Word: republican
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...center of the recruitment effort was Michigan's Engler, a two-term Governor who had spent much of the 1990s turning the Republican Governors Association from a paper tiger into an organization that could raise $20 million in a single cycle. During 1998, Engler was the Republican who worried most about how the G.O.P. of Gingrich and Trent Lott had grown too detached from Americans' lives. "A lot of us decided he was the best candidate," Engler told TIME last week. "We wanted to be able to work with someone early on." Though careful to be discreet, Engler privately began...
...these early, intimate meetings, people wanted to see if he was one of them. Was he truly a conservative or a moderate, a Christian, a tax cutter, a libertarian? What breed of Republican was this guy? Bush seemed to have found a universal language. Warren Tompkins, a veteran G.O.P. operative in South Carolina, watched Bush come into the Palmetto State last year to raise money for Governor David Beasley. Tompkins recalled how people from both left and right remarked afterward, "This guy is talking to me." "Shoot," said Tompkins later, "that's when I thought this thing is gonna...
...this you just can't control," Bush told TIME. "Like generational change. Like incumbency. Like the tides of history." The tides of history, in 1998, could not have been more helpful if he had aligned the moons and planets himself. A popular Democratic Administration was drowning in scandal. The Republican Party in Washington was obsessed, adrift and seemingly intent on proving to voters that it had no clue about what was actually on their minds. And all the while Bush was waltzing to re-election in Texas against a Democratic opponent so hapless that the Democratic lieutenant governor endorsed Bush...
From that moment, among Republicans, the sheer hunger for victory swamped all distinctions of rank, ideology and geography. Corporate chieftains were calling down to Austin, wanting to come visit. Petitions began appearing from state legislators, some orchestrated by Austin, some not, calling on Bush to run or signaling their support if he did. Silicon Valley executives starting taking out ads in newspapers pumping his candidacy. The checks came in unsolicited at state party headquarters, to Republican consultants, to old friends of the Bush family...
...undemocratic nerve of it, and the risk that this could all blow up and leave the party with a choice among broken and, other than Steve Forbes, penniless understudies. "No matter how much support you get from insiders, activists, fund raisers, you still gotta run the gauntlet," says longtime Republican strategist Charles Black. "You gotta earn it at the polls. That's the beauty of the system. You won't know until February how he's gonna...