Bush, Clinton, Willie Horton and American Politics

Abstract

It was the blue-collar voters who flocked into groups such as Restore Our Alienated Rights whom the Republicans were eager to win over from the Democratic party and in the process unravel the gains made by disadvantaged groups ever since the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. For fundamentalists, whether Catholic or Protestant, the anti-abortion, anti-communism and anti-bussing crusade had a national, not merely regional, appeal. According to Howard Zinn, former SNCC activist and anti-Vietnam War protester, this new mood of conservatism which emphasised national unity had been engineered by the ‘uneasy club of business executives, generals and politicos’. The elite ensured that the disadvantaged turned their anger against one another: it was poor black students who were bussed into poor, white-neighbourhood schools that were already substandard, while the superior suburban schools remained segregated (Zinn, 1980). The spokesman of this new conservatism was the former congressman, Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Vice President, George Bush.