Poppy Bush Nostalgia

I'm convinced that Victor Davis Hanson is actually an AI bot, but the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit are linking to his latest essay, Pseudo-Recessions:

As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection.

The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses.

For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent.

By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the favorite Democratic nominee. But he was written off as having little chance to knock off the popular Republican incumbent president with far more foreign affairs experience.

Bush, however, had just lost his brilliant 1988 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to cancer. And third-party prairie-fire candidate Ross Perot had entered the race, drawing off conservative Bush support.

I'm even older than Hanson, but my memory of 1992 is very different, as is my memory of 1980, for that matter. According to a 2015 essay by Jules Witcover in Politico,

The first Bush president, George Herbert Walker, never would have reached the Oval Office in 1989 had the 1980 presidential nominee, Ronald Reagan, not chosen him as his running mate. But heading into the convention in Detroit, it was not at all clear that Bush would be Reagan’s pick. . . . In 1974, when Vice President Gerald Ford became president in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Ford passed over Bush, regarded by many other party leaders as a quirky lightweight, as VP in favor of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Witcover goes on to outline that in 1980, Reagan hoped to enlist Gerald Ford as his vice presidential running mate on a "dream ticket", but once that idea fell apart, he was forced to fall back on Bush, who'd impressed him as a "wimp" in the primaries. He concludes that Poppy Bush's term, and then the political careers of his sons Dubya and Jeb, were

a wholly unanticipated outcome of an old and bizarre political episode in vice-presidential selection that unexpectedly put the first Bush on the path to the presidency, with his two sons after him. What, one could ask, would Ronnie think today if he knew what he hath wrought?

In 1988, Bush ran on the basis that he would represent Reagan's third term. But by 1992, he'd broken his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge by caving to Democrats in 1990 budget negotiations. This became fodder for his primary opponent Pat Buchanan, and it also gave credibility to Ross Perot's third-party campaign that portrayed Bush as part of a uniparty political establishment. But Bush himself repeatedly supplied episodes that further damaged his standing, like when, at a state dinner in Japan just before the 1992 primary season, he fainted and vomited onto Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's trousers.

During one of the presidential debates, he visibly checked his watch as a woman from the audience asked him a question. Following an episode at a grocers' convention where he appeared to be amazed at a supermarket scanner, media characterized him as being out of touch with everyday life. There was a similar episode on his Cigarette speedboat at Kennebunkport.

And on one hand, although Bush's approval reached 80% in the immediate wake of the First Gulf War in 1991, his failure to continue to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein laid the seeds for another war a dozen years later, and there was an underlying sense of unfinished business in 1992. Certainly the 1991 Desert Storm victory did him no good by 1992. But Ed Driscoll, agreeing with Hanson, concludes in the Instapundit post,

But with Atwater having passed away from brain cancer in 1991, the following year, Bush looked utterly exhausted on the campaign trail, in sharp contrast to Clinton’s rockstar energy and charisma. While Rush Limbaugh was on the scene by 1992, there was no Fox News, no original era Drudge Report, no Blogosphere, and the DNC-MSM could still shape reality uncontested for millions of voters[.]

. . . One of my favorites was the DNC-MSM, in lockstep with their candidate Bill Clinton, pummeling Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election over a minor recession that Clinton described as “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to turn around and reveal that, as the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity.

Lee Atwater could promote Bush as Reagan's third term only as long as Bush was able to follow through, but he wasn't able to do that. Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, gave him something to work with. One take on the First Gulf War was that Bush needed it to distract attention from the fact that he'd had no domestic successes up to the fall of 1991, and without that distraction, he wouldn't be able to run a successful campaign in 1992. That he had a serious primary opponent in Pat Buchanan undescores this, as well as the fact that it wasn't just Bill Clinton who beat him in 1992, it was also the erratic Ross Perot.

Jules Witcover asked what Reagan might have thought of the outcome of choosing Bush as his runnong mate in 1980, but I'm not sure if this matters -- a measure of Trump's effectiveness is that he was able to end the putative Bush dynasty and the related Cheney faction of the Republican party. Witcover didn't anticipate this when he wrote in 2015; he really didn't even anticipate Trump.