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Subject: Domestic Perils Sink President; To the End, Bush Expected Anxious Voters Would
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 92 04:54:43 EST
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Domestic Perils Sink President; To the End, Bush Expected Anxious
Voters Would Return<By Ann Devroy=Washington Post Staff Writer=

Even during the final days of a campaign in which the majority of
voters had been saying for a year they wanted anyone but George
Bush, the president would not hear of it, could not accept it.

"He told me he just could not believe that when they went into
that voting booth they'd forget the Republicans had won the Cold
War, defeated a tyrant in the Persian Gulf, made the world a safe
place for their children," said one congressional ally, recount-
ing a conversation last week with the president.

"He told me it was politically incorrect now to admit to being
for Bush but privately, the voters, they'd come back. It could
just not be this bad."

But it was.

Yesterday, George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the
United States, who returned from his foreign travels and war tri-
umph to discover an anxious America he did not understand, got
the final verdict on his presidency.

"It was a failure of governing more than it was a failure of cam-
paigning," said one of the president's advisers. ". . . He and we
did not anticipate at the close of the Cold War there would be
this desire for an activist government, a government turned to-
ward the problems at home.  We put all our chips on the economy
improving and when it didn't, there was nothing there."

Bush's fall was one of the most precipitous declines in American
political history, a mean, almost inexorable, slide from that
March in 1991, after the gulf war, when a record 90 percent of
Americans said they approved of his handling of the presidency.

Six months later, Bush would call two dozen veterans of his pol-
itical wars to a daylong Camp David session to discuss the upcom-
ing campaign. With his approval rating then near 70 percent and
most of the heavyweight Democrats opting out of the 1992 race,
Bush was riding high. He would go from there to one of his Kenne-
bunkport golf-and-boat-and-jog vacations at the Bush family com-
pound atop the rocky Atlantic Ocean shore in Maine.

Robert M. Teeter, later to be named campaign chairman, said Bush
wanted his reelection to be like Ronald Reagan's, out of view un-
til election year, presidential, dignified. Patrick J. Buchanan
ruined that first, with his challenge that shocked the Bush camp
into a new round of panic. But that would come later.

In 1991, many of Bush's aides were almost cocky, like then-White
House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, who had opened the year with
a declaration that typified the mood of the administration: As
far as the White House was concerned, Sununu said, Congress could
just go home because there was nothing that needed to be done by
Washington.

But there were rumblings of trouble, even then.

Overwhelming approval of his handling of foreign policy - 80 per-
cent that August - was camouflaging some deep public concerns and
giving him and his aides a false sense of comfort. Teeter's Au-
gust 1991 poll showed half the voters felt the nation was on the
wrong track. Fewer than two-fifths of voters approved of Bush's
handling of the economy. But the White House and its allies main-
tained, as they had for months, that when the economy began im-
proving, as all their economic gurus said it would, everything
would be fine.

In the months ahead, alarm about the economy worsened. Bush
watched his former attorney general Dick Thornburgh go down to
defeat to Harris Wofford in Pennsylvania's Senate race, with Wof-
ford riding the populist health care issue to victory. As domes-
tic issues moved front and center, Democrats began to mock Bush
for his overseas travels, and in a panicky response, the
president abruptly canceled a trip to the Far East. And for the
first time in his presidency, in December 1991, more Americans
dissapproved of his handling of his job than approved.

Bush would never recover.

As the new year began, Bush knew, by all accounts, that he was on
a slippery slope. All he had to do was read the newspapers. In
late November, as he contemplated his fate at a Camp David
Thanksgiving, Republicans were pleading in public. Steve Roberts,
the Iowa Republican chairman, said Bush needed to respond to
widespread worries about the economy and answer Democratic claims
that he lacked a domestic agenda. Van B. Poole, the Florida GOP
chairman, described "anxious" Republicans who wanted Bush to get
up and fight.

By August, as Bush was handed the Republican nomination at a con-
vention seized by the party's right wing, barely one-third of the
voters approved of his handling of the job. Nearly 80 percent
said the nation was on the wrong track. The economic news had
been relentlessly bad.

Bush, flailing and anxious, was on his third chief of staff in a
year: He had dumped Sununu after his Thanksgiving sojourn at Camp
David; then he had taken up with Samuel K. Skinner; then he
dumped Skinner for James A. Baker III.

Nothing seemed to work. He was preparing for his sixth of seven
"economic vision" speeches in little more than a year. He was
continuing to say that his problem was not his policies but his
inability to communicate them to the public. His campaign of ex-
perienced operatives was almost inoperative, inexplicably unable
to make and execute decisions.

In these final days, Bush called 1992 "the most unpleasant year
of my life," and complained repeatedly of being mistreated by the
news media and written off. George W. Bush, in a phone conversa-
tion from Air Force One on Monday, spoke of his father "soldier-
ing on" in the face of "unbelievable treatment" from the media.

As the general election campaign opened in September, Republicans
were dispirited. The clock was ticking, ticking, ticking, and
Bush, in the view of many, had started too late, missed too many
opportunities, let too many chances pass him by.

Bush kept saying there was time, plenty of time, to get into the
fray. Once voters saw him clearly, he said, they would make the
right choice because "things just aren't that bad."

When the campaign finally seemed to move in late October, even
Bush appeared to realize he started too late. Asked about that by
a caller on CNN's "Larry King Live," Bush said, "For a long time,
I decided I wouldn't get into the arena," attempting instead to
"get some things through Congress.  "After our convention," he
said, "I started in. . . . some thought it was a little late.
They may well have something."

Long before he moved into the Oval Office, Bush liked to bemoan
naysayers, pessimists and what he called doom-and-gloomers. "I
see the glass half full while others see it half empty," Bush
used to tell audiences a decade ago in describing his innate be-
lief that things are never as bad as they may seem.

It was that refusal to see the recession and his own political
peril clearly that Bush allies and critics blame for his loss.

"It was a whole series of missed opportunities and at each point,
it got to be later in the day and harder to do," said another
aide. He attributed the loss to a "weird and doomed synergy"
between a passively conservative president, wedded to maintaining
the Reagan status quo, surrounded by a group of senior advisers
who encouraged "a do-nothing, risk-nothing economic and domestic
policy."

During this long, uphill campaign, Bush has admitted one major
mistake - abandoning his 1988 pledge not to raise taxes and ap-
proving a large 1990 tax increase. But many of his aides, even
the most loyal ones, insist voters would have forgiven the tax
increase if the president had turned activist on the economy two
years ago.

In the final months of his presidency, Bush, finally, took to
describing himself as a conservative activist with an agenda for
change. But it was too late. By most accounts, two years too
late.<02:30 11-04C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)