http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/04/us/the-1992-elections-news-analysis-the-economy-s-casualty.htmlTHE 1992 ELECTIONS: NEWS ANALYSIS; The Economy's Casualty
By R. W. APPLE Jr
Published: November 04, 1992
In the end it was the faltering economy, which had bedeviled him all year, that did George Bush in.
From the New Hampshire primary in February, through the party conventions this summer, to the start of the general-election campaign on Labor Day, public opinion held remarkably steady: three-quarters of the American people, according to New York Times/CBS News polls, disapproved of the way the President was handling the economy.
Mr. Bush failed to change their minds with his furious closing onslaught against Bill Clinton's character. More than 7 voters in 10 said in interviews as they left their polling places yesterday that they considered the economy not so good or poor, and a big majority opted for giving the Arkansas Governor a chance to turn it around. Though many had doubts about a man untried on the national stage, they had lost faith in Mr. Bush's ability to do the job, and they found Ross Perot too much of a gamble.
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It was not just the hard economic statistics that dogged the President, not just the shuttered shops and lost jobs from Alameda, Calif., to Zanesville, Ohio, that cost him dear. It was also a pervasive if less quantifiable sense of economic foreboding, a fear that the United States was losing its manufacturing base and economic leadership to Germany and Japan.
The current recession had an extra political cost that earlier ones did not, because it hit not only manual laborers but also large numbers of white-collar, and highly skilled, highly paid blue-collar workers who suspected that their jobs were gone forever.
If there was a leitmotif to the 1992 campaign, it was the comment heard on a thousand doorsteps and a hundred bar stools: "I'm worried my kids will never have it as good as I do."
Such economic worries easily overcame the social concerns that had dominated most of the last six Presidential elections, all but one of them won by the Republicans. Concern about jobs -- and about the closely allied subjects of health care and education -- trumped racial tensions, fears about crime and even fervent appeals to patriotism.
That was especially true among the urban, socially conservative, largely Catholic Democrats who have been voting for Republican Presidential candidates in recent decades -- a pivotal block this year. Exit polling by Voter Research and Surveys, a consortium of the leading television networks, showed that half the Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan and half those who backed Mr. Bush four years ago came back to Mr. Clinton in yesterday's balloting.
So George Bush suffered the fate of William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, the only other elected Presidents in this century to be turned out of the Oval Office.
In one important sense, his defeat was the most ignominious of all, because he had held such a commanding position, with a stratospheric 88 percent approval rating in March of last year, and allowed it to disintegrate so quickly."He was the king of the mountain after the Persian Gulf War," said J. Robinson West, a Republican who served in both the Ford and Reagan Administrations. "He could have achieved almost anything. He was so popular that if he had drawn up a program, gone to Capitol Hill and battled for it, Congress would not have dared defy him. But he didn't do anything at all."
