The Election of 1988

The issues that had dominated American politics for over a decade—the Soviet threat, the energy crisis, stagflation—were gone. The presidential election of 1988 initially lacked focus. The selection of Vice President George H. W. Bush as the Republican nomination was a foregone conclusion. Bush, the son of a Connecticut senator, had attended an elite private school and Yale. He served as a pilot during World War II and then settled in Texas, where he worked in the family’s oil business and became active in Republican politics. From 1971 to 1973 he served as ambassador to the UN and from 1976 to 1977 as director of the CIA. As Republican presidential hopeful, he trumpeted his experience as vice president; but when the Reagan administration was tarnished by the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush claimed that he had been “out of the loop” and thus free of the scandal.

The Democratic race was far more complicated but scarcely more inspiring. So many lackluster candidates entered the field that wits called them “the seven dwarfs.” But eventually Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, stressing his record as an efficient manager, accumulated delegates steadily and won the nomination.

During the campaign, Bush attacked Dukakis as a liberal governor who had been soft on crime. Lee Atwater, campaign manager for Bush, produced and aired a television advertisement showing prisoners, many of them black, streaming through a revolving door. Dukakis’s attempts to shift the focus away from crime failed. The presidential campaign became, in effect, a referendum on crime in which Dukakis failed the toughness test. Bush won 54 percent of the vote and carried the Electoral College, 426 to 112.