George H.W. Bush inherits the Reagan Revolution on November 8, 1988


November 8, 1988. The very air itself, brothers and sisters, was thick with it! Not just the usual whiff of stale ambition and light beer that hangs over every American election, no sir. This was the culmination, the apotheosis, the very zing! of the Age of Reagan, now metastasizing, transforming, elevating itself into something else. Something…Bush!

Yes, George Herbert Walker Bush! The man, the myth, the scion of privilege with the patrician grin, the tennis whites, the entire gestalt of New England rectitude mixed with a Texas drawl as authentic as a Hollywood stagecoach. And what a stage it was! The nation, awash in the glow of Morning in America, flush with material prosperity, high on the sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of eight years of Reaganomics! 

The stock market was roaring, the Soviets were…well, they were still the Soviets, but they seemed to be doing it with a little less conviction, a little more glasnost! America felt good, damn good! And into this fertile, ego-stroking landscape stepped Bush, the inheritor, the designated successor to the throne.

His opponent? Ah, Michael Dukakis! The very name practically mumbled itself. A man who radiated the charisma of a particularly stern high school principal, riding a tank like a giddy lawn gnome driving a golf cart through a particularly thorny patch of municipal greens. He tried, bless his heart, he tried to inject some liberal fire, some economic anxiety into the proceedings, but it was like trying to stir champagne with a teaspoon. The electorate, by and large, was having too much fun! They wanted more! More of that sweet, sweet, tax-cut feeling!

At Dukakis HQ, the mood was less champagne, more flat Diet Coke. Willie Horton ads still flickered on the monitors, those grainy black-and-white specters that had turned the campaign into a morality play starring fear, race, and the revolving door of the Massachusetts prison system. The Duke had tried to fight back with charts—charts!—but charts don’t bleed, and the electorate wanted blood.

George Bush—Yale ’48, Skull and Bones, captain of the baseball team, the original résumé on legs—had spent a lifetime proving he was more than that preppy résumé. War hero, the CIA directorship, the China posting, the vice presidency: each a chapter in the longest job interview in American history. And now, at sixty-four, the silver-haired eagle had landed. No more "wimp factor" headlines from Newsweek. No more lapel-grabbing by the press corps. 

The early editions of the morning papers told the story in their own hieroglyphics. America had chosen continuity over experiment, experience over idealism, the man who looked like your neighbor’s yacht-club commodore over the man who looked like your accountant. And so the republic turned another page.  

Reagan's Revolution, that gaudy, glittering, supply-side, Laffer curving, deficit-financed carnival, would now be institutionalized, bureaucratized, Bushified. The Cold War still simmered, but the evil empire was cracking at the seams. The economy hummed along on borrowed time and borrowed money. Something Bush himself had once termed "voodoo economics." But now, the "kindler, gentler" Bush would engage in his own decidedly more-cryptic esotericism of "a thousand points of light." The Bonesmen got it, even if the press and the public never did.

George Bush, the last president to have fought in World War II, the first to utter the phrase "new world order," stood on the balcony of his Lone Star hotel at dawn, looking out over a city still drunk on victory. The sun was coming up like a gold coin flipped by God Himself, and for one crystalline moment the old patrician allowed himself to believe that history had chosen wisely. 

Location: Houston, TX, USA

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