April 1988: Bush in Glory

. On April 11, 1988 at the 60th Academy Awards, The Last Emperor won all nine Oscars for which it was nominated, including Best Picture, as well as Best Director for Bernardo Bertolucci, who cowrote the screenplay. Wikpedia: "The film is a  epic biographical film about the life of Puyi, the last Emperor of China. The film opens in 1950, five years after the capture of Puyi by the Red Army. It then goes back to depict his ascent to the throne as a small boy to his imprisonment and political rehabilitation."

1988 NCAA Final Four semi-finals ticke for Sat. April 2, 1988t. Kemper Arena, Kansas City, Missouri. Finals were held on Mon., April 4.. Wikipedia: ."Kansas, coached by Larry Brown, won the national title with an 83–79 victory in the final game over Big Eight Conference rival Oklahoma, coached by Billy Tubbs. Kansas's upset was the third biggest point-spread upset in Championship Game history. After this upset, the 1988 Kansas team was remembered as 'Danny and the Miracles.'"  source

After Connecticut the Republican race was all over. Dole had fought hard as long as he could legitimately claim to be viable. He had withdrawn with honor and had given his endorsement at the end. By April, only Robertson still held out. His refusal to the step aside when he numbers dwindled marked his full transition from possible threat to a minor protest candidate. His recalcitrance in the face of obvious defeat smacked of disloyalty and would disqualify him from any future serious consideration within the Republican Party. 


Good riddance to the asshole, Bush must have thought, about the televangelist. His entire candidacy had been absurd. It had only served to weaken the party and give the idea to independents that it was overrun with nutty evangelicals. It played into the worst problems. Yet it also  underscored Bush's own manifest weakness at connecting with this segment of voters. To many of them, despite being Reagan's Vice President, he was an untrustworthy millionaire representing the Eastern elite.  

They will come to love me, he thought to himself.

Thankfully, the April primaries were now just a formality. Bush was the presumptive nominee. He could make the rounds of the primaries in semi-leisure, collecting his victories and solidifying his stature as a candidate of domination and strength. He must have been glad, almost delighted, to yield much of the media spotlight temporarily o Michael Dukakis, who throughout April was still plagued by an more-than-inconsequential protest candidacy of Jesse Jackson.

Dukakis was clearly going to win the nomination. Jackson didn't have a viable path at this point, but as the self-proclaimed and media-ordained leader of the nation's African-Americans, Jackson had an automatic credibility in staying in the race past the normal drop-out point, one that Robertson did not.  The Democratic Party couldn't force him out without looking terrible to the black community, which would cut deeply into their, and their philosophic idea of how politics should be run.

All in all, the situation was typical of the Democratic Party's historical inability to rally around a single standard bearer.

Thank god for the eleventh commandment, Bush must have thought. Speak no ill of fellow Republicans. By extension, you rally around the inevitable winner. Don't stay in just to knock him down. The Democrats kill themselves every time with infighting, and each time they swear they aren't going to do it.

Dukakis had done a better job than Mondale at least. He would not go down easily in the general election.

In the meantime, Bush was pleased to have the Massachusetts governor's energies devoted to this ongoing battle with Jackson. Hopefully it would last all the way to the Democratic convention, which ideally would be contentious and leave the party fractured. Meanwhile each week ticked off another headline: Bush wins again.

1988 Republican primary results for contests for late March and April.* Columns represent percentages of votes respectively for Bush, Dole, Robertson, Kemp, and du Pont. Only Bush and Robertson were still declared candidates at this point. From Wikipedia.  *Author note: New York results not represented here. Unavailable on Wikipedia and other sources, but they were considered of no consequence by then, and Bush would have won all the delegates.

Only last thing eluded him--the endorsement from one person that counted nearly as much as all the other votes so far, the man who had bested him in 1980, and whom he was determined one day to eclipse in greatness, not because his own ego required it, but because history inevitably would demand it. For all that to come, he still needed the Gipper.

Wikipedia: "President Reagan delivers a special address to Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery from the U.S. Capitol, April 28, 1981, a few weeks after surviving an assassination attempt."