly (allegedlys) corrupt Paxton. Why not? trump must figure Paxton will cut him into Paxton's piece of the action...

Ergo, to this bit of schadenfreude:

Donald Trump just endorsed incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the GOP primary challenger, George P. Bush—who sold out his own family to kiss Trump’s ass. No hero in this tale, just a reminder that there’s no honor among thieves—and a deal with the devil can backfire. https://t.co/sRUg0qQpg4

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) July 27, 2021

I wonder what George P. will do now. Probably crawl back to the Bush Family Compound and convene a session with their current elders to decide the next step of revenge against Paxton. I wonder how many judges in line to handle Paxton's indictments still owe a favor or three to the Bushes... 

Things I Remember About Bush The Elder 1924 - 2018

With Bush Sr's. passing yesterday, this has been a day of reflection and pondering.

His was the Presidency of my college years, and the first election I voted in. So there's a lot of significance in this for me looking back at what I recall (more than the Character review I made about five years ago).

• I voted for Bush as President. Yes, in hindsight voting for ANY Republican feels blasphemous. But in 1988 as a college freshman I couldn't really recognize the damage - on social issues and public health issues like the AIDS crisis and the Drug War - being done. And a lot of the REALLY BAD stuff the Republicans would get into came during the 1990s under darker leadership by Newt Gingrich and others.
• Bush on foreign policy was one of the more competent Presidents we had, overseeing a serious transitional moment with the collapse of Communism, the opening of Eastern Europe, and political power shifts across every continent.
• Bush *was* quick on the trigger finger when it came to troop deployments, border clashes, and straight-up war. People seem to forget we sent in armed forces to overthrow Noriega in Panama in 1989 on what turned out to be sketchy reports. There was also the first Persian Gulf War/invasion of Iraq in 1990-91 where U.S. mishandling of Saddam - our government saw him as a useful opponent against a hostile Iran throughout the 1980s - allowed that dictator to invade Kuwait and disrupt the local balance of power. Towards the end of his term, Bush sent troops into Somalia as a peace-keeping force to help the citizenry during a famine caused by civil war... but doesn't leave in place an agenda or pull-out strategy, leaving it to Clinton.
• Bush did attempt bipartisan dealing with a Democratic-controlled Congress... by agreeing to tax hikes that went against the Supply-Side dogma of many Republicans who came to power during the Reagan years. It actually triggered an intraparty revolt by Newt that drove out moderates (RINOs) and led to the current monstrous party leadership running the GOP now.
• As a political campaigner, Bush was a nasty piece of work, relying on slander and mudslinging even in the 1960s as a Texas Congressman. The Willie Horton attack ads of the 1988 Presidential campaign was a new low - even compared to the harsh "Daisy" ad LBJ ran against Goldwater in 1964 - and essentially opened up a new era of dirty campaigning that has darkened our electorate since (and it's a tactic his own sons Dubya and Jeb rely on far too often themselves).
• Bush *did* preside over major achievements such as the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a major Immigration Reform act (something the modern GOP would never touch), a key Civil Rights Act protecting workers from discrimination, overall reductions in nuclear weapons across the globe...
• Oh, and he gave Dana Carvey good reason to earn a paycheck on Saturday Night Live for 4 straight years.

Seriously, message received.

The First Book I Kept From College

(EDIT: Hello, everyone from Crooks & Liars, thanks for visiting!)
I went for a Journalism degree at University of Florida, thinking of getting a career as a writer.  It didn't work out - reporting itself as a skill eluded me - but that's what I got my bachelors' degree (parents didn't back my request to switch majors to Poli Sci).

Of the textbooks I purchased over the semesters, when finished with the classes I traded most of them back in as I no longer needed them.  Except for a select few that caught my eye and became favorites for me to read and re-read as time went on.

One of the ones I kept - the first one, actually - was Joe McGinniss' Selling of the President.

The professor was using the book as an example of investigative, in-depth reporting covering a prolonged event: a Presidential campaign.  Specifically, Richard Nixon's 1968 return to politics as the Republican nominee.  But to me - with my interests in politics and history - there was a lot more to what it was about.

McGinniss was covering one of the key moments in the American political landscape.  During the 1960s, television had become the most powerful communications medium in the nation, surpassing radio which had been the dominant form since the 1930s and surpassing newspapers which had been the standard since the colonial era.  Before, most political campaigning relied on print ads, banners, crowds, speaking events, buttons, etc.  There'd been radio ads but they were easy to produce and ship out.  Television was different - a visual format that punished the unworthy and elevated the vain - and required a more cunning approach.  Advertising had by that time become a major profession using all of these mediums - print, radio, TV - to sell products: by 1968 with television leading the way, it was going to be used to sell politicians on a massive scale.

McGinniss lucked into the story by accident: his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition which I owned gave the details.  Hanging around New York City to interview Howard Cosell, a rising sports announcer, he met an advertising executive crowing about "landing the Humphrey account:"

The ad man was quick to explain.  Hubert Humphrey, who, now that Kennedy was dead, would almost certainly be the Democratic presidential nominee, had retained the agency to create a winning image for him... A week earlier, I'd been in Los Angeles because a leader of potentially heroic dimension had been slain. Now I was hearing an ad man say he'd be selling Hubert Humphrey to Americans like so much toothpaste or detergent... (p. xiii-xiv)

McGinniss, a young columnist for a Philadelphia paper who attracted the interest of a book publisher, conveyed the story he heard to the publishing agent meeting him later that week.  Intrigued, the publisher convinced McGinniss to pursue this as an investigatory piece for a book, one counter to the "official" historical tomes written by Theodore White (a respected author who wrote dry but impressive volumes about previous Presidential campaigns).  McGinniss even came up with a title mimicking White's usual Making of The President: this book about the ad campaign would be The Selling of the President.

When he followed up with the Humphrey ad exec to see about doing it, the ad man was obviously horrified. What he said was off-the-record, and above all the thing about advertising is how some ad men don't like revealing trade secrets: it's akin to pulling the curtain back on the All-Powerful Oz to realize people have been sold a humbug (Humphrey as the pro-war candidate in 1968 was not the most popular choice in his own party for the job).

McGinniss, stuck with an idea but not a subject to cover, decided to give Nixon's campaign - since at that time he'd sewn up the GOP nomination - a call to see if their ad execs were more accommodating.  He was put in touch with a Harry Treleaven, who "was most congenial.  He said he'd be happy to meet with me at ten o'clock..."

So that was it.  A dime in a pay phone was the genesis of this book...  He said he had no problem with that, but protocol required that such an arrangement be approved by his superior, Len Garment, whose own office was at Nixon headquarters.

That afternoon, Garment said no problem, with one stipulation: that nothing I observed would be printed until after the campaign was over.  I told him, as I'd told the man from Doyle Dane, that I would not even start writing until November and that it would be months after that before a book would be published...

...I asked Humphrey's people and they said no and I asked Nixon's people and they said yes...

As it was, when first published the book was widely perceived as being an attack upon Richard Nixon rather than a report on a very nearly apolitical process which promised (or threatened) to forever alter the way national campaigns would be conducted...

...It was fashionable in the season of the book's first publication... to lament the amorality of the process of selling the President and to bemoan as tragic the surrender of something so sacred as our method of choosing our leader to cynical, mercenary... soldiers of fortune.

But, look: who were the Watergate villains?  Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Magruder, Dean, Colson, Liddy, Hunt, and of course Nixon himself.  These were the people (excepting Nixon) whom even Harry Treleaven (my note: Treleaven is pretty much the hero of the book) considered the forces of darkness...  As for the supposedly venal ad men... their hands are clean, their souls unsullied (my note, again: this was written before Roger Ailes committed the deadly sin of producing Fox Not-News)...  What's more, every one of them was absolutely correct about Spiro Agnew. (introduction)

I liked the writing: wordy but not showing off, leavened with a dash of self-deprecation and awareness, an attempt at objective analysis while letting the author's bias show up in bits of levity.

The book itself then dives into the actual mechanics of what a modern Presidential campaign is anymore: a series of staged, well-managed media events staggered by a round of making televised ad snippets.  Interwoven into the scenes of Richard Nixon - not the most comfortable of souls - doing what he could to be both dignified (his only saving grace as a figure at that point) and (formally) informal, McGinniss wrote about the ad men themselves, dedicated to an increasingly demanding job of marketing to an electorate whose moods and whims shifted with each changing news story.

I loved McGinniss' introductory chapter to Treleaven: a rather middle-class guy who worked in L.A. for the Times and wrote radio scripts for a few years and grew to loathe it out there:

One night he and his wife were having dinner in a restaurant in L.A. with a couple he did not like.  Halfway through the meal, he turned to his wife.  

"Do you like it here?"  

"You mean the restaurant?"  

"I mean Los Angeles."  

"No, not especially."  

"Then let's go." (p.42)

At which point Treleaven left that night to New York City to find another job and never looked back.

It's a brilliant way to write a descriptive of your subject.  It highlighted Treleaven's sense of self, and an impulsive earnest willingness to break the routine when realizing the routine was killing his soul.  Elsewhere, McGinniss noted how Treleaven was annoyed that a newspaper misspelled his name, but found out later it wasn't about a sense of pride, it was Treleaven being disappointed someone didn't do their job right.

It was Treleaven, working on a 1966 Congressional campaign in Texas for this businessman named George HW Bush, who noted that "logical persuasion" was difficult to sell because he found "probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." (p.45)  He found that image worked wonders, as long as he presented Bush as likable, hard-working, and expressing empathy for the voter.  Bush won in heavily-leaning conservative Democratic Texas beating the incumbent 58 percent to 42, an unheard-of victory margin in that day and age (and even remarkable in this one where incumbents are even harder to defeat).

It's in these revelations that McGinniss details the shift in political science away from the logical to the emotional.  In some ways, politics had always been emotional and partisan.  But previous campaigns there were serious issues that had to be debated seriously.  The new method, due to television requiring an expressive empathic presence, needed to rely on emotional impact more than ever.  It stains the political discourse we have today, where actual facts and the complexity of real-world issues are drowned out by impulsive and inaccurate posturing.  Because of all the money that all this marketing requires, every candidate for every office has to campaign to the emotional impulse... nearly every minute of every day.

It was both eye-opening and horrifying to read the book when I was in college.  I keep re-reading every so often to compare it to the horrors of the political stage we see today 24/7.

But for more than just the outrage about the destruction of honest politics.  I kept this book because it's a great read.

McGinniss' skill as a writer-reporter comes through during the most compelling chapter in his book, the one where Nixon's campaign stages a "Question & Answer" broadcast where they actually bring on a fire-eating liberal radio show host, by the name of Jack McKinney (whom McGinniss suggested when Ailes asked him for any liberals they could bring onto the show).  McKinney goes after Nixon like a bulldog, and for half a chapter McGinniss details how Nixon works the stage, projecting somewhat Nixon's inner rage but also making you cheer Nixon on as he verbally spars with an opponent out to ruin his night.

Yeah.  Cheering Nixon on.  And this is an admitted Kennedy-following liberal reporter in McGinniss making you root for the sonofabitch.

I'm writing all this because McGinniss just passed away.  Andrew Sullivan at The Dish dedicated a decent-sized memorial to a fellow political writer/junkie:

...It’s not an exaggeration to say that Joe – at the tender age of 26! – transformed political journalism with The Selling Of The President, the legendary expose of the cynicism of media optics in presidential campaigns – and, by the by, a lovely, ornery rebuke to the magisterial tomes of Theodore H White... And the first thing to say is that the man could write. He couldn't write a bad sentence. His narratives powered along; his prose as clear as it was vivid; his innate skill at telling a story sometimes reaching rare moments in non-fiction when you’re lost in what is, in effect, a factual novel.

The book I keep from college over twenty years ago was itself twenty years old when I got it.  It was relevant in 1968 and 1988 and 2012 and will remain relevant.   Because it's that well-written.  And that important a topic.

You must read it.

Presidential Character: Week Forty-One, There Was Competence But Not Confidence

"You gotta dance with who brung ya" - one of Molly Ivins' favorite sayings.

In the first election I ever cast a vote, it was for George H. W. Bush.  For a couple of reasons.  First, I grew up in an old-school Republican house (so old-school my dad still doesn't think Nixon did anything wrong).  Second, I came of age during the Reagan years, and as such had a hazy, complacent view of the political arena despite my years reading Doonesbury and sympathizing with the plight of the proletariat.  Third, seriously Dems?  Dukakis was the best you could do?!  Tsk...

Looking back, I grew into a kind of bemused awareness - this was in college - that while Bush was a competent enough political operative, there was a kind of distance to him, a disconnect that separated him from the immediacies of day-to-day living in America to the high-ended objectives of his administration with regards to economic and international issues.

I couldn't put a label on it then, other than noting that by 1992 during a hard jobless recession that had a direct affect on me - graduating with a bachelors and no job prospects lined up - that President Bush didn't seem focused on fixing the economy that would mean job opportunities for meself and others.  Hindsight can give me now a better understanding.

In hindsight: What happened was that Bush the Elder (as I've taken to calling him) had come to the Presidency as the Heir to Reagan and was stuck dancing to the agenda of a Passive-Positive administration that left him incapable of fulfilling his own more Active instincts.

He had taken on the mantle of a social conservative agenda that he himself wasn't too comfortable with: when you look back, you'll see Bush trying to take a moderate stance on abortion (for cases of rape, incest, and health of the mother) that was counter to the hardline pro-fetus stance (no exemptions, never, and no contraception either, you sluts and whoremongers).

Bush had taken on an economic conservative agenda of mass deregulation and massive tax cuts ("Read My Lips, No New Taxes"), when during his administration he made a bipartisan deal with Congress that included tax increases.

Bush pursued an international relations agenda that relied heavily on diplomacy and personal communication that would have impressed Nixon, with an emphasis on increasing trade to open global markets like never before... but angered up an increasingly isolationist, America-First right wing that abhorred deals like NAFTA and sought U.S. hegemony in the wake of the collapsing Communist opposition.

Things I think Americans take for granted even today, was how Bush was able to build on the trust Reagan engendered with the Soviet Union to further improve international relations.  On the one hand, it proved helpful to keep the USSR on the sidelines when one of their client states - Iraq - went rogue, invading Kuwait, drawing Bush in with a truly international coalition to free Kuwait and weaken (but not topple, which would have busted the coalition) Iraq.  While the neocons of today looked back and considered it a failure that we didn't invade Iraq then and overthrow Saddam, hindsight proved that an occupation would have driven away our allies, depleted our resources fighting an unending insurgency, and given neighboring Iran the opportunity to sway the large Shia Iraqi population to their influence.

Bush, remembered, presided over one of the more peaceful political overthrows our planet's ever seen (with the sad exception of at the time Romania) when the Soviet Union, unable to maintain any economic or military control of Eastern Europe, allowed their satellite allies freedom to self-determine their rules.  The summer and autumn of 1989 witnessed nations like Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and finally East Germany bring an end to one-party rule, open borders, and basically celebrated like free drunken hippies.

I will never forget, sitting at the apartment at Gainesville the whole night of Nov. 9th, watching just hour after hour of people dancing atop the Berlin Wall on the television, tearing at the graffiti-ed concrete with pickaxes and shovels, wanting oh so much to hop onto a plane and just fly out there to join in, although knowing that 1) I had no passport and 2) by the time I got there the party would be over kinda kept me planted in the sofa.  Bush's diplomatic efforts, tied in with political leaders like Gorbachev who sought peaceful reforms, made a lot of that happen.

Part of me wonders to this day if Bush had stayed in office for a second term, if the collapse of Yugoslavia into Balkanized factions driven to civil war would have been curtailed or controlled to a more peaceful ending...

Pity of it was, by 1992 none of that mattered: what mattered was a broken economy that needed an infusion of government investment to boost jobs and wages.  And Bush, sad to say, found himself stuck in a one-note conservative platform ("cut taxes, cut regs") because those were the Republicans that brought him to the Big Dance.

It didn't help that Bush the Elder faced one of the more peculiar third-party attempts in the nation's history: a disgruntled business executive, Ross Perot, decided to muddle into politics on a platform of trade protectionism, balanced budgets, and an idea of "direct democracy" allowing direct input of the electorate through the burgeoning Internet.  Part vanity project, part serious reform movement, Perot became a banner to rally among the far right and/or centrist voting base, which cut more into Bush's political support than the Democratic challenger's.

Bush's final problem was simply an inability to present himself in as confident a manner as possible.  Part of that image had come from his seeming acquiescence to the Vice Presidency under Reagan - at a time when those in the know believed Bush's political views could and did differ from Reagan's - and part of it had come from an increasing vibe of disconnect during his own Presidential tenure.  While he showed confidence in 1988 campaigning as the successor to a popular Reagan, by 1992 he could no longer campaign like that: he had to campaign on his own successes.   Because his domestic success - passing a bipartisan, tax-increased budget - was in opposition to his party's platform, he couldn't.  He had to ignore what he did and campaign on what was expected of him by the base.

As an anecdote, during that tenure Saturday Night Live was at its apex of political satire and commentary (seriously, the 1992 political skits should be bottled and preserved for future generations).  Dana Carvey, doing about as pitch perfect a Bush impersonation (and even a Perot impersonation) ever seen, slowly depicted week by week a desperate, almost pleading Bush trying to figure out what to do to please people (holding up a sign "Message: You're Pissed" at one point).  It's as apt a description of how Bush struggled towards his loss in November to Bill Clinton.

All this talk about Bush the Elder and little yet about his Character.  Mostly because I want to note something else: this is as far into the Presidential Character as Prof. James David Barber took his 4th edition of his textbook.  Bill Clinton will be the second jumping off point into the Unknown where I have to make my own interpretation.  As for Bush, lemme dig up a quote or two on him:

By the summer of that election year, asked "What about George Bush?" I was puzzled that "the basic question about Bush, is not character, but world view.  What is his vision?  What is his direction?"... (p.457)

(from Barber's New York Times 1989 article) ...Those who think he will be simply a steady, middle-of-the-road chairman of the White House team might well be wrong.  There are signs that this Presidency could be far more innovative - for better or for worse - than the last one...  Mr. Bush wants a mission.  It is important that he likes normal, ordinary politics and that he invests much energy in that work.  His character is Active-Positive, a pattern that means he is ready to learn, to change, to develop in office, as distinct from the fixated types, such as Nixon or Johnson... (p.458-9)

That in hindsight was a common part of Bush's style: a negotiator type, someone capable of dealing and Adapting as the circumstances required.

Problem was, the Republican Party that brought him to the dance didn't like changing their tunes.  And Bush didn't have enough confidence to make the Party see that the dance style had changed from Charleston to Rave.

Next Up: There was this article about The Future Imperative relating to this guy.  I gotta go find it.