"Read My Lips , No New Taxes!!" , the most famous words George H. W. Bush ever uttered. He said it at the 1988 Republican National Convention as he struggled to unite his party for the coming race for President against a surging Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts. Dukakis was a whopping 20 points ahead of George Bush the sitting Vice President. While Ronald Reagan had grown to have a good relationship with his Vice President, those around Reagan and the conservative wing of the Republican Party he represented did not trust George Bush. He had to bring them into the fold if he had any hope of catching and defeating Michael Dukakis. So Bush made a promise, a promise he would have to break for the betterment of the country.
He would live to hear those words again.
This is the story of the 1990 Budget Deal that led to George Bush reneging on his promise to not raise taxes. It would lay the groundwork for much of the division among the various factions within the Republican Party that still lingers to this day. Robert Cahaly, of the Trafalgar Group National Polling Firm, says much of what you see today in the modern political landscape is found in the coming 1992 election divisions that would eventually cost George H. W. Bush his Presidency. As he points out the Ross Perot voters of then are Republicans now, and 20% of the Republicans then are Democrats now.
The decision to go back on that pledge had a profound effect on the Republican Party. It led to the "America First" anti establishment campaign of Pat Buchanan, and in the remnants of that campaign are the seeds of the rise of another political figure nearly three decades later, President Donald Trump. That is a story we will tell in our next season of shows but for now here is where it all started.
In this episode we go back to the very start of it all, the 1990 Budget Deal that may very well have laid the groundwork for the boom of the 1990s, but it did so at the expense of the unifying principles of the old Republican Party, and in that split, lay the seeds of the populist party of Donald Trump we see today.
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