He was warned: Mr. Bush's defeat was predictable but not inevitable; all he needed was a change of heart - and mind

National Review, Nov 30, 1992 by William McGurn

HONG KONG--Here in this last great outpost of British colonialism, five thousand or so expatriate sons of America gathered at the Marriott Hotel to watch the election returns. As the reality of the Clinton victory flashed across the two large-screen TVs--images of a jubilant Little Rock, George Bush's concession speech, and the talking heads intoning "change"--it began to approach what Augustine must have felt when news of the sack of Rome reached North Africa in 410. Although it would be presumptuous to liken the end of the Bush Administration with the fall of Rome, Hillary makes a more than passable Alaric.

I never subscribed to the form of political Manicheanism that held that conservatives would best be served by a Bush defeat that brought us worse policies rather than bad ones. Perhaps it is an Irish disposition, but no matter how bad things are I always hold out the possibility that they may get worse, and I expect full vindication from President Bill Clinton. Those conservatives now celebrating the Bush defeat would do well to sober up with a copy of Grover Norquist's masterly "The Coming Clinton Dynasty" in the November American Spectator.

More than this, I thought--and still think that almost until the last month Bush could have won re-election had he, even at that late stage, given people a real reason to vote for him. Never did I dream that the Bush campaign would attempt to promote its candidato solely along the lines of his opponent's untrustworthiness (especially given his own problems with credibility). In many ways it amounted to yet another broken promise: far from doing "whatever it takes to win," President Bush retained the architoct of all his miserable domestic policies, Richard Darman; squelched Republican efforts at the congressional level for a genuine growth package; and continued to argue about hypothetical emergencies overseas while the media were screaming about the recession at home. For all these reasons, while everyone was counting Bush out in the summer I thought he had a chance, and while he was gaining on Clinton in the last weeks I became more pessimistic, because there appeared to be nothing of substance to put him over the hump.

From the Wreckage

IN THE midst of the encircling gloom, I have nonetheless been determined to find such few silver linings as may exist. The first is the most obvious: my departure from the nation's capital for this far-flung outpost of the British Empire well in advance of the Occupation. The second, if I may toot my own horn, is what in hindsight now appears to be an excellent estimation of the Bush Administration. Back when Mr. Bush's popularity was hovering at 80 to 90 per cent and no less than Newt Gingrich was insisting that NATIONAL REVIEW was too hard on the President, I was there, about as welcome as Banquo's ghost, writing that those who live by the polls die by the polls. As the magazine pointed out at the time of the now-infamous budget agreement, the problem with pragmatism is that it doesn't leave you anything to fall back on when you hit hard times. Wasn't that old wizard Bob Teeter talking about "shoring up the Republican base" as late as October 317

From overseas, accurate information on American politics is difficult to come by. But from what I read in the International Herald Tribune--a handy compendium of the worst of both the New York Times and the Washington Post--it appears recriminations have already started, and all the fingers are pointing at the campaign team.

Again, I have to confess to a certain pride here, in that while everyone was hailing Robert Mosbacher, Fred Malek, Mary Matalin, Charles Black and Co. as the Dream Team of campaigns, we ran a piece in NATIONAL REVIEW claiming that there wasn't an idea among the lot of them. At the same time, when everyone else was treating the return of Jim Baker (whose campaign credentials included the Jerry Ford effort) as the Second Coming, it wasn't clear to this reporter how better flow charts and sharper meetings and all-mght strategy sessions (dutifully leaked to the press) were going to substitute for clear policy. It was clear that the essence of the Baker plan was to try to destroy Bill Clinton personally. George Bush had character.

That was never enough for an ordinary presidential candidate, much less an incumbent who had burned bridges with virtually all sections of his base. Judging from the victor, it wasn't even essential. I don't think that there exists any doubt, even among most of the people who voted against him, that George Bush is a better man than Bill Clinton will ever hope to be: as a patriot, as a husband, as a father, as a friend. The problem is that voters don't think this has much to do with being President. On top of that, all this harping on what George Bush did as a Navy pilot fifty years ago only underscored that he had no program for tomorrow.

President Bush never seemed to grasp that politics is about ideas--not during his stint in Congress, not during his time in the Reagan Administration, not even in the Oval Office. His approach to politics was essentially Old Boy, as if he were the highschool quarterback running for student-body president: Vote for me because I'm a good guy. And perhaps because his politics were so intensely personal, he tended to take disagreement among fellow party members as betrayal. Republicans in both the Senate and the House who did not go along with, for example, the 1990 tax accord were treated far more viciously than the Democratic leadership that had been at war with the Administration from day one.