From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: AMERICA TO BUSH: YOU DIDN'T CARE
Date: Wed,  4 Nov 92 22:54:45 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

KAMARCK ON POLITICS: AMERICA TO BUSH: YOU DIDN'T CARE
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Kamarck is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.
By Elaine Ciulla Kamarck
Special to Newsday 11/04/92

           At the end of this campaign George Bush kept telling us that
this was a great country, with a great future.
           Bush was sick of hearing the United States get run down. He
believed that we were still No. 1 and that we would remain No. 1. He also
told us that our recession was not that bad, that the recession we were
part of was worldwide and that we would come out of it better than ever.
           All of this was and is, I believe, true.
           So why did George Bush lose so decisively? Because, in order to
make sure that America had a great future, in order to make sure that
America remained No. 1 _ in short, in order to guarantee that all those
things George Bush kept bragging about remained the same _ most Americans
decided that we had to get rid of George Bush.
           If you had simply plugged the raw economic numbers for Bush's
four years into a computer model that took into account only the basics _
as many scholars did this year _ you would have predicted, as they did, a
nerrow Bush win, not a large Bush loss.
           If you had factored in the Persian Gulf war, you might have
predicted an even bigger Bush win, certainly not a large Bush loss.
           If you had simply compared Bush's economic record to that of the
last incumbent president to get beaten, Jimmy Carter, you might have
predicted a narrow Bush win, not a large Bush loss. The Carter
administration, after all, added double-digit inflation to its unemployment
numbers, something that we have been spared in the Bush administration.
Bush even had an excuse that Carter didn't have; his party didn't control
the Congress. Carter's did.
           And if you compared George Bush's economic record to the
rhetoric of the Democrats who were calling him Herbert Hoover, you would
have to laugh. You want trouble? Hoover went down to defeat with a full
quarter of the work force unemployed.
           And yet George Bush is suffering a Herbert Hoover-, Jimmy
Carter-style defeat without having anywhere near a Herbert Hoover- or even
Jimmy Carter-style economy. This is a leadership failure, a loss of public
faith of gargantuan proportions.
           It is hard to imagine a Ronald Reagan with the same set of
objective circumstances both at home and abroad suffering the same sort of
defeat. He was, after all, the president who coined the phrase ``stay the
course'' during a much worse recession than this one. It's even hard to
imagine Jimmy Carter _ certainly a less inspiring leader than Bush _ losing
under these circumstances.
           So what happened? As the economy stumbled through its
never-never land of slow, infinitesimal growth, Bush made a fatal error for
a democratic leader: He failed to convey that he understood the pain of
those affected (who happened to reside disproportionately in the big states
of New York and California) and he failed to convey a plan that would
prevent the pain from spreading to those who were not affected at the time
but who feared that they might be.
           In his final days he reminded us that 93 percent of Americans
were employed and that growth in the last six quarters had been positive
not negative. But the 93 percent with jobs wanted to see some theory, some
plan and some action that would convince them that they would not end up
like the 7-plus percent without jobs.
           Jim Pinkerton, a former White House domestic policy adviser to
Bush and lately a part of the Bush campaign, has been telling the young
Republicans whose hearts were broken Tuesday night a little of his own
history in order also to teach a lesson. In 1980, he was 22 years old. When
he came to Washington as a bit player in the Reagan administration he felt
that he was part of something bigger than himself, part of a movement. But
by 1984 and 1988, the Reagan coalition was coasting. By 1992, Pinkerton
claims that the ``decadence of incumbency'' had set in. He is careful to
define decadence not in Madonnaesque terms but in its more classic meaning
of ``decay or decline.''
           Nowhere was this more evident than in the voluntary paralysis on
domestic policy. Says Pinkerton, ``Of course, the voters would blame us for
not having a domestic policy when the White House chief of staff John
Sununu said at midterm that the Congress could go home for the rest of the
year because we didn't need anything more from them.''
           There never was a Bush jobs package, there was a flimsy and
half-hearted health care package that went up to Congress where it died a
lonely death. It was joined by an education package that actually contained
some good ideas but none fought for by the president and a poverty program
that, like its brethren, was also left to languish without presidential
attention.
           Had he paid one-half of the attention to Americans that he paid
to the Saudi Arabians, George Bush would be president for four more years.
Had he drawn opponents who talked about the economy in even less convincing
ways than he did, he might have survived. But he did not.
           In the snows of New Hampshire, in the midst of personal scandals
that would have deep-sixed a weaker man, Bill Clinton discovered the secret
to the election: The voters wanted to hear about their own economic future;
they wanted plausible explanations and detailed plans.
           They didn't care about the candidate's past but they did care
about the past of the candidates' parties. Quick fixes of the traditional
Democratic variety and benign neglect of the Republican variety were
losers. They wanted something new, something different and something
without the sugar coating.
           For a while that's what Ross Perot was offering. But in the end
he was an improbable president. Bill Clinton, the ``different kind of
Democrat,'' showed them some vision of the future. George Bush expected to
show them a ``not so bad'' present. That was not enough.
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