Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [52]
The Exeter-Yale GOP
Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, was the reluctant heir of the Republican Party’s proud new role as the defender of white people. Bush knew how to talk the talk, but one had the sense that his heart wasn’t in it. As a student at Yale, Bush had headed the United Negro College Fund, but when he ran for the U.S. Senate in Texas, he opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He lost the race but became a congressman in 1966 and established a strong civil rights record, bucking his Southern constituency in the process.
Back on the campaign trail for president in 1988, Bush started tossing race cards again. He relentlessly hammered opponent George Dukakis for a policy that enabled William Horton, a black convict, to rape a white woman while on weekend furlough from prison; the campaign’s Willie Horton ad is infamous for coded “law and order” racism. As president, Bush appointed Clarence Thomas, an African American but also a fierce critic of affirmative action, to the Supreme Court. Finally, Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 on the grounds that it “introduces the destructive force of quotas.”49 But the act addressed compensation for employment discrimination and had nothing to do with affirmative action. It introduced “quotas” only insofar as quota had become the new code for “pampering black people.”
The following year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which one pundit described as “the Civil Rights Act of 1990 with one more year of political maneuver and acrimony thrown in. The basic issues haven’t changed, only the tactics of supporters and opponents.”50 But this time, Bush assured the nation, “Unlike last year’s bill, a bill I was forced to veto, this bill will not encourage quotas or racial preferences.” 51 Quotas, it seems, are in the eye of the beholder. Pat Buchanan, for one, still beheld lots and lots of quotas. He attacked Bush for caving to Democrats and charged, “It’s a quota bill and it’s horrible for business: Every minority malcontent is going to be suing . . . The whole idea of merit is going out the window.”52
Buchanan was so incensed by Bush’s callous disregard for white Americans suffering from lawsuits by minority malcontents that he ran for president. “If you belong to the Exeter-Yale GOP club, that’s not going to bother you greatly because, as we know, it is not their children who get bused out of South Boston into Roxbury,” Buchanan charged, “It is the sons and daughters of Middle America who pay the price of reverse discrimination advanced by the Walker’s Point GOPas to salve their social consciences at other people’s expense.”53
Meanwhile, David Duke evidently concluded that Pat Buchanan was too soft on reverse discrimination, because he ran in the Republican primary as well. Duke had put away the Nazi uniform that he once wore to Klan meetings and now substituted the phrase growing under-class for blacks and Jews. He spoke to voters’ concerns about welfare, busing, and affirmative action.54 Unfortunately for Duke, Buchanan co-opted his kinder, gentler white supremacy and wrapped up the racist vote, leaving Duke short of supporters, donors, and media attention. Duke consoled himself by saying, “I think Pat Buchanan sounds more like me every day.”55 Buchanan begged to differ, countering, “David Duke is busy stealing from me. I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft.”at56
Buchanan didn’t win the nomination, but he snagged a fat consolation prize—the keynote address at the Republican convention. He defiantly delivered what has become known as the Culture War speech, in which he introduced America to the full force of persecution politics, proclaiming, “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”57 In the mode of the Nixon-Agnew law and order campaign, Buchanan concluded his fiery speech with a martial allusion to the race riots that had recently shaken Los Angeles:
[The 18th