Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush
by By Duffy, Michael and Goodgame, Dan
Category: History , General

Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Time magazine's White House correspondents, deliver the first hard-hitting, critical assessment of the Bush presidency. Marching in Place penetrates the Bush politicking, decodes the activity--and inactivity--of Bush's first term, and reframes the political choices facing us in 1992.Duffy and Goodgame began covering Bush in the summer of 1988, and since then they have watched, investigated, and chronicled his every move. They saw Bush pull together a coalition of country club Republicans, social conservatives, Reagan Democrats, and suburban independents, spinning a complex and often contradictory web of campaign promises. He was assembling a constituency not to govern, but simply to get elected.President Bush moved into the White House with a resounding electoral victory but no mandate. With his bumbling elocution, his posing with all those puppies and grandchildren, his manic engagement in sports, his nonstop travel, and of course his now famous personal touch, he was hard not to like. The public rewarded him, for more than two years, with record approval ratings. But looking behind the photo ops and small-bore political pronouncements, Duffy and Goodgame saw that Bush's frenetic manner masked a deep fear of change, that his dread of the Republican right wing and of opinion polls had hardened into a refusal to lead at home.For the last three and a half years, Bush has been marching in place, a status quo president in a revolutionary world. After the Tiananmen massacre, Bush's concern was to maintain good relations with the Chinese rulers who ordered the killings. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush looked as if it had landed on his head and emphasized that "we're not trying to cause trouble for anybody." And during the coup attempt against Gorbachev, his first instinct was not to burn any bridges with the hardline insurgents. Even in his finest hour, the Persian Gulf crisis, Bush confined his war aims to the restoration of the status quo: the removal of Iraq from Kuwait, not Saddam Hussein from Iraq.As a candidate in 1992, Bush must run on his record--as the guarantor of stability and continuity--and against his record--as an "agent of change." Duffy and Goodgame remind us that Bush is a master of this sort of straddle. He promised "a kinder and gentler nation" but used Willie Horton and the specter of hiring quotas to exploit underlying racial fears. He pledged "no new taxes" and then broke his pledge rather than cut popular middle-class spending programs. He said "I know people are hurting" from the recession, yet waited 17 months before suggesting any new measures to help.Bush is betting that his oft-repeated promise "to not make things worse" will appeal to those voters who share his fear that government cannot and does not make things better. He is relying on his successful strategy of trashing his opponents' character and values. As Duffy and Goodgame demonstrate, no one should doubt George Bush when he says "I will do what I have to do to be re-elected." But Marching in Place describes a president who is reluctant to lead.