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Bill Clinton once said in an interview years later, "George Bush could have beaten me. The problem is he spent the whole campaign talking about what he had done in the past, not what he would do in a second term."
The US and the world at large were in pretty good shape in 1992 and the right policy was to let things continue in the same direction. There was a relatively mild recession, following over 100 months of expansion, so apparently enough voters expected the expansion to run forever and were taken by surprise and they blamed Bush 41 for the economic difficulties.
The significance of the Perot candidacy should not be dismissed. He was a charismatic character and populism is a recurrent theme in American history.
I was one of those 18% who voted for the Independent candidate Ross Perot.
At the time I saw Clinton as a lightweight. And for Bush, he was a good honorable decent man and great at foreign policy, but he had almost no domestic policy whatsoever. Even a college kid like me knew "Thousand Points of Light" was just an excuse for doing nothing. And when a recession hit, that caught up with him.
Basically, Bush behaved like a first-rate Secretary of State but forgot he was the President.
Don't forget about the jack booted government thugs in August of 1992, whom killed Randy Weaver's 14 year old son Sammy, his wife Vicky, and the family dog Striker. Randy Weaver was a veteran and joined the Green Berets in 1968, after moving his family from Iowa to Idaho in 1983, he purchases a 16 acre parcel and builds a cabin on Ruby Ridge. In 1989 he sold a couple sawed off shotguns to uncover ATF agents that were cut 1/2 inch shorter than the law allowed, and was arrested on weapons charges. They want him to become an informer but he refuses, so they press charges and send him a letter to appear in court on March 20, but the actual appearance date was Feb 20, so a warrant is issued for his arrest. This leads to the bloody standoff later that summer at Ruby Ridge. Eventually, in 1995 Randy Weaver sues the US government and wins a 3.1 million settlement.
I have no doubt the far right blamed Bush for the actions of the ATF and FBI that August, thinking Bush had moved far away from Reagan's philosophy of big government being a problem, and the no new taxes thing too. No doubt many who were loyal to Reagan may have voted for Bush in 1988, but stayed home in 1992 with Ruby Ridge events being very fresh on their minds, or perhaps voted for Ross Perot in protest. Soon there would be a new attorney general, Janet Reno, and another tragic standoff at Waco involving the ATF, and the horrific bombing at Oklahoma City in 1995.
I think Bush *could* have won without Perot running but may well still have lost. It's naive to say that an uninspiring and pretty lame establishment guy like Bush would have taken a big majority of the votes Perot got instead, if you consider that Perot was the anti-establishment candidate and did not attract the kind of voters who were happy with how the years 88-92 had gone. I suspect without Perot running a lot of those folks stay at home and a decent % vote for Clinton as the only other available 'change' option.
It would definitely have been much closer, but Clinton may well still have pulled it out.
Read my lips...no new taxes. - Strike one was raising domestic taxes. In hindsight, he was the last President to look at the deficit and, instead of dodging the issue....raised taxes to cover the shortfall.
This was weakened however by lowering taxes with Canada and Mexico in NAFTA which....
Perot swayed thinking in that the first (of many later) jobless recoveries was because the jobs were going to Mexico.
I seem to remember during that election that the democrat ticket talking points was that George Bush would cut social security, scaring off all the old people. It was repeated again and again. Total lie of course, and as much as Bush repeatedly denied it (and hey he did raise taxes after saying he wouldn't), the story sunk in.
You don't **** of senior citizens, they vote. You lose that vote, you lose the election.
And of course Ross Perot did not help.
There were 3 times when George Bush seemed glaringly out of touch. The first was when he was at his summer house in Maine and was filmed zipping around the harbor on an expensive speedboat. This was at a time when people were out of work and hurting. His son, George W, tried to warn him that indulging in an expensive past time in front of news cameras when so many people were hurting would not look good from a PR standpoint, but he didn't listen. Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he had much better political instincts than his father did.
The second was when he was at the grocery store and he seemed amazed by the scanner at the checkout counter. It made it look like he hadn't been in a grocery store since the 1970's. That attack was kind of unfair. Any president will lose touch with ordinary people.
The third was in the second debate with Clinton and Perot when a young woman asked, "How has the national debt affected you personally?" To be fair, it was a confusing question, and both Bush and Perot flubbed their answers. Clinton with his people skills knew that what she meant to ask was, "How has the economy affected you personally," and answered accordingly. That was the same debate where Bush was caught looking at his watch. He didn't just glance at it either. He looked at his watch in a way that people sitting in the last row could see it. The Bush team threw out the story that he was checking to see if Clinton was going over his allotted time, but nobody bought it. It was like he was thinking, "When is my next appointment?" Like he couldn't wait for the debate to be over. It was like he felt being in the debate was beneath him.
There were 3 times when George Bush seemed glaringly out of touch. The first was when he was at his summer house in Maine and was filmed zipping around the harbor on an expensive speedboat. This was at a time when people were out of work and hurting. His son, George W, tried to warn him that indulging in an expensive past time in front of news cameras when so many people were hurting would not look good from a PR standpoint, but he didn't listen. Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he had much better political instincts than his father did.
The second was when he was at the grocery store and he seemed amazed by the scanner at the checkout counter. It made it look like he hadn't been in a grocery store since the 1970's. That attack was kind of unfair. Any president will lose touch with ordinary people.
The third was in the second debate with Clinton and Perot when a young woman asked, "How has the national debt affected you personally?" To be fair, it was a confusing question, and both Bush and Perot flubbed their answers. Clinton with his people skills knew that what she meant to ask was, "How has the economy affected you personally," and answered accordingly. That was the same debate where Bush was caught looking at his watch. He didn't just glance at it either. He looked at his watch in a way that people sitting in the last row could see it. The Bush team threw out the story that he was checking to see if Clinton was going over his allotted time, but nobody bought it. It was like he was thinking, "When is my next appointment?" Like he couldn't wait for the debate to be over. It was like he felt being in the debate was beneath him.
I think the story of how a guy like Bush became President in the 1st place is actually the most intriguing one. I don't think today a guy with his career path would even be considered a possible candidate.
If you look at positions like Director of the CIA, UN Ambassador, chairman of the RNC. Those are not seen as springboards for presidential ambitions today, and he is in fact to this day the only President to have ever held any of those positions.
It's interesting that he was considered a viable candidate in 1980 after not having had a political office since being CIA director (at a time when the CIA wasn't exactly held in high regard publicly either). I guess it showed that there was a real vacuum among moderate Republicans and the difficulty they had in building someone up as an alternative to Reagan.
Yes to most of the above. He was a poor candidate, a seriously uninspiring speaker, came across as weak, and it really seemed to me that he didn't want to win. Him puking over whoever the Chariman Mao was that year didn't help any.
Clinton is best not underestimated, though. I lived in Arkansas and watched him move on up and knew what he was all about. He was called Slick Willy then and still is. But two weak candidates...
The Bush family has IMO achieved way past their pay grades and levels of incompetence. W was a loser, lucky he had a bigger loser to run against. Big Dummy Algore. THIS is the best the United States of America can do? Lord help us all.
"Clinton is best not underestimated" and then "two weak candidates?" Kind of a weird dichotomy there, eh? Listen, you may not like Clinton (and by the rest of your post any politician), but no serious pundit or historian of any political persuasion has ever called Clinton a "weak" candidate. Quite the opposite. In fact, lots of pundits/historians believe that it was Al Gore distancing himself from Clinton and not using Bill on the campaign trail that cost Gore what was a razor-thin election.
This myth has been debunked not only in this thread but in many, many, many other places.
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