Hey, the '80s are over
Dionne, EJ. Jr.
CAMPAIGN '92 HEY, THE '80s ARE OVER THE CLINTON BOUNCE uring and after the Democratic Convention, you could not pick up your newspaper or turn on your television without hearing the word...
...His proposal to guarantee everyone access to reasonably priced student loans is a classic Democratic-style program...
...And that is exactly what some of the smartest Republican strategists I know actually fear...
...His economic program is thin on deficit reduction, but explicit about using government to do a few things that happen to be popular—and that many sober Republican business types also think are important: raising the education and skill level of the American work force in order to confront the global economy...
...At stake were not dry statistics about economic advantage—not all the numbers are bad—but a national identity crisis...
...If Democrats don't talk about the middle class, say these Clinton advocates, the Republicans will, and they'll win every time...
...But while no one was watching, Clinton had positioned himself to take advantage of many of the Republicans' weaknesses...
...He is also stuck on the spending side...
...Finally, Clinton has talked over and over about "the forgotten middle class...
...After the festivities in New York City, his lead over President George Bush soared—variously measured by the polls at between twenty and thirty points...
...And yes, he did get a lift from the convention and from his selection of Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his running mate...
...With Perot out, their first reactions seemed inspired by Gore's convention chant: "It's time for them to go...
...And here is Bush's final problem: After running the executive branch for twelve years, it strains the credibility of a great part of the electorate for the Republicans to run against big government or promise to reform it...
...But it was not in an ad for fabric softener...
...In 1992, George Bush is not so lucky...
...Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, was said to have won the largest convention "bounce" in polling history...
...His call for a small middle-class tax cut, which so troubled Paul Tsongas, was simply Clinton's way of saying that Democrats now understood the legitimacy of the average voter's anger about taxes...
...Many Perot supporters were actually Republicans angry at Bush but 14 August 1992: 5 not yet ready to admit that they had shifted all the way to the Democrats...
...In the absence of unbelievably good economic numbers in the next three months or a deep crisis in Russia that would make Bush's approach to the world seem relevant again, voters are unlikely to change their minds about him...
...or there is the middle class and the well-off, with the poor in the minority...
...Bush still has good polling numbers as someone the electorate "trusts," and you can count on the Republicans to contrast that reputation with "Slick Willie's...
...The question for many voters, especially the Perot voters, is this one: If government is so fouled up, what have Republican presidents been doing all these years...
...If the above argument is correct, it means that this election is structured in such a way that Clinton should win it...
...The Republicans will no doubt think of at least some ways of pulling Clinton back to earth—notably by trying to "forty-ninth" him to death, as in, "Arkansas is forty-ninth in (pick your category...
...But while it's relatively easy to see the many ways in which the Republicans will go after Clinton (readers will surely think of others), it is extremely difficult to come up with a coherent approach to building Bush back up—and as an incumbent, Bush must look a lot better than he does now if he is to win...
...The collapse of the Soviet Union means that the foreign policy issues so important to Bush and his party matter very little to the electorate...
...The years 1984 and 1988, which just happened to be election years, were also years of exceptionally high rates of growth...
...Local taxes were rising sharply, and local taxes, especially sales taxes, hit the middle class and the poor especially hard...
...The Bush slogan would be something like: "The man you can trust in a time of change...
...As an aide to the House Democratic leadership put it: "We did not realize how much we had been leaning on the Berlin Wall until we tore it down...
...Jimmy Carter learned that unpopular incumbents have a hard time persuading voters to look badly upon their opponents...
...E.J...
...Their war against taxes was popular because the great inflation of the seventies took people with average incomes and drove them into what they considered to be above-average tax brackets...
...Don't believe it...
...Worse for Bush, the declining importance of military power as the test of a country 's primacy only heightened the popular sense that the United States has become less powerful in comparison with Western Europe and Japan...
...That troubles some liberals, and also Jesse Jackson, since Clinton seems to be taking the Democratic emphasis off helping the poor...
...On government, Clinton has sent two related messages: that, unlike the Republicans, he really does believe in government...
...But Clinton started bouncing a long time before the convention...
...In the meantime, Clinton is having a great time making fun of the Republicans' incessant use of the old totemic words like "tax and spend" and "liberal," as if this were all they knew how to say...
...it's that for this election, the Republicans are largely stuck running with the past...
...Hey guys," Clinton seems to be saying, "the eighties are over...
...Little-noted polls in the late spring showed Clinton already even with or slightly ahead of Bush in a two-way contest...
...CAMPAIGN '92 HEY, THE '80s ARE OVER THE CLINTON BOUNCE uring and after the Democratic Convention, you could not pick up your newspaper or turn on your television without hearing the word "bounce...
...But as CNN's political analyst, William Schneider, noted, all those people did not gravitate to Perot to change Congress...
...Dionne, Jr., author of Why Americans Hate Politics (recently published in paperback by Touchstone), writes about politics for the Washington Post...
...By calling for higher taxes only on those earning over $200,000 a year, he was sending an old New Deal message: Democrats will tax Republicans more than they'll tax Democrats...
...George Bush may well have been trained to be the best cold war president we ever had...
...It's not that the Republican party is without a future...
...Either there is the middle class and the poor, with the well-off in the minority...
...People paid little attention because they were looking at a three-way race involving Perot...
...Republicans could talk a great antigovernment game, but when it came down to it, they couldn't cut the largest money items very much (things like Social Security, Medicare, or farm subsidies) because a lot of their own voters benefited from these programs...
...Ross Perot learned what he'd have to tell the voter about big-time deficit reduction—and dropped out...
...E.J...
...Clinton's advantages and Bush's troubles were masked partly by Ross Perot's presence...
...Even the Olympics underscored how different the world has become...
...Antitax populism, in other words, was not phony populism...
...So he regularly attacks excessive bureaucracy and he praises Housing Secretary Jack Kemp"s ideas about tenant management and ownership of public housing, suggesting he'd be willing to use government in new ways and even steal good conservative ideas...
...How much fear can a country with something called "The Unified Team" inspire...
...Clinton's lieutenants argue that this just isn't so...
...A long recession further undercut national confidence and took away the Republicans' single best issue, economic growth...
...they want a strong president, which is someone they did not think they were getting in Bush...
...A triumph for the nation turns out to be a kind of personal tragedy for Bush...
...The fact is that for all the Republican antigovernment talk, a large share of government spending is popular...
...The "trust thing," as our president might call it, could also work in another way...
...Bush strategists may well prove themselves to be a whole lot smarter than I am and come up with a brilliant plan between now and November...
...For the moment, he shows no signs of doing that...
...Commonweal but, unlike pre-Reagan Democrats, he understands why voters are frustrated with how government works...
...But when Perot pulled out on the night of Clinton's acceptance speech, in effect cutting his supporters loose, he not only gave Clinton a boost, he also removed the mote from our eye and allowed us to see just how much the country had turned against Bush and the Republicans...
...dionne, jr...
...But Republican losses are even greater than that...
...Bush's misfortune, as George Will has pointed out, is that the cold war ended on him...
...Bush not only threw away the tax issue by breaking his "no new taxes" pledge...
...it would help the poor and be popular with the middle class...
...But for the moment, I think only Clinton can beat Clinton...
...it was real, even if the Republicans tended to be especially generous in cutting taxes at the upper end of the class structure...
...Voters were in a fine mood by election day, which favorably disposed them toward incumbent Republican regimes...
...Bush faces a fundamental problem: All of the pillars of Republican ascendancy have been kicked out from under him...
...Yes, Clinton's lead was real...
...The Republicans will first argue that Clinton can't be trusted and then say that voters therefore should not believe all the sensible, pleasant noises he's been making...
...They were inclined to forgive others sins and overlook areas of disagreement...
...Bush will try to blame Congress, and given Congress's unpopularity, he'd be crazy not to...
...Broadly considered, they say that there are only two available coalitions in American politics...
...All of these factors are more important to Clinton's rise than a single convention "bounce...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
