After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election by John J. Pitney Jr. (review)

Professor Pitney's account of the 1988 presidential campaign and election is a lucid, engaging, and informative book that students of American politics will find valuable. It is a strong addition to the University Press of Kansas's ongoing series on American presidential campaigns. A diminishing number of citizens remember this campaign from thirty-two years ago that took place in a very different political climate than we have today. Younger readers may find that the norms of American politics in that era appear very foreign to them, and the author does a fine job of appreciating this reality. Indeed, the occasional comparisons to the contemporary political environment are very helpful.

The book meticulously explicates the context in which this election would be held by going back several decades and providing useful biographical details for all of the 1988 presidential candidates. The author manages to do this without digressing too much into ancillary episodes. There is some description of the 1984 election and how that disaster for the Democrats shaped the party's nominating context for 1988. After an anti-climactic primary contest, Republicans chose incumbent Vice President George H. W. Bush, while the Democrats chose Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis after a somewhat protracted primary season. The author's biographical narratives of Bush and Dukakis foreshadow some of the vulnerabilities that they each would face in the 1988 campaign.

Dukakis is properly described as a progressive reformer who valued innovation, efficiency, competence, and frugality in government. Dukakis held an ideology, but he sought to be a good administrator rather than a liberal icon. While some Democrats had hoped that Dukakis could escape some of the baggage that doomed George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Walter Mondale, the Massachusetts governor was successfully depicted as a tired and discredited big-government liberal who was beholden to left-wing interest groups.

Bush had the challenge of establishing an identity of his own after a long career in government that had him in subordinate roles. President Ronald Reagan was a particularly towering political figure in the 1980s, and while he was popular throughout 1988, Bush still had to define a name for himself when he was at the top of the ticket. Bush was less charismatic than his predecessor, and questions continued to swirl around his involvement in the complex Iran-Contra scandal that roiled the Reagan administration in the outgoing president's final two years in office. For his own part, Reagan did not lend his vice president an endorsement until the latter had secured the nomination.

The author contends that campaigns are indeed very relevant to electoral outcomes, but that fundamentals are also very important variables. Campaigns activate partisan and ideological impulses in voters for electoral purposes. Bush did that very well, while Dukakis did not. As the loyal heir apparent to a popular incumbent president, Bush hitched his campaign to continuing and protecting what was called the Reagan Revolution. Part of this strategy was making the most famous campaign promise in modern American political history: "Read my lips! No new taxes!" Bush proclaimed to cheering delegates at the Republican National Convention. The simplistic rhetoric was effective for the goal of winning the election but would make governing very difficult. This phenomenon is common when we see campaigns transition to the task of holding office.

The general election campaign is covered in greatest detail in chapter six. Dukakis held a strong lead in many polls well into the summer, but this had largely evaporated by Labor Day. Bush was never known as a ferocious campaigner, but in 1988 he went on the attack with not only the tax issue, but also a variety of matters that were meant to stoke voters' cultural and racial anxieties. The author takes readers back to the Massachusetts prison furlough program, and the fiasco over William Horton that became a major vulnerability for Dukakis, to which he could not (or refused to...