Presidential polities has, at times, an eerie rhythm. In the first week of October 1980, another desperate incumbent decided to lash out at his opponent and found, according to NEWSWEEK, that “the politics of insult, and the inflamed media reaction to it, had in fact [hurt] him more than the enemy.” The Washington Post said Jimmy Carter had gone “haywire.” Herblock portrayed him as slinging mud in a gutter. His opponent noted, in sorrow, that the president was “nearing the point of hysteria.” Finally, Barbara Walters coaxed an apology from him. “I have gotten carried away on a couple of occasions,” he admitted.
It might be argued that George Bush’s recent anti-Clinton sleazathon was merely political symmetry. Except for one telling detail-the nature of Jimmy Carter’s offense: he merely said the election would determine if “Americans might be separated, black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban … [and] whether our adversaries will be tempted to end the peace for which we all pray.” He never mentioned Reagan directly.
It may seem harsh to argue that George Bush has debased presidential discourse in ways that would have been unimaginable little more than a decade ago-but so be it. He has. Never before has a candidate for president been so directly, personally mean-spirited and derogatory toward his opponents, so willing to indulge in demagogic innuendo. In the past, candidates would send others out on sewer patrol-Nixon had Spiro Agnew; Carter had unnamed aides who could say the president thought Ronald Reagan “dangerous” and “scary.” Nominees for the presidency stayed above the fray; direct attacks-especially personal ones-were considered unpresidential. Until Bush.
The man’s unraveling has been a sorry spectacle, and a rather remarkable one. His slide in the polls, from near 90 percent approval to about 30 in a year and a half, is unprecedented-and inexplicable. He is not hated; he hasn’t had a policy fiasco like Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs or Carter’s Iran embarrassment Unlike Reagan, who was defiantly out to lunch when it came to details, Bush has an easy command of the issues. he isn’t perceived as evil, manipulative or even especially political, like Nixon or Lyndon Johnson. The ugliness he ha., spewed on the campaign trail-even the odious Red-baiting of Clinton for visiting Moscow and participating in the antiwar movement while a Rhodes scholar in 1969-hasn’t really been held against him. “People just figure he’s desperate,” says a top Clinton adviser. “It’s gold watch time. They want him gone.”
But why? “He seems to care more about foreign policy than he does about us,” a retired teacher-and devoted Republican-named Evelyn Barrett told me in Rapid City, S.D., last February, expressing the most common sentiment of this election year. In fact, Bush has admitted several times that he likes foreign policy better-yet another tone-deaf, casually disastrous confession. This feckless neglect of the commonweal has been at the heart of Bush’s failure-and one other quality, closely related: the cynicism that informs not just the resident’s “campaign mode” but all his attempts to communicate with the Great Unprepped.
He has been reinforced in this congenital disdain by his sly amanuensis, Jim Baker, who surfaced briefly for the president’s awful visit to Texas last week-to celebrate the North American free-trade pact, Baker probably assumed; but high-minded diplomacy was trampled by Bush’s ham-handed Red-baiting on Larry King that evening. Baker’s carefully nurtured reputation may eventually suffer a similar fate, the solid work he did on the reunification of Germany and in the Middle East subsumed by his supervision of two of the ugliest, least dignified presidential campaigns in history. This would only be fair: it was Baker, after all, who most succinctly defined this administration’s fatal cynicism when, in November 1990, he endeavored to bring the gulf crisis “down to the average American citizen. . . If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s jobs.” It is a delicious irony of 1992 that if the average American citizen were to return the favor and sum up this election to the missing-in-action former secretary of state, it might be with the very same word. And then hand him an attractive gold-plated watch.
