The current of unhappiness ran far deeper than the normal ebb and flow of partisan feeling in an election year; it challenged the settled order of our politics and the inflated expectations it had encouraged in us. The engines of economic growth, overheated in the ’80s, had stopped turning. The institutions of self-government seemed too corroded by money, vanity and cynicism to do anything about it. The optimism once regarded as a national birthright had given way to fear of the future and anger at the politicians who had mortgaged it for short-term gain for themselves and their patrons. In another time and another society, an elder of Bush’s own party said, the mood could properly have been called prerevolutionary. And yet the president seemed first blind to and then baffled by the danger, even as it threatened to engulf his presidency.
His polltaker, Fred Steeper, had been among the first of his men to see it, and then only faintly, as an odd anomaly in his polling. The numbers didn’t add up, Steeper thought, poring over his printouts one chill October afternoon in 1991 like a medical detective first confronting the symptoms of a troubling new disease. On the one hand, his client seemed the picture of political health, with a glowing 70 percent approval rating in the afterlight of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. On the other, a virus of pessimism was spreading across Bush’s America-a sense that the country was seriously off on the wrong track-and had by then infected half the population.
Steeper was an understated man, his imagination tethered firmly to earth by his data; they told him that the odds still greatly favored Bush’s re-election. But the dissonance between the president’s ratings and the popular mood wasn’t right, wasn’t normal. Steeper found himself haunted by the ghost of an earlier and grander wartime leader who had been cast aside by his people once the guns fell silent. “I’m worried about the Churchill parallel,” he confessed to a visitor to his high-tech offices in the Detroit suburbs. What would happen if the president’s trend line going down crossed the arc of America’s discontent going up?
The worry became a common one at the White House that autumn as both the numbers and Bush’s inattention to their meaning worsened. His people had been after him for months to get on with the business of seeking a second term. “It’s just a two-month sprint,” he would say, waving them off, the real campaign wouldn’t begin till Labor Day 1992, and there was no point in getting excited before then. So dreamy was his disengagement that, at midyear, one of his own children had felt it necessary to call him and ask point-blank whether he really meant to stand for re-election.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” he had replied, closing off further inquiry. It was as if saying yes, even in the family, would begin the worst year of the rest of his life.
He would run, of course, and by the conventional markers he relied on, he saw no reason why he should not win. The polls a year out looked good, at least to him; they were his daily affirmation that people still liked him and still took patriotic pride in his triumph of arms in the gulf. Sure, the doom-criers said the economy was in a bad way. But Bush and his closed circle of advisers didn’t believe it, and even if it were so, no one yet appeared to be blaming him.
Neither did the opposition then seem especially formidable. The Democrats his people most feared had fled for cover when Bush’s favorable rating hit 91 percent after the war; the early betting favorite was Bill Clinton, and when his name was mentioned among the president’s men, the dismissive one-word answer was usually “women.” There were no third-force candidacies to trouble their slumber. Ross Perot, the crotchety computer-systems tycoon, was thought to be happily engaged piling up his third or maybe his fourth billion, and Pat Buchanan’s right-wing polemics were still the stuff of op-ed commentary and talk TV.
THERE WAS, MOREOVER, the comforting private assessment of Bush’s friend and strategist Robert Teeter that his defeat was highly unlikely. Teeter was an ineffably cautious man, and he hastened to add that the election was going to be closer than most people thought. But he liked the president’s core strengths -the fondness America felt for him personally and, with his successes at war and diplomacy, a new respect for his leadership as well. He was not seen as larger than life, as Ronald Reagan had been in his prime, but he had something at least equally precious: people thought he was real, and they had come to believe he knew how to be president. It would take worse than a worst-case train of events to beat him; it would, in Teeter’s view, take a doomsday scenario.
What was missing from his reading and the president’s was the subtext of jeopardy-the unquiet spreading like a dark stain beneath the bright surface of Bush’s popularity. His own people did not pretend that he was really of Churchillian size. One of his middle managers described him rather as having been an adequate president; nobler adjectives seemed inappropriate even to his courtiers. But the temper of the times seemed to beg for more than adequacy-for a clarity and strength of purpose that seemed quite beyond him. Bush was instead the president as major-domo: a succession of patrons from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan had found uses for his excellent manners and his obliging nature in subordinate roles and then had left him to manage the national estate just as the bills were coming due.
His political coloration had always been borrowed from his patrons and his party constituency, no matter how much farther right their views were than his own. There was no real Bush agenda beyond muddling through. His domestic policies were a hash, reflecting his own inattention to them, and even the new world order he proposed to build in the post-cold-war era had a certain shapelessness to it, like a house built by do-it-yourselfers in the dark.
He remained rather an indistinct figure, for all his years on public view. Bush was not really from anywhere; he was a man of Washington and, like many such men, rootless in place, time and ideology. He had been born to a gentleman’s ideal of public service as the obligation of his class, and it remained his credo. Ronald Reagan ran for president because he wanted to do something, David Keene, a Republican strategist who had worked for both men, observed. Bush, in Keene’s view, had nothing he hungered to do; he ran to be president-to sit in the Oval Office and serve.
He was at his happiest and best at foreign affairs; it was, as he often noted, one arena where you could make things happen without ordinarily having to go beg Congress for permission. He would claim, with pardonable hyperbole, that he had overseen changes of almost Biblical proportion in the world. It was Reagan who had spent the Evil Empire into bankruptcy, but its disintegration had happened on Bush’s watch. It was he who got to negotiate an end to the 40-year balance of nuclear terror. And it was Bush who had inherited and fitfully used the resulting new opportunities open to America as the last real superpower on the planet; he had even got the Arabs and the Israelis into the same room, talking.
His apotheosis as world leader had been mobilizing a global alliance against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The enterprise was arguably more slaughter than war, with a kill ratio of perhaps 300 Iraqis for every American lost. There would be questions about whether Bush’s policies had invited the Iraqi aggression in the first place and whether he had ended the war too soon. But the quibbles were lost at the time in the flutter of a million yellow ribbons. It was a famous victory, and Bush had, for a season, become a national hero.
The halo effect of the war had dimmed only with the worsening of the economy and, with it, the impression hardening among Bush’s countrymen that his mind was elsewhere-that he neither understood nor cared about their travail. During his long ascent to the presidency, he had confided to friends that his days as CIA director had been by far the most exciting of the many chapters in his public life. The world was Bush’s oyster. Mention domestic policy, one pal said, and his eyes would glaze over; his people learned not to schedule meetings on the subject later than, say, 2:30 or 3, when there were always excuses for him to play hooky.
His distaste came across, for a growing number of Americans, as a lack of conviction about the concerns that mattered to them. The two most memorable lines he had spoken in his rise to power had been his charge in 1980 that Reagan was preaching voodoo economics and his exhortation in 1988 to read his lips-he would permit no new taxes. Both principles had been abandoned when they became inconvenient, and no new fighting faith had sprung up in their place. “I still can’t tell you what he stands for,” a senior campaign aide lamented, “and I’ve worked for him for 10 years.”
His people despaired of his suddenly growing a Vision Thing, or even producing a more prosaic to-do list for a second term. He had neither the flair nor the patience for high concept; George was a good and a smart man, a close friend from his long-ago days in Congress once said, but he appeared never to have thought about any public matter for longer than two minutes. He ran his presidency instead on a piecework model, reacting to problems serially as they were thrust upon him. Where Reagan had favored broad strokes, Bush painted by the numbers; inspiration tended to fail him when he was placed before a blank canvas and asked to do the big picture.
His want of poetry had finally caught up with him, after a lucky lifetime in politics. He was coming to seem a provisional figure in our history, a man who offered experience, prudence and competence when what America most wanted of him in the settling winter of its discontent was hope. Bush found it hard to grasp the growing disaffection of his countrymen, mistaking their desperation for fussiness. As his support wilted, his bewilderment grew; by the spring of 1992, he would scan what had become an alien political landscape and complain, “It’s vague out there.”
His people shrugged. They had long since reconciled themselves to his shallow depth of field. Maybe he would get lucky again; maybe the Democrats would oblige him again, as they had in 1988, by nominating somebody eminently beatable-somebody like Governor Clinton. What you couldn’t do was fix Bush, one senior adviser said at the eve of the campaign. Yes, he needed to convey some sense that he knew where he wanted to go. But, his counselor thought, he was the last president of the generation formed by World War II, and it wasn’t in him to reinvent himself as a prophet or a visionary. It was too late. By Election Day, his last as a candidate for public office, he would be 68 years old.
BUSH HAD THE FURTHER MISFORTUNE to be seeking re-election at a time of deepening estrangement of the governed from their government. The divide was not a new one; its ancestry was at least as old as the Whisky Rebellion of 1794, and by 1992 it had been widening for 20 years. It had been glimpsed in the third-force candidacies of men as disparate as George Wallace in 1968 and John Anderson in 1980. It had boiled over in the tax revolt of the late 1970s. It had sent outsiders like Carter and Reagan to Washington with implicit mandates to clean house. Its endings were almost never happy; perhaps the saddest was that, in 1988, half of adult America stayed home on Election Day.
But in that new Age of Anxiety called the ’90s, the people’s alienation from the settled institutions of politics and governance had risen to a frightening flood tide. It was, the young Democratic polltaker David Petts thought, as if a contract had been broken between Washington and the rest of the country. His Republican counterpart Linda DiVall did a survey advancing the proposition that the entire political system was broken-that it was run by insiders who didn’t listen to working people and couldn’t solve their problems. In the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, three voters in four agreed.
For the disaffected, each day’s news seemed to bring fresh grounds for unbelief The sputtering economy was itself a daily indictment, of Congress as well as the president. The national debt had quadrupled in the Reagan-Bush years, to $4 trillion and counting. Savings and loans lay in ruin. Banks were wobbling under backlogs of bad debt. Real-estate values crumbled. Corporations shored up profits by “downsizing,” which sounded nicer than letting people go; blue- and white-collar jobs were disappearing not just for the duration but for good. One American in 10 was on food stamps, one in eight living in poverty; unemployment had touched one family in four. For those who were working, household incomes were stuck where they were in the early ’70s-and then only because the working wife had become an American norm.
A sense of danger hung like smoke in the air, a fear that the future was at hazard and the nation in decline. Tokyo eclipsed Moscow in the American nightmare; in Fred Steeper’s focus groups, people talked about the victorious end of the cold war only if you reminded them of it. Pessimism supplanted hope in the American Dream; great majorities felt that their own standards of living were declining and believed, against the grain of history and myth, that their children would do worse still.
Politics, for growing numbers of Americans’ had little to do with real-world concerns; the principal interest of its practitioners seemed to be their own survival and betterment at public and private expense. Their cynicism, even their criminality, was widely assumed. A hit movie proposed quite seriously that John F. Kennedy had been the victim of a state conspiracy involving practically every arm of government except perhaps the Bureau of Mines. A poll brought in a two-thirds-majority verdict that a sizable number of the people running the country were crooked-a level of suspicion unmatched even at the height of the Watergate scandals.
The quest for the presidency in 1992 thus began as a kind of Kabuki drama played to an audience grown weary of its stylized makeup and its ritualized forms. Politics had become a game for professionals, at once attuned to and removed from a population they segmented into coalitions and target groups. Some surveys even detected an incipient collapse of faith in American democracy-a breakdown so far advanced as to call the very legitimacy of the government and the electoral process into question.
One inquiry, a 10-city tour of the American psyche commissioned by the Kettering Foundation in 1990 and 1991, found levels of revulsion so high that people no longer felt they lived in a democracy at all; the nation, in their view, had fallen captive to an oligarchy of politicians, PACs, lobbyists and mass media responsive only to special interests, including their own. Elections had become charades, all empty rhetoric, slung mud and profligate spending; the citizens and their concerns had been crowded almost entirely out of the picture.
The people appeared to have caught on, and their mood was dangerous to all professional politicians, of whatever party or persuasion. On the day he left for Moscow as Bush’s ambassador, Robert Strauss, the Democratic power lawyer who had witnessed much history and brokered some of it in his 72 years, ventured to a friend that the faith of the people in their country was the lowest he had ever seen it. They loved America, he said, but they no longer believed it could deliver for them, and they had accepted as a fact of life that they were going to be screwed. In such a climate, voting no was the best revenge. It became quickly evident that 1992 would be a time when incumbents fell and insurgencies bloomed, challenging a two-party architecture that had been more or less securely in place since the extinction of the Whigs before the Civil War.
The burden fell most heavily on George Bush. He was victim in part to our habit of asking too much of the men who have held or sought our highest office. A presidential election has come to resemble a pilgrimage of the lame and halt to a holy place, so great are the hopes, prayers and expectations it excites. Nobody mortal could fulfill them all, and Bush-unlike a Roosevelt, say, or a Reagan-did not have the art to pretend that he could. Hope, which dies hard in America, would seek other vessels. Bill Clinton, the man who would emerge as the leading Democratic challenger, was a bright and talented politician, but his most compelling claim was that he was new.
