Hey, the '80s are over: the Clinton bounce

Commonweal, August 14, 1992 by E.J. Dionne, Jr.

During after the democratic Convention, you could not pick up your newspaper or turn on your television without hearing the word "bounce." But it was not in ad for fabric softener. Arkansas Governor Dill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, was said to have won the largest convention "bounce" in polling history. After the festivities in New York City, his lead over the President George Bush soared - variously measured by the polls at between twenty and thirty points.

Don't believe it. Yes, Clinton's lead was real. And yes, he did get a lift from the convention and from his selection of Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his running mate. But Clinton started bouncing a long time before the convention. Clinton's advantages and Bush's troubles were masked partly by Ross Perot's presence. But when Perot pulled out on the night of Clinton's acceptance speech, in effect his supporters loose. he not only gave Clinton a boost, he also removed the mote from your eye and allowed us to see just how much the country had turned against Bush and the republicans. Many Perot supporters were actually Republicans angry at Bush but not yet ready to admit that they had shifted all the way to the Democrats. With Perot out, their first reactions seemed inspired by Gore's convention chant: "It's time for them to go!"

Bush faces a fundamental problem: All of the pillars of Republicans ascendancy have been kicked out from under him. The collapse of the Soviet Union means that the foreign policy issues so important to Bush and his party matter very little to the electorate. (Even the Olympics underscored how different the world has become. How much fear can a country with something called "The Unified Team"inspire?) Worse for Bush, the declining importance of military power as the test of a country's primacy only heightened the popular sense that the United States has become less powerful in comparison with Western Europe and Japan. At stake were not dry statistics about economic advantage - not all the numbers are bad - but national identity crisis. As an aide to the House Democratic leadership put it: "We did not realize how much we had been leaning on the Berlin Wall until we tore it down."

A long recession further undercut national confidence and took away the Republicans' single best issue, economic growth. The years 1984 and 1988, which just happened to be election years, were also years of exceptionally high rates of growth. Voters were in fine mood by election day, which favorably disposed them toward incumbent Republican regimes. They were inclined to forgive others sins and overlook areas of disagreement. In 1992, George Bush is not so lucky.

But Republican losses are even greater than that. Their war against taxes was popular taxes because the great inflation of the seventies took people with average incomes and drove them into what they considered to be above-average tax brackets. Local taxes were rising sharply, and local taxes, especially sales taxes, hit the middle class and the poor especially hard. Antitax populism, in other words, was not phony populism; it was real, even if the Republicans tended to be especially generous in cutting taxes at the upper end of the class structure.

Bush not only threw away the tax issue by breaking his "no new taxes" pledge. He is also stuck on the spending side. The fact is that all the Republican antigovernment talk, a large share of government spending is popular. Republicans could talk a great antigovernment game, but when it come down to it, they couldn't cut the largest money items very much (things like Social Security, medicare or farm subsidies) because a lot of their own voters benefited from these programs. Ross Perot learned what he'd have to tell the voter about big-time deficit reduction - dropped out.

And here is Bush's final problem: After running the executive branch for twelve years, it strains the credibility of a great part of the electorate for the Republicans to run against big government or promise to reform it. The question for many voters, especially the Perot voters, is this one: If government is so fouled up, what have Republicans presidents been doing all these years? Bush will try to blame Congress, and given Congress's unpopularity, he'd be crazy not to. But as CNN's political analyst, William Schneider, noted, all those people did not gravitate to Perot to change Congress; they want a strong president, which is someone they did not think they were getting in Bush.

All of these are more important to Clinton's rise than a single convention "bounce." little-noted polls in the late spring showed Clinton already even with or slightly ahead of Bush in a two-way contest. People paid little attention because they were looking at three-way race involving Perot. But while no one was watching, Clinton had positioned himself to take advantage of many of the Republicans' weaknesses. His call for a small middle-class tax cut, which so trouble Paul Tsongas, was simply Clinton's way of saying that democrats now understood the legitimacy of the average voter's anger about taxes. By calling for higher taxes only on those earning over $200000 a year, he was sending an old New Deal message: Democrats will tax Republicans more than they'll tax. His economic program is thin on deficit reduction, but explicit about using government to do a few things that happen to be popular - and that many Republicans business types also think are important: raising the education and skill level of the American work force in order to confront the global economy. His proposal to guarantee everyone access to reasonably priced students loans is a classic Democratic-style program; it would help the poor and be popular with the middle class.