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the chairman of the GOP Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Bush's former
campaign aide, Jim Allison, was now the deputy chairman of the Republican
National Committee.
Losing Again
Bush himself was ensconced in the coils of the GOP fundraising bureaucracy.
When in May, 1969, Nixon's crony Robert Finch, the Secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare, met with members of the Republican Boosters Club,
1969, Bush was with him, along with Tower, Rogers Morton, and Congressman
Bob Wilson of California. The Boosters alone were estimated to be good for
about $1 million in funding for GOP candidates in 1970. / Note #2 / Note #2
By December of 1969, it was clear to all that Bush would get almost all of
the cash in the Texas GOP coffers, and that Eggers, the party's candidate
for governor, would get short shrift indeed. On December 29, the "Houston
Chronicle" front page opined: "GOP Money To Back Bush, Not Eggers." The
Democratic Senate candidate would later accuse Nixon's crowd of "trying to
buy" the Senate election for Bush: "Washington has been shovelling so much
money into the George Bush campaign that now other Republican candidates
around the country are demanding an accounting," said Bush's opponent. /
Note #2 / Note #3
But that opponent was Lloyd Bentsen, not Ralph Yarborough. All calculations
about the 1970 Senate race had been upset when, at a relatively late hour,
Bentsen, urged on by John Connally, announced his candidacy in the
Democratic primary. Yarborough, busy with his work as chairman of the
Senate Labor Committee, started his campaigning late. Bentsen's pitch was
to attack anti-war protesters and radicals, portraying Yarborough as being
a ringleader of the extremists.
Yarborough had lost some of his vim over the years since 1964, and had
veered into support for more ecological legislation and even for some of
the anti-human "population planning" measures that Bush and his circles had
been proposing. But he fought back gamely against Bentsen. When Bentsen
boasted of having done a lot for the Chicanos of the Rio Grande Valley,
Yarborough countered: "What has Lloyd Bentsen ever done for the valley? The
valley is not for sale. You can't buy people. I never heard of him doing
anything for migrant labor. All I ever heard about was his father working
these wetbacks. All I ever heard was them exploiting wetbacks," said
Yarborough. When Bentsen boasted of his record of experience, Yarborough
counterattacked: "The only experience that my opponents have had is in
representing the financial interest of big business. They have both shown
marked insensitivity to the needs of the average citizen of our state."
But, on May 2, Bentsen defeated Yarborough, and an era came to an end in
Texas politics. Bush's 10 to 1 win in his own primary over his old rival
from 1964, Robert Morris, was scant consolation. Whereas it had been clear
how Bush would have run against Yarborough, it was not at all clear how he
could differentiate himself from Bentsen. Indeed, to many people the two
seemed to be twins: Each was a plutocrat oilman from Houston, each one was
aggressively Anglo-Saxon, each one had been in the House of
Representatives, each one flaunted a record as a World War II airman. In
fact, all Bentsen needed to do for the rest of the race was to appear
plausible and polite, and let the overwhelming Democratic advantage in
registered voters, especially in the yellow-dog Democrat rural areas, do
his work for him. This Bentsen posture was punctuated from time to time by
appeals to conservatives who thought that Bush was too liberal for their
tastes.
Bush hoped for a time that his slick television packaging could save him.
His man Harry Treleaven was once more brought in. Bush paid more than half
a million dollars, a tidy sum at that time, to Glenn Advertising for a
series of Kennedyesque "natural look" campaign spots. Soon Bush was
cavorting on the tube in all of his arid vapidity, jogging across the
street, trotting down the steps, bounding around Washington and playing
touch football, always filled with youth, vigor, action and thyroxin. The
Plain Folks praised Bush as "just fantastic" in these spots. Suffering the
voters to come unto him, Bush responded to all comers that he
"understands," with the shot fading out before he could say what it was he
understood or what he might propose to do. / Note #2 / Note #4 "Sure, it's
tough to be up against the machine, the big boys," said the Skull and Bones
candidate in these spots; Bush actually had more money to spend than even
the well-heeled Bentsen. The unifying slogan for imparting the proper spin
to Bush was "He can do more." "He can do more" had problems that were
evident even to some of the 1970 Bushmen: "A few in the Bush camp
questioned that general approach because once advertising programs are set
into motion they are extremely difficult to change and there was the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]