It\u2019s quaint how high-stakes the 1988 election felt; it\u2019s also hard to convey how Zeus-like Ronald Reagan seemed, even when it was apparent, at that stage of his presidency, that he was diminished. At the time, I did not have a sophisticated understanding of why he was the enemy, but he was, and now, I understand, especially, that Reagan and his loyalists were intent on reordering society\u2019s priorities, and at the top of their list were the feelings and fortunes of the rich. <\/p>\n
I never recall my dad bad-mouthing Republicans, not that he talked shop a lot at home\u2014preferring to decompress while playing Nintendo\u2014but he did warn me to beware of lawyers wearing shiny new cowboy boots. Austin has always crawled with them. <\/p>\n
Reagan\u2019s veep, George H.W. Bush, was not a shoo-in, but with the help of his sons, including a cocky George W., and the cynical campaign strategist Lee Atwater, he slowly waged a campaign that validated the prejudices of white voters. It was risky to stir up those dark feelings, but Reagan\u2019s legacy was on the line, and Dukakis, while a decent man, was vulnerable because he, the son of immigrants, suffered from the Democrats\u2019 greatest weakness, which is an inability to be mean as a rattlesnake on command.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s quaint how high-stakes the 1988 election felt; it\u2019s also hard to convey how Zeus-like Ronald Reagan seemed,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-397395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}