Bush’s tough-on-crime stance in his 1988 campaign has been cited by historians as helping to drive decades of politics low on justice or equity.
Inside the National Cathedral in Washington and beyond it on Wednesday, George H. W. Bush was lauded as a courageous and decorous leader, ” America’s last great soldier-statesman.” He was described as a loving father, a man with an appreciation for the zany parts of life and, as one columnist put it, the vanishing embodiment of a ruling class of trusted WASPs .
But amid the praise since Bush’s death, there have also been pointed critiques of his way of doing politics and winning the White House, which drew from a habit of relentless pragmatism, including on matters of race and questions of equity. Bush employed a strategy of subtle stereotyping, playing on suspicion, fear and group-based guilt, political experts and historians say. The combination remains so potent that Democrats and Republicans have grappled for decades with Bush’s methods — and some have outright emulated them.
For some African Americans and Bush’s political opponents, the Bush legacy also demonstrates the way that pernicious allusions to race can influence elections and all the consequences for power and exclusion that follow. Bush’s tough-on-crime stance in his 1988 presidential campaign, including in his speeches and an ad from an outside group about a black criminal named Willie Horton, has been cited by many historians of racial politics and even some Republicans as helping to drive decades of politics low on justice or equity.
For many Republicans, an overwhelmingly white group, the Bush presidency was good for black America. It is where the current notion of school choice began to flourish, and Bush named Louis Sullivan, a black man who was dean of the historically black Morehouse University School of Medicine, to his Cabinet. As secretary of health and human services, Sullivan was a fierce tobacco opponent because, in part, of its disproportionate effect on black health.
Related: George H. W. Bush through the years
“H. W. Bush is everywhere, in ways that defy easy binaries,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “What’s much easier to do is say ‘this person is good,’ or ‘this person is bad,’ when reality is much more complex. What I have concluded is that Bush was a person who took a utilitarian approach to achieving power.”
During the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, it was Rep. Al Gore, D-Tenn., who first raised the idea that his opponent and the eventual nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, was soft on crime. Gore accused Dukakis of being unwilling to contain violent criminals like Horton, a convicted murderer who had raped a white woman and stabbed and robbed her and her partner while out on a weekend furlough.
Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, heard the story and thought that Bush, the 1988 Republican presidential nominee, should raise the Horton case so often that voters would think of Horton as Dukakis’ virtual running mate, Atwater later said.
