PrintSeptember 21, 2008
Newsweek's confused history lesson
In an otherwise interesting article on the American electorate's post-war preference for center-right presidential candidates, Newsweek's Jonathan Darman offers this solecism:
"George H.W. Bush won the White House not because of the tawdry Willie Horton ad but because he convinced the country he was the only candidate ready to be president in an unknown post-cold-war world."
While I have great faith in the collective wisdom of the American voters, this would have been quite a feat of prescience considering that he was elected in 1988 before the unexpectedly rapid fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
