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...