Word: raced
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bentsen's latest campaign report showed him with $3.9 million on hand for his Senate race against GOP challenger Beau Boulter...
...revulsion at political corruption descended to details from the outset. He boasted to his constituents, in the year Kennedy died, that "I haven't fixed a ticket." But others in the state were constantly fixing things -- a truth dreadfully confirmed for him in 1970, the year he lost his race for the lieutenant governorship. A boozy young driver with Irish political connections hit a campaign car accompanying Dukakis' own from a TV station. When Dukakis rushed to the hospital and saw one aide's head all bloodied, the normally controlled candidate fainted. That aide recovered, but another...
...next year, as a sophomore, Dukakis won a more important race, becoming a town-meeting representative. He ran with the help of a bright group of young Brookliners, many of them Jewish, who were consciously taking control of the town meeting on their way to bigger battles. Forming an organization called the C.O.D. (Commonwealth Organization of Democrats), they were not crusaders devoted to a single ideology. Reform for them meant putting better people into government, enforcing laws, ending graft...
...Senator Edmund Muskie, who came to campaign for Yarborough, an ultra-liberal. Yarborough kicked up dust as well, calling the Bentsens a family of land frauds and exploiters, a reference to lawsuits that were filed against the senior Bentsen and settled out of court. Bentsen's successful general-election race against George Bush was a much more genteel affair: a Houston insurance millionaire and a Houston oil millionaire did not have much to argue about, at least back then. Bentsen won, 53% to 47%, a reflection in part of the huge Democratic majority in Texas...
...stump speech was over, Bentsen strode angrily back to his car and shook the Missouri dust off his expensive shoes. A few months later he ended his campaign, but organizers of the event remember that day in Sikeston the way others remember a death in the family. The 1976 race so discouraged Bentsen that he considered not running for re-election in 1982. The lure of becoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee once the Democrats regained control changed his mind...