Bush Bewildered and Dismayed

...Later, the White House let it be known that he might have something new to say about the economy in January...

...Don't ask me who does the outlawing...

...bombing of Libya in April 1986 deterred Colonel Muammar Qadaffi from terrorism...

...But if these were headaches, then Excedrin headaches followed...

...Even less in the Poindexter than the North case was there reason to believe that the trial had been contaminated by testimony before the Congressional investigating committees...

...Thus, especially after the trauma of the Clarence Thomas confirmation to the Supreme Court, the impression was left that the judicial process, too, had been thoroughly politicized...

...Nevertheless, while Johnson was starting a crusade for safe sex, Vice President Dan Quayle was still saying, in a Los Angeles speech, that the answer was abstinence...

...Perhaps they perceive their officials as concentrating too much on perks and too little on works...

...Now, in the region of Europe where Communism once reigned, stability is menaced by ethnic conflict and uncertainty about the control of nuclear weapons...

...The elections revealed an America sorely troubled by economic insecurity venting its fears in anger at both the ruling class and the underclass: In Pennsylvania, Senator Wofford won an upset victory by running against Bush Administration passivity on income and health protection...

...Budgeting for AIDS research and education fell victim to the tendency of these ideological Administrations to treat public health problems as moral issues...

...In May 1986, for instance, Vice President Bush said the action had "sentamessage around theworld that state-sponsored terrorism will not be tolerated...

...The question arises as to how long President Bush's ill-defined New World Order can continue to be based on the principle of territorial integrity—that is, respect for sovereignty and borders—given the many threats to international stability that can evolve within national borders...

...The anger of Americans seems to flare even retroactively...

...It seemed to bring home again an American sense of vulnerability and helplessness in the face of insensate forces...

...Flying to Houston on October 31 for a Republican fund-raising speech, Bush attacked the Democrats with a petulance that seemed to reflect frustration...

...A recent Anglo-American announcement of criminal charges against two Libyan intelligence officers for the December 1988 explosion that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103, however, suggests that Qadaffi misread the "message"— taking it as a challenge to further retaliation, rather than a deterrent to terrorism...

...Perhaps Americans have seen too many photo opportunities and too few economic opportunities...

...When I read a recent opinion poll reporting that 69 per cent of respondents expected the economy to get worse and 55 per cent expected deepening ethnic strife, I looked twice to see which country was being reported on...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Bush Bewildered and Dismayed Former Attorney General Dick Thomburgh lost to Senator Harris Wofford in Pennsylvania last month, and David Duke lost to former Governor Edwin W. Edwards in Louisiana...

...During his November tour of Asia, Secretary of State James A. Baker III had little success in inducing China to join international efforts to discourage North Korea from proceeding with its nuclear program...

...The evidence of Libyan involvement—a Swiss-made timer known to have been bought by Tripoli—seems solid enough...

...Although a term limitation referendum lost in Washington State —in part because it would have retired the popular Speaker of theHouse, Tom Foley—the impulse to throw the rascals out, however irrational, remains strong...

...One begins to appreciate what Ohio University Professor John Lewis Gaddis meant when he entitled his book on the Cold War The Long Peace...

...In Louisiana's racist-vs.-rogue competition for the state mansion, 39 per cent of the vote could hardly be considered a crushing defeat for a candidate carrying the baggage of ex-Klansman and ex-Nazi who threatened the tourist and convention trade...

...Maybe Americans have finally come to understand about malaise...

...In Houston, Bush said he was delivering the attack on Congress that he originally planned to make next March or April, after formally announcing for re-election...

...On November 4, when the incumbent and the four living exPresidents gathered in Simi Valley, California, for the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Los Angeles Times published a poll showing that the Great Communicator, the winner of electoral landslides, was judged to have been an average or below average President by almost three-quarters of those questioned...

...It becomes more difficult, after the Johnson episode, to regard AIDS simply as God's punishment for homosexuals...

...Contributing in another way to the American malaise was the startling disclosure by Magic Johnson on November 8 that he had contracted the AIDS virus through heterosexual contact...

...President Bush, caught once more off base (this time in Rome for the NATO summit), raised the question of whether government had been responsive enough to the AIDS threat...

...A former Moscow correspondent is reminded of travels in the Soviet Union a generation ago...

...The raid, it will be remembered, was in reprisal for a bomb explosion in a West Berlin discotheque frequented by American GIs...

...In his Administration and Reagan's, of course, it has not...

...President Bush has seemed at times bewildered and at times dismayed at the growing perception that, in acting as President of the World, he has shortchanged his job as President of the United States...

...The Congressional leadership, for example, ultimately worked out the compromises that enabled the President to cover his retreat on the civil rights bill and the extension of unemployment benefits...

...The widespread suspicion of manipulation was yet another reflection of the profound lack of confidence in government —a mistrust that extends even to the judicialbranch...

...He has responded to the politics of the situation by lashing out at Congress, thus making it harder to deal with the economics of the situation...

...Whatever he expected to gain from advancing his offensive, it cannot help him to conduct a premature vendetta against Congress, since he badly needs its cooperation...

...Before he flew to that Houston event, the President spent an afternoon listening to Cabinet officers, economic advisers and Congressional leaders engage in a babel of dissension about what, if anything, should be done to shore up the economy...

...The public's reaction suggested that this was a national tragedy on the order of the Kennedy assassination or a spaceship explosion...

...But the explosive, a specially-rigged cassette player, had been previously linked to Syrian-sponsored Palestinian terrorists, operating from West Germany...

...The United Nations has already limited the sovereignty of Iraq, is playing an important role in Cambodia, and has been wrestling with the issue of peacekeeping in Yugoslavia...

...People habitually referred to the governing class as "they," in expressions like, "They lie and they will always lie...

...It is ironic that the latest atomic bomb menaces surfaced just as European scientists announced advances in controlled nuclear fusion for peaceful purposes...

...When retired Admiral John M. Poindexter was, like Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, cleared of his Irancontra conviction by two Reagan-appointed Appeals Court judges, over the vehement dissent of a Carter-appointed judge, not many felt that immaculate justice was being performed...

...Instead he finds himself being cast as a Herbert Hoover, oblivious to a nation sliding into depression...

...He would like to cast himself as a Dwight D. Eisenhower, shaping world events while the economy sails along serenely...

...When the economy goes wrong, everything goes wrong," in the political adage recalled by the Post' sDavidBroder.And the economic auguries do not look good...

...He was quoted by one participant as saying he felt as though he was in the middle of a hurricane, hearing only noise...

...But, in national terms, the big loser was President George Bush and government in general, while the big winner was class and race polarization...

...Headaches for the international community have included the civil war in Yugoslavia and the defection of the Chechen-Ingush autonomous region from Russia, a development prompting President Boris N. Yeltsin to make the same mistake of reflexively cracking down that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had made, or condoned, in the Baltic states...

...One can discern the source of that frustration...

...They have involved the control of nuclear arsenals in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in the disintegrated Soviet Union —which preoccupied NATO's Rome summit—and now in North Korea, where the unpredictable Kim II Sung lusts for unification on his terms...

...The question immediately arose as to whether the United States was blaming only Libya, its favorite enemy, and giving a pass to Syria, our ally in the war against Iraq and currently, with the Palestinians, engagedin the Mideast "peace process...

...The Reagan Administration held Libya responsible on the basis of intercepted communications with East Berlin...

...It was the Soviet Union...

...This would seem to spell trouble ahead for an Administration that found its own cunning racial code words being appropriated by the next generation of demagogues...

...It should be further noted that Duke won majorities among the white voters (55 per cent), the Republicans (56 per cent) and the Protestants (65 per cent...

...More progress seems to have been made in taming the mighty atom than in taming ambitions to develop nuclear terror...

...With regard to nuclear weapons projects, new international rules may have to be written to put teeth into ineffective inspection requirements and to determine when forceful intervention is justified to deal with an outlawed nuclear arsenal...

...A Washington Post poll, indicating pessimism and mistrust of government, has reported that only one-third of Americans believe their government will do what is right most of the time...

...Apparently economic anxiety can produce constructive demands for change as well as destructive race hatred...

...In Mississippi, businessman Kirk Fordice won an upset victory in the gubernatorial contest by articulating resentments against minorities...

...Either way, though, incumbents bear the brunt of voter discontent...

...Fallout from Abroad Both Reagan and Bush have bragged that the U.S...

...But American opinion polls indicate that three-quarters of the voters favor limiting the terms of state and Federal officeholders...

...Other reverberations from events abroad are also having a disturbing effect...

...Asked with which exPresident they would like to spend time, the largest number, 35 per cent, named Jimmy Carter...