Bush’s campaign was considered to have set a new low-water mark for restraint-free campaigning. (Until the 2016 campaign reset the clock). The journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover made the subtitle of their book The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency because they judged the 1988 race to be “perhaps the most mean-spirited and negative campaign in modern-day American political history.”33 Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker wrote that the contest “did something new to our Presidential elections. A degradation occurred which we may have to live with a long time. The Bush campaign broke the
...more
