Sara S
03-07-2011, 07:05 AM
from delancyplace.com
In today's excerpt - George H. W. Bush, whose popularity rose to virtually unprecedented
heights after presiding over the victorious first Persian Gulf War, the fall of
the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., nevertheless lost his re-election
bid in 1992 for his seeming neglect of the domestic economy. It brought to mind
Winston Churchill's shocking election loss to Clement Attlee after leading Britain
to victory over Hitler in World War II, and led to Bill Clinton's giddy election
mantra - 'it's the economy, stupid':
"The different pollsters tracking George Bush in the period after the Gulf
War, from March until well into the fall of 1991, found a steady decline in the
president's approval ratings, a decline, depending on the pollster, of some
twenty or twenty-five percentage points. That was bad enough, but it was relatively
easy to justify - after all, his ratings at the moment of victory in the
desert had been almost unconscionably high. What went up that high certainly
had to come down. Much more alarming was that people were again becoming mutinous
over the economy, even as the aura of good feeling about the
Gulf War was beginning to vanish.
"The White House, for a variety of reasons, tended to cut itself off from that
ominous trend. [RNC pollster Fred] Steeper's polls and those of other pollsters
showed that much of the country, perhaps as many as 80 percent of those polled,
thought the country was in a recession. But the president's economic advisers -
Michael Boskin, who was the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, effectively
Bush's own personal economist; Dick Darman, his budget director; and Nick Brady,
his secretary of the treasury - all told him that the recession was over. Some
of his political people were furious with that stance; they thought the economists
were dead wrong and were underestimating a potentially destructive political issue
in order to justify their past advice. Nonetheless, Bush, in the fall of 1991, went
public and declared that the recession was over. That was a critical mistake; it
put him in direct conflict with the way a vast majority of Americans felt on an
issue that was growing ever more serious in the public mind.
"This was the predicament of the Bush White House at the end of 1991. It
had been Bush's best year in office, yet a powerful political current was beginning
to work against him. Furthermore, he was being given little credit for his considerable
skill in negotiating the end of the Cold War. In fact, the end of
the Cold War was now possibly also working against him, as the release from
Cold War tensions accelerated the change in the primacy of issues, from foreign
affairs, where the Republicans in general and Bush in particular had been
the beneficiaries, to domestic affairs, at a time when the economy was soft
and the chief beneficiaries on economic issues were the Democrats.
"Among the first to spot this change was Fred Steeper. In December 1991,
at exactly the time when the Soviet Union was breaking up and a once-feared
adversary was losing its strength, he was holding a series of focus groups with
ordinary citizens, trying to figure out how they felt about the issues that
would face the Republican Party in the upcoming election year. The results
were deadly. Not only was the primary issue the economy, not only did most
ordinary people feel the country was mired deep in a recession, in contrast to
what the president and his economic advisers were saying, but they were furious
with Bush, who, they believed, was not that interested in them and their
problems. Even more devastating, there were signs that it was already too late
for him to right himself on this issue.
"Because of these findings Steeper wrote a memo for his boss, Bob Teeter,
suggesting the possibility of what he termed the Churchill Factor or the
Churchill Parallel. At the end of July 1945, just after Germany had surrendered,
a tired England had not even waited for the war to end in the Pacific before voting
out Winston Churchill, its gallant and beloved wartime leader, whose bulldog determination
had symbolized England's strength and faith during
Europe's darkest hour, and replacing him with the obviously less charismatic
Labor Party leader, Clement Attlee. (He is a modest man and has much to be
modest about, Churchill once said of Attlee.) The British had believed that
Churchill's primary passion was defense and foreign policy, not domestic
affairs, and they wanted someone who they thought would pay more attention
to their postwar needs."
Author: David Halberstam
Title: War in a Time of Peace
Publisher: Touchstone
Date: Copyright 2001 by The Amateurs, Inc
Pages: 16-17
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
by David Halberstam
Paperback
In today's excerpt - George H. W. Bush, whose popularity rose to virtually unprecedented
heights after presiding over the victorious first Persian Gulf War, the fall of
the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., nevertheless lost his re-election
bid in 1992 for his seeming neglect of the domestic economy. It brought to mind
Winston Churchill's shocking election loss to Clement Attlee after leading Britain
to victory over Hitler in World War II, and led to Bill Clinton's giddy election
mantra - 'it's the economy, stupid':
"The different pollsters tracking George Bush in the period after the Gulf
War, from March until well into the fall of 1991, found a steady decline in the
president's approval ratings, a decline, depending on the pollster, of some
twenty or twenty-five percentage points. That was bad enough, but it was relatively
easy to justify - after all, his ratings at the moment of victory in the
desert had been almost unconscionably high. What went up that high certainly
had to come down. Much more alarming was that people were again becoming mutinous
over the economy, even as the aura of good feeling about the
Gulf War was beginning to vanish.
"The White House, for a variety of reasons, tended to cut itself off from that
ominous trend. [RNC pollster Fred] Steeper's polls and those of other pollsters
showed that much of the country, perhaps as many as 80 percent of those polled,
thought the country was in a recession. But the president's economic advisers -
Michael Boskin, who was the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, effectively
Bush's own personal economist; Dick Darman, his budget director; and Nick Brady,
his secretary of the treasury - all told him that the recession was over. Some
of his political people were furious with that stance; they thought the economists
were dead wrong and were underestimating a potentially destructive political issue
in order to justify their past advice. Nonetheless, Bush, in the fall of 1991, went
public and declared that the recession was over. That was a critical mistake; it
put him in direct conflict with the way a vast majority of Americans felt on an
issue that was growing ever more serious in the public mind.
"This was the predicament of the Bush White House at the end of 1991. It
had been Bush's best year in office, yet a powerful political current was beginning
to work against him. Furthermore, he was being given little credit for his considerable
skill in negotiating the end of the Cold War. In fact, the end of
the Cold War was now possibly also working against him, as the release from
Cold War tensions accelerated the change in the primacy of issues, from foreign
affairs, where the Republicans in general and Bush in particular had been
the beneficiaries, to domestic affairs, at a time when the economy was soft
and the chief beneficiaries on economic issues were the Democrats.
"Among the first to spot this change was Fred Steeper. In December 1991,
at exactly the time when the Soviet Union was breaking up and a once-feared
adversary was losing its strength, he was holding a series of focus groups with
ordinary citizens, trying to figure out how they felt about the issues that
would face the Republican Party in the upcoming election year. The results
were deadly. Not only was the primary issue the economy, not only did most
ordinary people feel the country was mired deep in a recession, in contrast to
what the president and his economic advisers were saying, but they were furious
with Bush, who, they believed, was not that interested in them and their
problems. Even more devastating, there were signs that it was already too late
for him to right himself on this issue.
"Because of these findings Steeper wrote a memo for his boss, Bob Teeter,
suggesting the possibility of what he termed the Churchill Factor or the
Churchill Parallel. At the end of July 1945, just after Germany had surrendered,
a tired England had not even waited for the war to end in the Pacific before voting
out Winston Churchill, its gallant and beloved wartime leader, whose bulldog determination
had symbolized England's strength and faith during
Europe's darkest hour, and replacing him with the obviously less charismatic
Labor Party leader, Clement Attlee. (He is a modest man and has much to be
modest about, Churchill once said of Attlee.) The British had believed that
Churchill's primary passion was defense and foreign policy, not domestic
affairs, and they wanted someone who they thought would pay more attention
to their postwar needs."
Author: David Halberstam
Title: War in a Time of Peace
Publisher: Touchstone
Date: Copyright 2001 by The Amateurs, Inc
Pages: 16-17
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
by David Halberstam
Paperback