Word: bentsen
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...have now come as close as they ever do to party harmony. There is nervousness, to be sure, over Jesse Jackson's failure to receive the respect and deference he craves and deserves. Will he, in the end, yield gracefully or grudgingly to the inevitability of Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen? Could the Dukakis-Jackson rift result in a lasting schism along racial lines? Such tensions are serious, but a party built around uneasy coalitions should be used to them...
What is telling, however, is the way the Democrats seem to have papered over doctrinal disputes. Dukakis is the party's first postliberal nominee: he blends thrift, managerial skill, social tolerance and a nonbellicose foreign policy with the Democratic mantra of "Good jobs at good wages." By anointing Bentsen last week, Dukakis further complicated the game of pin-the-label-on- the-donkey. With his centrist, probusiness views, Bentsen is a preliberal, a throwback to the days of the Solid South, when Democrats were created by birth, not belief. Thus the party that ruled almost uninterrupted during the Great Liberal...
...Bentsen's selection surprise...
...surprised me. It has been very well received. And it should be. It is a tribute to Bentsen. But, you see, I'm not running against Lloyd Bentsen. I'm running against Michael Dukakis, in Texas and everywhere else. How Bentsen and Dukakis get together on these issues where they are diametrically opposed, I don't know. Remember voodoo economics? Every place I went ((in 1980)) people were saying, hey, explain these differences between you and Reagan. Dukakis and Bentsen have a litany of differences. You can just walk through them, whether it's MX missile, support for the contras...
Sundquist said the pick "in the long term is probably a mistake." He questioned whether the liberal Dukakis and conservative Bentsen are compatible, and noted that they take differing stances on several major issues. "The first debate ought to be between Bentsen and Dukakis....I don't think there's anything Bentsen can do that will help that much in the South...