Quest for the Presidency 1992
Miller, Mark & Goldman, Peter & DeFrank, Thomas M. & Murr, Andrew & Mathews, Tom
Written by Newsweek's political staff, Quest for the Presidency is a beautifully crafted, brilliantly reported account of the 1992 presidential race that arrives embarrassingly late. Some of its...
...The Republican realignment, begun in 1968, deepened in 1980 but idle since then, was merely waiting for a catalyst...
...And that will probably turn out to be Clinton's role in history...
...from the generation that had fought World War II to the generation sundered by Vietnam...
...Whatever you think of Clinton, you would not think much meditation would be required to understand him...
...And there were pictures, she said...
...from men who mistrusted government to men and women who believed in its affirmative uses...
...But just because the information is exclusive doesn't mean it's interesting or valuable...
...And yet the president seemed first blind to and then baffled by the danger, even as it threatened to engulf his presidency...
...After prevailing over a pathetically weak Democratic field, Clinton proved himself adept at one thing, drawing a contrast with Bush without veering too far to the left...
...His claims to be a different Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Clinton revived conservatism—and the GOP—by trying to replace it with watered-down liberalism...
...From the vantage point of post–November 8, 1994, the correct conclusion seems obvious: Clinton's rise to the White House was an aberration...
...All this comes through in Quest, even if the contributors are often unaware of it...
...It was Spencer who went to the Pentagon to broach the subject with Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who didn't rule out replacing Quayle but said he didn't want to be asked...
...But he softened the story later, and when the time came to meet face-to-face with a Bush representative, former Marine Commandant P. X. Kelley, he didn't show up...
...And he couldn't work with the experienced pols—Ed Rollins, Hamilton Jordan—who might have elected him president...
...Another trained to a Marine who'd told friends he had known Clinton in Arkansas and later housed him in Norway during Clinton's antiwar days...
...The authors are blind and baffled about the state of American politics...
...I think the press would murder me if I did this," Bush told a friend...
...I'm talking about Ross Perot...
...If "complicated" doesn't describe Bill Clinton, it does describe Maraniss's sympathies for him...
...They've been done in by an intervening event, the 1994 election...
...Was Clinton an operator or the real thing...
...True, but the press murdered him anyway...
...The tale of the feckless effort to jettison Quayle is both, however...
...This is the downside of access...
...kind of Democrat who believes in government activism but not government intervention are vapid, but he did manage to restart the engine of realignment...
...People who crave power and attention are not among the more elusive of human types...
...Three years ago the Washington Post dispatched him to Little Rock to get a fix on the candidate...
...Though Bush had ruled out using Clinton's sexual affairs against him, his staff pursued a woman named Naomi, who said she'd been seduced by Clinton at a Little Rock party in the mid-1980s...
...He put middle-class folks first, Bush . . . Oh, you get the drift...
...But the embarrassment comes from the book's conclusions...
...Just ask the new king of the Washington mountain, House Speaker Newt Gingrich...
...But he alone understood that the public was fed up with Washington, symbolized more by the Democratic Congress than the White House, and desperate to rein in the federal government...
...The Newsweek crew didn't understand how rich that vein is, nor did I at the time...
...Clinton had supposedly talked of giving up his American citizenship—at least that's what the Marine had told "at least six acquaintances...
...That puts Clinton in a class with Mikhail Gorbachev as a world-class promoter of unintended consequences...
...In fact, there's too much...
...Without him, Bush was a goner...
...Or this one: "What had come to pass was a seismic change in our politics, a shift of power from the ruling party of a quarter-century to its opposition...
...What emerges clearly in this long book is that only one candidate was in touch with the populist and conservative energy that would explode in 1994...
...I've got a suggestion...
...But there would be a big payoff to such a book...
...Clinton was a great campaigner, but other than that, he didn't have a clue...
...Not only Bush...
...Newsweek reporters make a pact with campaigns to hold material until after election day in exchange for getting lots of it...
...Take this one: "The central idea of the Reagan Revolution, that government was a bad thing, no longer seemed relevant to reality...
...Bush came "to the point of yielding to temptation," the authors write, then backed off...
...He represented change, Bush was status quo...
...Gorby killed Communism by trying to save it through reform...
...Conversations among James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, Stan Greenberg, and Mandy Grunwald drone on endlessly...
...T he Quayle story is DeFrank's work and so is the other swatch of great reporting, involving the Bush campaign's hunt for a "silver bullet," a revelation about Clinton so damaging it would swing the race to Bush...
...As for Bush, he couldn't even campaign effectively...
...But in the end, after numerous QUEST FOR THE PRESIDENCY 1992 Peter Goldman, Thomas M. DeFrank, Mark Miller, Andrew Murr, Tom Mathews A Newsweek Book–Texas A&M University Press / 742 pages / $29.95 reviewed by FRED BARNES The American Spectator April 1995 69 phone conversations with Bush contacts, she vanished...
...Sure, he's a wacko...
...Newsweek crew...
...Those who have observed Clinton Matthew Scully was a speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle...
...He's not a conservative...
...Despite Bush's denial, the anti-Quayle cabal included all the top Bush brass—chief of staff James Baker, campaign chiefs Bob Teeter and Fred Malek, former President Gerald Ford, even GOP strategist Stu Spencer...
...There's also fascinating inside information from the Clinton campaign, reported by Mark Miller...
...It's far easier to put together a book about the relatively few individuals who seek the presidency...
...Some of its revelations are fresh, like the riveting details of efforts by President Bush's top aides to dump Vice President Dan Quayle from the ticket in favor of either Colin Powell or Bob Dole...
...Those who write it will have a real grip on the state of political play, which is precisely what eluded them in 1992...
...He was tomorrow, Bush yesterday...
...The powerful have their psychological conflicts to face, but the drama is easily overstated: What human being is not divided, complex, and torn...
...Newsweek's campaign books (this is the third) are notable for two things: the fluffy prose of Peter Goldman and the dazzling reporting of stalwarts like Tom DeFrank, for years the magazine's White House correspondent...
...They describe Clinton as painfully indecisive, ideologically torn, overly reliant on polling and focus groups, given to fits of self-pity—hardly the stuff of a pioneer of a new political era...
...In another time and another society, an elder of Bush's own party said, the mood could accurately have been called prerevolutionary," according to the D avid Maraniss in First in His Class invites us to brood over Bill Clinton as a "complicated," "tormented," and "torn" character, much as Robert Caro has looked at LBJ as a man of "light" and "dark" threads...
...Perot and his shapelesspopulism had tapped into a vein of history literally as old as the American nation, the revolt of the burghers against a distant and unfeeling crown," the authors write...
...They were bolstered by a poll of dubious merit that suggested losing Quayle might boost Bush by four to six percentage points...
...That's a whopper on par with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s claim that President Clinton's victory marked the beginning of a new era of Rooseveltish government activism...
...There was plenty of damaging information available, just not "the killer issue...
...This isn't a snap...
...Instead of writing another making-of-the-president book, the authors should turn their reporters loose on the 1996 congressional races...
...On the contrary, that idea is reality now...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
