Last week Bush was at his unscripted worst on his first campaign swum of the 1992 season, a six-stop tour through New Hampshire, site of next month’s crucial primary. His sentences piled up; he blurted out handlers’ notes verbatim: “Message: I care,” he said. He was local, he said, because he’d gone to high school nearby-meaning he’d prepped at Andover. He grew unconvincingly angry at cardboard bogeymen. He issued mock orders. “So now listen,” he said. “Here’s the final word: vote for me!”
Bush’s real problem was that he had nothing to say. At a time when the nation was calling for leadership to get the country out of its prolonged economic decline, Bush had none to offer, and he knew it. Traveling up to New Hampshire on Air Force One, Bush’s aides fretted to see that their boss was clearly feeling low, discouraged after a disastrous trip to Japan and worried about his prospects in New Hampshire. For the moment, he could do little more than tell voters to stay tuned for his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, when he will offer up his plan to revive the economy with a bouquet of voter-pleasing tax cuts. But Bush and his senior advisers know perfectly well that tax cuts, while good polities, are lousy economics. And they fear that the public will not be fooled, either. Bush is still struggling to find a message that win convince voters that he has found a way to deal with the serious long-term problems facing the nation. Without that, Bush was left looking silly.
For the press traveling along on Air Force One, Bush’s bumbling was a hoot. For Bush, it had to be a nightmare. Here he was in New Hampshire again, begging for votes. Worse, he found himself having to woo, or at least neutralize, the same crowd that has been skeptical of him throughout his career: the Republican right. Since the late ’70s they’ve controlled the activist innards of the GOP, and they’ve always had power in New Hampshire. In the 1988 campaign, pacifying them was Bush’s chief strategic objective. It paid off. He rode into the White House on the fading momentum of the Reagan Revolution, uttering one memorable conservative phrase: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
But now, in 1992, George Bush is being stalked by Patrick J. Buchanan, the talk-show pundit whose rhetoric is as wickedly sharp as Bush’s is goofily fuzzy, and whose conservative credentials are m far better order. Buchanan has emerged as the conservatives’ bully boy. He has launched a surprisingly deft campaign tailor made to appeal to New Hampshire’s flinty-eyed right. “I have gotten traction,” he said in an interview with Newsweek. “Buchanan is coming through.” It’s highly unlikely that, Buchanan can defeat Bush there-or any where. But he has the president running scared. History explains why. Presidents who get challenged tend either not to ran again in 1952, Johnson in 1968) or to lose in the fall (Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980). “We have a chance to make history here,” Buchanan declared.
For all his rhetorical skill, Buchanan wouldn’t be on the radar screen-or even in the race—-were it not for the dismal shape of the economy, nationally and in New Hampshire. The GOP’s own polls, N has learned, show that a majority of Buchanan supporters are hoping to send Bush the message that he must take charge. Sensing his opening, Buchanan last week focused his jihad on economics. He excoriated Bush for reneging on the “no new taxes” pledge and challenged him to take the pledge again-which Bush obligingly refused to do. “George Bush is the biggest spender in American history,” Buchanan told Newsweek , previewing the likely theme of ads to be unveiled this week. “He’s the biggest taxer in American history. And he’s walked away from the principles of the Republican Party he said he would pursue.”
For connoisseurs of political comeuppance, it was a rich moment. The True Believers have always suspected Bush of perfidy, and now they have a useful avenging angel in Buchanan. His views were formed in a conservative Roman Catholic family that distrusted the very ideologically muted WASP establishment Bush embodies. Buchanan doesn’t seek to avoid enemies, he relishes doing so. He’s been a speechwriter advising Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and Ronald Reagan on how to stir the passions of “street-corner conservatives” he now wants to win for himself (page 22).
In traditional insurgent fashion, Buchanan is staking his whole campaign on New Hampshire. He and his entourage have taken up residence on the top floor of a hotel in downtown Manchester. His campaign is well funded and will have plenty of cash to compete in the TV ad wars. It remains a family operation. His campaign chairman and alter ego is his younger sister, Angela (Bay) Buchanan, a longtime Reagan campaign worker who in 1990 lost a race for treasurer in California. Last week they hired some little-known but very capable conservative consultants, including a media specialist who had crafted the ads for Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire. Buchanan makes a virtue of his lack of support from the conservative GOP consultants who rose to power in the Reagan years. Most of them, he says, are busy getting rich off foreign business clients. Bush advisers Charlie Black and Jim Lake, he says, are “the geisha girls of the new world order.”
Buchanan is savvy enough. to know that the easy part is over. He has no real organizational battle plan beyond New Hampshire, and the campaign will move south, to more congenial territory for the president. And for all the firepower of his assault on Bush, Buchanan is a classic protest candidate, woefully short on the specifics of what he might actually do if elected. He acknowledges a need for a health-care plan, but has none. He touts his anger about jobs lost to foreign competitors, but offers no radical or imaginative economic solutions. As he meets the demand for details, he stands to lose support among the voters he’s trying to woo. Last week, for example, he told NEWSWEEK he was toying with proposing an “import tariff " on the “consumption of foreign manufactured goods.” “Street-corner conservatives” aren’t likely to cheer him for wanting to boost the cost of their VCRs, clothing and autos.
George Bush is every bit the scrapper Buchanan is, and he has the personal experience in the trenches that no former speechwriter can match. “We’ll stoop to whatever is necessary to win,” said one Bush campaign official, echoing his boss’s sentiments. NEWSWEEK has learned that Bush allies may soon call on Buchanan to release his tax returns. Buchanan says he would do so, and the documents will show a man grown rich. His controversial statements may also haunt him: if pressed, Bush allies will haul out columns and public statements to underscore what Buchanan’s detractors allege is a history of anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia. Buchanan insists he won’t disavow anything he’s written.
In the New Hampshire ground war, the president can also claim conservative allies of his own. Bush surrogates Jack Kemp and Dan Quayle (and Barbara Bush) will drop by; the campaign can trot out some legitimate icons of the New Hampshire right including Senator Smith and former senator Gordon Humphrey. Then there are the other virtues of incumbency. The administration already has channeled money for a host of pork-barrel projects into New Hampshire, and there are likely to be others. “I’ve had the ball the entire first half,” Buchanan concluded, a little glumly. “Bush gets the ball in the second half.”
The most important playing field for the president, though, isn’t really New Hampshire. It’s the podium in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he will deliver his State of the Union address next week. It’s not yet been written, but the initial draft is likely to come from the word processor of Tony Snow, a credentialed young conservative who, like Buchanan, is a former editorial writer. It’s unlikely that the speech will contain a convincing new vision of America’s destiny in a post-communist world. Rather, the early plan is to have Bush concede the obvious: that the economy is in deep trouble. The president will say that there are no quick fixes, but then go on to propose some. The host of tax cuts should, not coincidentally, play well among New Hampshire conservatives.
The danger for the president is that the speech will be dismissed as just another episode in George Bush’s history of transparent pandering. Privately, Bush believes that the best thing he could do for the economy is to do nothing: that the most prudent course would be to let the recession pass without adding more red ink to the nation’s yawning deficit through a feel-good tax cut. A better solution would be for Bush to show real leadership by asking voters to make some immediate sacrifices, like cuts in middle-class entitlement programs or an energy tax, for the sake of the nation’s long-term health. But sacrifice is not something that politicians ask for in election years. Instead, the voters of New Hampshire, and the rest of the nation, will have to settle for the blustering of Pat Buchanan and the pleadings of a weakened president.
The population grew by 2.6 percent in 1988, compared with a 0.4 percent drop in 1991.
There were 835 bankruptcies in 1988, compared with 3,848 in 1991.
The Aid to Families with Dependent Children average December caseload rose from 5,518 in 1988 to 14,807 in 1991.
Unemployment, far below the national average at only 2.4 percent in 1988, rose to 7 percent in November 1991, the highest rate since 1982.
There was an October average of 18,851 food-stamp recipients in 1988, compared with 51,893 in 1991.
There were no bank closings in 1988. In 1991: 14.
