In his frenetic final campaign dash, Bush had embarrassed himself by calling his opponents “bozos.” But in his concession speech in Houston, Bush took the high road, calling on the nation to rally behind its new leaders and reminding his dejected partisans that “America must always come first.”
The president’s weary smile did not betray the shock he must have felt. Until the very last day, he could not quite believe that George Herbert Walker Bush, Leader of the Free World, Hero of the Persian Gulf, was going to lose to a slick Arkansas cracker, even one buffed up at Oxford. Bush underestimated Bill Clinton in part for generational reasons. The World War II hero did not feign his indignation over the fact that Clinton, as an American student abroad during the Vietnam War, demonstrated against his government. And Bush’s blind spot about Clinton’s political skill was shared by many Washington pundits who wrote off the Democratic challenger last winter and spring. Still, in the end, Bush was done in not so much by his opponent as by his own fatal arrogance.
If Bush was slow to accept the blame for his own demise, it is partly because no one around him would set him straight. The president was a founding member of the world’s most rarefied support group: unpopular heads of state. Chatting with phone pals German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Bush commiserated about the world recession. The American people just don’t understand how good they have it, Bush griped. At times he played the fatalist. If the American people want change, Bush told a close friend, “What can I do?”
Bush was for most of the time his own campaign manager. He could be scornful of advice, telling more than one aide, “If you’re so damn smart, how come I’m president and you’re not?” When campaign honchos Bob Teeter and Fred Malek told Bush more than a year ago that he should quit playing golf and riding in his speedboat because it furthered the image that he was out of touch with voters, Bush paid little attention. Last winter, when aides urged a more aggressive economic stimulus package, Bush took notes and then did nothing. To his aides he said, “I know what I’m doing. You can trust me.”
That was essentially Bush’s pitch to the voters as well. He regarded discontent in the polls the way a knowing father deals with a rebellious adolescent. The voters want to send me a message, he told friends, but in the end, they’ll come home. Beneath this condescension, Bush harbored an insecurity about his ability to talk to common people. He was haunted by the vision of Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator. He covered up his discomfort with scorn. He told everyone from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to some Democratic members of Congress that they should ignore his rhetoric on the stump. “It’s just politics,” he said. The talk-show format of the Richmond debate, requiring candidates to answer the questions of ordinary Americans, unsettled Bush. Afterward he seethed at staffers, “Who got me into this?”
Bush is not by nature a complainer, and he has endured hard times before with a combination of humor and grit. His wife, Barbara, is, if anything, grittier and funnier. To stave off the blues on the First Lady’s campaign plane, she and Bush’s sister, Nancy Ellis, proposed a game: every person on board would name someone they wanted to gloat over if Bush won. They would be allowed to rub it in for 10 minutes. The First Lady picked The Washington Post’s Ann Devroy, a tough-minded reporter who specialized in the leaks of discontented White House staffers. Ellis picked Anthony Lewis, the liberal New York Times columnist. Another Bush loyalist picked the whole state of California.
Now the Bushes will have to bear defeat with grace. In his concession speech, Bush told the young to keep the faith and not be deterred by the “ugliness of politics.” As for himself, Bush added, “I’m gonna serve.” Some tout him as a next president of Yale, his alma mater, or as baseball commissioner. As a politician, Bush sometimes rang false. But no one can deny that he was true to his ideal of public service.
