Bush faltering
Chapin, Jim
CAMPAIGN '92 BUSH FALTERING IS TSONGAS A REPUBLICAN? Since it began in 1952, the New Hampshire primary has taken on mythic power in American politics. One of its "rules" is that if the vote for...
...I agree with them...
...In fact, without him in the campaign, black issues are less visible than in any election since 1956...
...for example, the Catholic vote...
...1992 continues this downward path...
...The exit polls showed that 47 percent of New Hampshire Republicans disapprove of his presidency and that half the Buchanan voters expect to vote against Bush in the fall...
...But this year only one issue was playing: the economy...
...If he was running a "help people" campaign, this technique didn't help...
...The neoconservative problem— the lack of an electoral constituency—is perhaps sharper than ever...
...No one, however, has yet drawn this "logical" conclusion...
...Among the "probusiness" questions that should be put to Tsongas, but probably won't be, is one about whom he would appoint to the National Labor Relations Board...
...Once they found that Reagan seemed acceptable, the election was over...
...The media—though they first crowned Bill Clinton front runner, and then unthroned him without a vote being cast—now seem to have decided that the Clinton showing in New Hampshire is enough to keep him alive in the race...
...Another is that every presidential winner has won his party's New Hampshire primary...
...The problem for Carter was that the voters were no longer interested in him, they were looking to see if Reagan really was "crazy...
...In fact, no less than 7 percent of the Republican voters were write-in, and most of them wrote in the names of Democratic candidates...
...Bush is left with just two chances of getting reelected: a substantial economic revival in place by the fall, or a Democratic candidate who is not credible as a national alternative...
...In Michael Dukakis, who touted the "Massachusetts Miracle" and found "populism" only in the last, desperate two weeks of his campaign...
...His survival in the face of this media windstorm seems to make Clinton the likely Democratic nominee...
...In fact, the Tsongas platform, which combines economic conservatism and social liberalism, has dominated the Democratic party since the midseventies...
...Bush might have done better than Reagan as president from '85 to '89, but few Americans now think that he is the man to lead us into a "new world order...
...To the Democratic core electorate, his being a Vietnam veteran was probably more puzzling than heartening...
...He has taken a long step toward bringing the Right back from its 1980 coalition with Jewish neoconservatives and libertarians to its 1940 coalition with isolationists and nativists...
...in so doing, he'd have us believe, he is fighting the antibusiness position of the Democratic party...
...Media coverage of presidential election races manages to get worse every four years...
...If the economy doesn't pick up, that same question is the only thing standing between Bush and forced retirement...
...Senator Bob Kerrey ran aground for lack of a theme in New Hampshire...
...One argument used against a Jesse Jackson candidacy (usually by people who didn't 6: 13 March 1992 Commonweal like him in the first place) was that by soaking up liberal and black voters, he was locking blacks out of the electoral process...
...Republican consultant Roger Ailes and NBC commentator John Chancellor agree that Tsongas ran the most economically right-wing campaign in New Hampshire...
...And the boos that rained down on PBS comic Mark Russell at his University of Buffalo forum when he joked about Clinton's motel parking spaces suggest that the governor is benefiting from a backlash against media exposés...
...Neoliberals may be happy with this absence, but so far it gives an abstract quality to the campaign...
...Now with just 34 percent of the vote Tsongas got a big bounce...
...There were two factions that weren't on the ballot at all: leftwing Democrats and neoconservatives...
...So far, Tsongas has managed to persuade the media that he is campaigning on the "hard truths" avoided by other Democratic candidates...
...It wasn't just that the incumbent president got only 53 percent of his party's vote...
...On the other hand, his status as a paid lobbyist for the National Venture Capital Association, and other unexamined parts of his biography, will soon be scrutinized...
...Though Jerry Brown did better than expected, he still finished fifth...
...Commonweal 13 March 1992: 7...
...JIM CHAPIN Jim Chapin is a writer, political consultant, and a long-time Democratic party activist...
...During Walter Mondale's campaign a man whose only campaign promise was to raise taxes...
...In everything from free trade to unregulated capitalism to abortion and environmentalism, he shares their views...
...Health care was the only issue on which he seemed well informed...
...No surprise then that his primary win correlated closely with economic status and education...
...But over the last twenty years, when has this been true...
...Also it is no surprise to find that Tsongas, like so many other neoliberals, comes from a Republican family...
...Nonetheless, party pros fear that he has suffered permanent damage...
...Neoconservatives are the other losers...
...In 1972, Ed Muskie's 47 percent was discounted because he was a "neighboring-state senator...
...And, at last, even the New York media have apparently realized that their fascination with Governor Mario Cuomo is not shared by the rest of the country...
...In the Democratic-dominated Congresses that passed the Reagan budgets...
...In 1988, Dukakis's 36 percent showing as "neighboring-state governor" was enough to make him the putative winner...
...The attitude of voters toward any other issue was, as Jeff Greenfield put it, a bit like the old joke: "Aside from that, Mrs...
...Lincoln, how was the play...
...Clinton voters were relatively even across the socioeconomic spectrum, while the other Democrats candidates had an economic profile the opposite of Tsongas's...
...His message may sell better than he does...
...In 1992, Bush spent more time and effort in New Hampshire than any incumbent president...
...A Tsongas presidency might well be a disastrous reincarnation of the Carter presidency—continuing to alienate the party from its critically important constituencies among the socially conservative and economically liberal...
...If both these rules hold in 1992, Paul Tsongas is our next president...
...The nation now faces the bad fortune of having been left with an excellent manager of things-as-they-are in charge of a situation in which nothing is at it was...
...he took half the postgraduate vote...
...One of its "rules" is that if the vote for the leading anti-incumbent exceeds 30 percent, the incumbent's cause is lost...
...In fact, he is just the latest example of those transplanted liberal Republicans in the Democratic party, those "pragmatists" who always seem to end up by losing...
...Senator Tom Harkin seemed to love every Democrat he didn't know, and attacked every one he did...
...Pat Buchanan's ideal Right (sometimes called "the paleoconservatives") is the Right evoked by his slogan "America First...
...If the economy does not recover, the voters will behave in the fall as they did during the first Carter-Reagan debate in 1980, which Carter won in some abstract sense...
...New Hampshire gave George Bush his second highest percentage in the 1988 general election...
...He spent the most on TV ads, but ran at least twenty different ones...
...Under Jimmy Carter, the most economically conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland...
...Indeed, on the TV talk shows, without the sharp tongue of Pat Buchanan, it is hard to find anyone with an unkind word for Tsongas...
...As a Republican pollster told me, the problem isn't that there aren't conservative solutions to the agenda of most Americans, it's that Bush isn't interested in their agenda...
...This combination may also help explain the media's generally favorable treatment of him...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
