The Bush Crack-Up

...Thus it allowed the economic successes of the Reagan years to be belittled to the point where Bill Clinton and Al Gore could promise cheering audiences they would undo the economic damage of not just the previous four, but twelve years of "trickle-down" economics...

...But during critical periods in this one, anti-Bush media sentiment was obvious and dominant...

...The President also hammered Clinton for his proposed tax increases, which on paper looked like an obvious vulnerability...

...It is part of his story that while he knew Weinberger and Shultz opposed the arms sales, he did not realize the depth of their opposition, because he had not heard all they said about it...

...It came at a particularly opportune moment for Governor Clinton, since he was under withering assault from Bush about his character...

...The meeting and what was said at it had been known of for some time...

...Never mind that John Tower was deemed by the Democrats who control the U.S...

...Still, when the successful Gulf War brought oil prices back down, the economy began to recover, helped by falling interest rates...

...They never did...

...His complaints about the "gridlock Congress" only reinforced that impression...

...Nobody really believed Congress would pass the bills, but the Christmas session gambit, it was argued, would at least portray the President as a man with ideas on the economy he was willing to fight for...

...There is good reason to believe that the President did the right thing economically in leaving the economy alone, even if it did him little good politically...

...He meant it, too...

...The President, it seemed, had gone through what every President dreads¡ªwar and recession¡ªand would escape with his popularity not only intact, but greatly enhanced, broken tax promise notwithstanding...

...The President has never denied that he supported the arms sales, and that he knew that hostages were expected to be released as a sort of side benefit of improved relations with Iran...

...At the time, of course, Noriega was being prosecuted, successfully it turned out, for drug trafficking...

...He never said, for example, that raising taxes is not the way to reduce the deficit because it doesn't work, because the revenues never meet expectations...

...Not until the third-quarter economic numbers came out in late October, showing a "surprising" 2.7 percent growth rate, did the President abandon his "I understand you're hurting" mantra in favor of a more positive message about the economy...

...Nor did he argue that raising taxes risks stalling the economy, reducing revenues and thus worsening the deficit...

...hostages had come home, without any funny business with Iran or anyone else...

...Hence his famous statement during the primaries that the economy was in "free fall," which it was not...

...Besides, the President never seemed fully convinced himself that legislative intervention was what the economy needed...

...But the fiery attacks on Clinton and the Democrats during the GOP convention by Pat Buchanan and others were treated as a sort of orgy of intolerance...

...His aides, keenly aware of the odds against him, privately expressed wonder at his refusal to believe he would lose...

...When he did finally attempt to address the issue, his credibility had been deeply eroded by his broken tax promise and by the long period in which he seemed oblivious to the economy's condition...

...Well," said the President, laughing, "I do think so, old fella...

...As he and his advisers nervously scanned the horizon for signs of better economic health, the country grew restless and worried...

...e will never know, of course, but it is just as W plausible that a spectacular, failed effort to gain action on the economy would have made everybody look bad, including the President...

...But he was...

...The notion had taken hold that George Bush had spent his childhood in comfort and his manhood in motorcades and was simply out of touch with the average citizen...

...The hard times themselves might have been enough to seal his, fate...

...James Reston even wrote in the New York Times that Bush, having captured Noriega, didn't "know what to do with him...

...But he was in no position politically to argue that the economy was actually better than his political enemies were saying...

...In the end, though,these were all failures to deal effectively not with the problem of the economy itself, but with the politics of the problem...

...The Bush Administration didn't understand the need not only to win its battles, but to defend its victories afterward...

...But none of that seemed to cut it with voters at large, and neither the crowds nor the poll numbers responded to the economic plan Bush had belatedly articulated (re-articulated, actually, since it was mostly a repackaging of earlier Bush proposals...

...The final months of 1991 would prove to be the fateful¡ªindeed fatal¡ªhours of the Bush presidency...

...It was a fascinating story, but it turned out to be almost wholly untrue...

...But the news media were utterly uninterested in why the prosecutors chose this particular document to make public five days before the election...

...It is not a monolith and its biases do not necessarily control the coverage of a political campaign...

...His crowds enjoyed his attacks on media bias and his lampooning of Al Gore as the "Ozone man...

...In the end, he still might have been re-elected had the economic recovery that had seemed more than once to be underway actually come...

...In fact, the seeds of Bush's defeat were sown long before the campaign began, and it is far from clear that even the most brilliant race by Bush could have changed the outcome...

...What he denies is that he saw the deals at the time as straight arms-for-hostages swaps...

...The President frequently spoke proudly of these new provisions, which made his repudiation of the budget agreement that produced them seem all the more hollow...

...The final irony is that as the last votes were counted, the economy appeared at long last to be picking up...

...The media's defenders argue that, after the rough treatment Bill Clinton got on the Gennifer Flowers case and his draft record, no one can say he was treated favorably...

...And he might have been right...

...Yet here again was a case where the luckless Bush was in no position to boast of his achievement...

...The President didn't believe things were that bad., but was cut off from making that case by the need to undo the political damage wrought by his months of waiting for things to improve...

...Deep down, it seems, the President believed that the budget deal was not a mistake, that it was a necessary political sacrifice in the cause of fiscal responsibility, and a worth while gamble to help a sag ging economy...

...With the other political baggage he had to carry, they proved overwhelming...

...The way it was supposed to work was this: the taxes and spending restraints would convince the Federal Reserve that it was safe to loosen credit...

...The most conspicuous example was the play accorded the re-indictment of former defense secretary Weinberger on the Friday before the election...

...Soon after he had abandoned it, he responded to reporters who shouted questions at him while he was out running one day by saying, "Read my hips...

...Because the White House press corps is too large to accompany the President everywhere, a rotating "pool" goes with him on such events as plant tours...

...Just in time to allow Bill Clinton to usher in George Bush's recovery...

...There was the additional question of what sort of plan it should be...

...A word is in order here about the news media...

...But there was more to his decision to hold his fire than that...

...He didn't put it exactly that way, of course, but there is ample evidence that he had little regard for the tax promise as a matter of policy...

...No one noted that Buchanan, who had after all tried to defeat Bush, obviously did not speak for him...

...Any chance the President had of overcoming that was lost by his seeming failure to understand the pledge and what it had meant in the first place...

...But it didn't, and the effect on the public's mood and the President's popularity was devastating...

...New revelations and questions about Clinton's draftrecord were duly reported, but so were charges about Bush's role in the Iran-contra affair, whether they were new or not...

...Ross Perot had joined in with his jeremiads about the deficit...

...Only the Times drew from that pool report the picture of Bush as a man awed by a supermarket scanner...

...The Gulf War had ended in victory, the Cold War was over, and times were supposed to be better...

...Character and trust were the only issues that seemed to move his poll numbers...

...Released with the indictment was a copy of one of many Weinberger notes on the case which formed part of the prosecution's evidence against him...

...Bush has said he attended the meeting but missed part of it...

...What's more, the Independent Counsel could have chosen any of the many other notes Weinberger made...

...Standing on the train's back platform, microphone in hand, the President called out by loudspeaker to onlookers, marveling at the friendli ness even of those who held Clinton-Gore signs...

...To do so could have tempted terrorists to snatch some more Americans...

...T here was much else about the Bush campaign that seemed too late, including its formal start¡ªat the Republican Convention...

...He failed to grasp what Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz observed during his Iran-contra testimony: that, in Washington, no fight is ever over, no issue ever finally settled...

...The reporter who wrote the Times story had not witnessed the event, but had taken his information from a "pool report...

...This was widely ascribed to Bush's well-known aversion to campaigning, especially the bare-knuckled variety he used against Michael Dukakis in 1988...

...economy would be in by now were Saddam Hussein still astride the world's oil artery, occupying Kuwait and either threatening or controlling Saudi Arabia...

...Such is the Times's influence, however, that the story became part of the legend of a President who just didn't know how things were out there in the real world...

...But that issue had lost its power, at least for George Bush...

...The charge against him is that he denied to Congress that any such notes existed...

...Teeter further believed that elections are decided in the closing days, and that Bush had plenty of time to make his case at a time when people would be expecting it...

...The President and his team had miscalculated on a number of scores: on the economy itself, on the depth of public distress about it, and on the chances of getting action from a hostile Congress in an election year...

...To Bush, however, the no-tax pledge seems to have been nothing more than a politically useful campaign promise, an appeal to the selfish instincts of people who simply wanted to keep more of their money...

...And the end of the Cold War, instead of helping Bush politically, seemed instead to eliminate one of the reasons for keeping Cold War¨Cera leaders like him in office...

...This, of course, is precisely what many believe happened as a result of his 1990 budget agreement with Congress...

...He spoke repeatedly of the end of the Cold War, of little children who no longer must live in fear of a superpower nuclear confrontation...

...Except for the wording, there was nothing new about the note...

...He had the more urgent need instead to convince people he "got it...

...Until then, the President had largely refused to attack, answer, or even mention his opponents by name...

...It may be the only time on record where anybody got an exclusive story out of a pool report...

...11...

...For a time, it appeared this "soft landing" was exactly what would happen...

...The virtually unanimous advice the President got from outside economists was that any spending or tax cut plan big enough to make a difference in the economy would also carry a major risk of spooking inflation- and deficit-conscious financial markets and boosting interest rates, thus aborting the best hope of recovery...

...This notion got plenty of nourishment from the news media, which love stories about rich and powerful people and their alleged insensitivi ty to everybody else...

...The media, however, gave a huge ride to the Weinberger note, treating it as new information, which it was not, and reporting that it flatly contradicted Bush's version of events, which it did not...

...It doesn't take much imagination to envision what condition the U.S...

...For example, Bush had been at the Army-Navy game during a meeting the previous month when Weinberger and Shultz had objected strongly to the arms sales, hence Bush's contention that he was "out of the loop...

...The Persian Gulf War, perhaps the greatest single act of presidential leadership in four decades, was allowed to be dismissed by the President's enemies as merely a war to overcome a tyrant the Bush Administration had "created" by giving him illicit aid...

...The resulting lower interest rates, in turn, would avert the economic downturn that loomed in the spring of 1990...

...By then both the argument and, more importantly, the good news were too late...

...Indeed, what the President got in exchange for agreeing to the taxes was new spending restrictions designed to keep Congress from, for example, using defense cuts to finance new domestic spending...

...In the campaign, he often criticized both Clinton and Ross Perot for their willingness to raise taxes, but he never made the case against doing so on economic, as opposed to purely political, grounds...

...He may or may not be telling the truth about that, but it is the same story he has told for years, and because it deals with his state of mind it is unlikely ever to be proved or disproved...

...The President by then knew full well how things were out there and had the plunging popularity ratings to prove it...

...A President, Teeter believed, is expected to tend to the nation's business...

...The advance work, for example, was superb, especially in the critical closing weeks...

...Senate to be unfit for Bush's cabinet for the very kind of alleged peccadilloes that did not disqualify Bill Clinton for the presidency...

...Besides, the Bush campaign was by no means as poorly executed as the conventional wisdom suggests...

...To George Bush, governance is one thing, politics another...

...His three train trips were especially picturesque and had the addi tional benefit of giving the candidate himself a noticeable lift: he got an obvious charge from the knots of people who gathered at each crossing to wave to him...

...In fact, of course, the deal contemplated that Congress would do precisely that...

...Some in the President's inner circle, including the ever-influential budget chief Richard Darman, believed an emergency session to force action would not only fail, but poison the atmosphere throughout 1992, guaranteeing that no economic plan would pass before the election...

...And his lost credibility on that subject made it more difficult for him to get a hearing on his economic ideas generally...

...It is one of the oldest forms of journalistic demagoguery, spectacu larly illustrated in this instance by the front page New York Times story about Bush's astonishment when shown an ordinary supermarket checkout scanner during a factory tour...

...The story dominated campaign coverage for two days and broke whatever momentum the President had in the final days of the race...

...B y midsummer, his political plight had become dire...

...o conservatives of T every stripe, the "read-my-lips" no tax promise was an affirma tion of their common view that raising taxes simply feeds the growth of the federal government and ultimately serves the Democrats, the party of government...

...Brit Hume is the ABC News White House correspondent...

...What emerged, finally, was a modest set of measures that sounded more substantial than they were and, above all, were not big enough to do any real harm...

...When he talked of his plans to stimulate growth, they made little impact on voters correctly skeptical that he could get them through Congress...

...Hardly the words of a man who took his promise seriously as a matter of principle...

...Before he broke the pledge, he frequently defended it by saying, "I don't hear a lot of people out there telling me they want their taxes raised...

...Similar arguments were made against the overthrow of Manuel Noriega...

...A s all the world now knows, it didn't turn out that way...

...Republicans across the country were pleading with the White House to do something, anything to show that the President "got it," that he knew people were hurting and was going to do something about it...

...Under these circumstances, it is hard to see how Bush could get any political mileage out of the tax issue...

...By the campaign's final days, Bush 'was pounding his opponent at every stop on the twin issues of character and trust, and his advance teams were making sure that large home-made banners reading "We trust Bush" festooned the backdrop at every rally...

...There was a less obvious but important consequence of Bush's above-the-battle stance, not only during the first of the campaign but much of the rest of his presidency...

...All these things contributed to Bush's demise...

...No issue better exemplifies the political predicament in which the President found himself...

...To this day, the economy's best hope remains low inflation and low interest rates, combined with the natural cyclical processes that tend to produce, sooner or later, economic recovery...

...To be haunted by the arms-for-hostages issue must have been an especially bitter irony for George Bush, under whom all U.S...

...Thus Teeter thought that for Bush to engage in a political brawl with Pat Buchanan, then Ross Perot, and finally Clinton would have cheapened both him and his office and devalued the incumbency...

...Certainly he had liked his office far more than he liked running for it, and he never saw the presidency, as Ronald Reagan for example had, as a continuation of his campaign and the battle of ideas it had entailed...

...Such criticisms went unanswered, as if the President and his aides thought that because they were balderdash they would collapse of their own weight...

...Conservatives on Capitol Hill urged the President to keep Congress in session during the Christmas recess to pass the capital gains tax cut and assorted other economic measures that had languished there for nearly three years...

...After the primary season, the Flowers case was barely mentioned again...

...Maybe Teeter was right: an earlier entrance into the fray might have made things worse...

...The President's pollster and campaign chairman, Bob Teeter, believed that it was one thing for Bush, as Vice President, to go on the attack early and often, and quite another for him to do so as President...

...Bush's wonder was mostly politeness and the scanner, far from being ordinary, was a new and different device of which the company was especially proud...

...he note itself T seemed to say that ¡¡¡¡¡¡then Vice President Bush had attended a January 1986 meeting at which Weinberger and George Shultz had made plain their vehement opposition to what they regarded as a straight exchange of arms for hostages...

...Bush played to large and enthusiastic crowds at colorful and well-organized rallies...

...His broken pledge of no new taxes, of course, was the main reason...

...The recovery that seemed to begin in the spring of 1991 faltered, and the economy remained basically stalled for the rest of the year, even as the President¡ªand many economists¡ªproclaimed that it would soon pick up...

...he post-election air over Washington is filled with the cries of disap pointed Republicans that George Bush's convincing, yet not over whelming, defeat could have been averted if only the President and his team had run a better campaign...

...The White House believed Congress had a major political interest in taking action to boost the economy and that there was a good chance, therefore, that Bush's proposals, or something close to them, would eventually pass...

...But Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing oil price spike wrecked the scenario...

...Economic stimulus packages enacted to end recessions have a long record of coming too late and doing too little, if any, good...

...For example, the harsh attacks on Bush and Quayle at the Democratic Convention by, among others, Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson were treated as nothing special...

...Instead they were bad, and in many places getting worse...

...To be sure, Bush had other good foreign policy news to proclaim, and he certainly tried...

...It is not uncommon for a sample of the evidence to be attached to an indictment, but it is not an invariable practice, either...

...The President decided to wait until the 1992 State of the Union Address to unveil an economic recovery program, and vowed that whatever he offered would be "no quick fix...

...The coverage mirrored almost precisely the claims about the note made by Bill Clinton, who called a news conference to make the most of it...

...What's more, while the note implied Bush had been at the meeting, it did not actually say so...

...Instead, Bush offered the nonsensical argument that because Congress kept trying even after the budget deal to raise both taxes and spending that the deal had not been worth it...

...Yet even in repudiating that deal last spring, the President never said what many believed: that hitting ashaky economy with new taxes brought on the lingering recession that destroyed his popularity...

...He spoke often of Operation Desert Storm and of stopping Iraqi aggression...

...Even Vice President Quayle, saluting the focused, largely blunder-free race run by Bill Clinton, suggested that a poor campaign was responsible for the Republican ticket's demise...

...But the dilemma shows you what a fix Bush was in: he had to choose between potentially demeaning himself and ceding his opponents a six-month head start...

...So he ended up running for re-election in hard times he had been slow to recognize, with a program he didn't seem deeply to believe in...

...The Democrats had spent all winter and spring on the campaign trail painting the economy¡ªwhich had begun to grow slightly¡ªas desperate, and getting worse...

...But the victory over Saddam had seemed, finally, both easy and incomplete...

...Never mind the allegations about the state job she got and the other woman who was allegedly passed over in Flowers's favor...

...One older man in North Carolina shouted sourly to the President, "I don't think so...

...Unemployment, which tends to go up last in a recession, and come down last in a recovery, was mounting...

...The pool reporter prepares a detailed account for his colleagues...