Reply #6: Bentsen didn't help [View All]

[Wright Patman]

that much. He couldn't carry Texas. If you as a native Texan cannot carry your own home state against a carpetbagging interloper like George H.W. Bush, you have not helped the cause. Bush had never carried anything beyond a congressional district in his so-called "home" state until the 1988 election.

Reagan trounced him anytime he was on the ballot against Elder Bush. Heck, even Ralph Yarborough, one of the most liberal U.S. Senators in Texas history, made short shrift of H.W. in 1964.

I don't recall any kind of bounce like that in the first week after Sen. Bentsen's selection, but you may be right.

What killed Dukakis electorally, along with the fact that he was too short (yes, unfortunately image does matter) and "effete," was one of the most diabolically brilliant campaign managers of all time, the late GOP operative Lee Atwater of South Carolina.

He didn't even come up with Willie Horton as a concept originally, but he took it and ran with it for every last racist vote down South and even elsewhere that it could bring Bush. He did the same thing with the "Pledge of Allegiance" issue.

Molly Ivins 'eulogized' him by saying, "His own brain eventually rebelled at the toxicity of his thoughts," or something like that. He died of brain cancer and apologized on his deathbed for all the politicians' whose lives he had destroyed.