1992 Ad

National Review, Nov 30, 1992

IN OUR LAST ISSUE, we advised a vote for President Bush on the theory of "Always keep a hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse." We expect our pessimism to be confirmed over the next four years. And the fact that Governor Clinton won with a percentage of the popular vote that would ensure a landslide defeat in normal circumstances suggests that most voters shared our mood, if not our conclusion. A Democratic victory was for them, if not something worse, then something not much better than the alternatives. This shoulder-shrugging resignation, however, is less a criticism of an untested President-elect Clinton than of an incumbent President Bush.

For presidential elections are almost invariably a referendum on the last four years. The 1992 election was an unmistakable repudiation of President Bush--the worst showing by an incumbent since William Howard Taft grabbed a mere 23 per cent of the vote in the 1912 three-way race. Pragmatic Republicanism failed by its own criterion: it lost.

For many years moderate Republicans, pointing to the landslide against Goldwater in 1964, claimed that conservatives could not win presidential elections; a moderate candidate was needed to capture the center. The evidence of the last 12 years suggests the precise opposite: Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan, won an absolute majority in the three-way race of 1980, and a landslide victory in 1984. Mr. Bush, running as Reagan's heir and "outing" his opponent as a liberal, won comfortably in 1988. But when he revealed himself as a warmed-over Rockefeller Republican with a fetish for bipartisanship, this incumbent President won a smaller percentage of the popular vote than the despised Goldwater.

Why? The largest single issue in the voters' minds was plainly the economy. And of the 43 per cent of voters who gave it as their top concern, only 24 per cent voted for President Bush. Indeed, he lost ground on nearly all questions concerning the economy and the size of government. Back in 1980, for instance, Republicans had enjoyed a 56-point margin over the Democrats as the party best able to control government spending. On election day this year, George Bush had only an 8-point lead over Governor Clinton among voters who said they wanted less government and lower taxes.

This was directly traceable to the President's departure from Reaganomics, illustrated most dramatically by the 1990 budget deal. That deal was the essence of moderate Republicanism: a compromise with the Democratic leadership that let overblown government proceed without undue disturbance. Three previous budget deals had increased taxes, spending, and the deficit. But that history was ignored-and repeated. In the decision that probably played the single greatest role in his defeat, Mr. Bush broke his tax pledge to the American people in order to reach a temporary accommodation with a hostile Democratic Congress. His reward? Polls show 22 per cent of voters saying that his breaking his tax pledge was very important in their decision. Of those, 33 per cent voted for Mr. Clinton, a mere 5 per cent for Mr. Bush.

With the budget deal alienating his base and the economy souring, the President nonetheless ignored the pleas a year ago of Jack Kemp, Vin Weber, and others for a tax-cutting economic-growth package. Even if Congress had stonewalled, that would have clarified where he stood and given him a powerful issue. Instead he defended the budget deal, denied the recession, and constantly postponed action. When he was finally driven to admit that the deal was a mistake, he blamed the Democrats, not his strategy of compromise with them, and demanded a Congress that would give him better compromises.

If Mr. Bush defended his failures, he curiously failed to defend his successes. When Clinton and Perot spoke of 12 years of failure, he never pointed out that most of those years had been very good indeed the longest peacetime expansion in U.S. history. He gave only perfunctory praise to his great predecessor. He seemed sometimes to believe the liberal charge that Reaganomics had been a costly mistake-apparently forgetting that he had been a leading member of the Administration responsible for it. As a result, he was unable to cite the success of Reaganomics after a shaky recessionary start as a precedent for his own economic difficulties. Indeed, Mr. Bush could never stick to a consistent analysis of, or solution to, the economy's malaise. Even when he had a critical and popular success like his speech to the Detroit Economic Club, economics never became a campaign theme. Instead, his chosen topic was Character--his character as war hero and grandfather, Clinton's as draft-dodger and ladies' man. This contrast, he hoped, would make him someone you would trust to manage the government. Michael Dukakis had lost an election when he fought on the theme of "competence over ideology." "Character over record" proved no more successful.

With his pragmatic embrace of the status quo Mr. Bush had also abandoned the strongest element unifying President Reagan's coalition: anti-Washington sentiment. This issue was seized first by Republican Pat Buchanan, then by Democrat Jerry Brown. Ross Perot exploited it most effectively, if insincerely, drawing 17 per cent of registered Republicans, 13 per cent of Democrats, and 30 per cent of independents. It is almost beyond belief that a post-Reagan Republican President could surrender this appeal to his opponents.