1992’s Campaign Trail Is a Rougher Road for Bush

In some ways, nothing has changed. The front page of the local newspaper blared the news--the President was coming to town--and people showed up by the thousands. Clutching babies and toddlers, they pressed against the security standards, edging as close as they could to the sparkling blue railroad car with the presidential seal.

From there, they spilled outward for hundreds of yards, past the billboard reading, “Bill, you’re just blowing smoke” and into the surrounding streets, their arms casting U.S. flags skyward.

At the rear of his railroad car, President Bush’s face was plastered with a gleeful smile. He pumped his arms playfully, mimicked a train engineer’s tug on the whistle, gave a thumbs-up sign that defined buoyancy and reveled in the applause, just as he did four years ago when it was he who led in the polls just days away from the presidential election.

Yet in the autumn of his life, some things are now very, very different for Bush.

Little more than a week before this year’s election, Democratic rival Bill Clinton--he of the billboard--is ahead in every national public opinion survey. Clinton is barnstorming in states where Democrats have not had a whisper of a chance for a generation, and Bush is struggling in places where Republicans should have sewed it up months ago. To add to the disconsolate stew, independent candidate Ross Perot is pressing Bush with a fierce assault.

Local politicians who can smell the whiff of death from a mile away have tripped over themselves to back away from Bush. The issue that he used to rocket himself into the presidency--the economy--is being used to pummel him.

Cheerleaders still squeal their hurrahs and bands still play triumphant tunes, but at the center of his last campaign, Bush is grasping desperately--not to simply avoid mistakes, as was the dictate in the closing days of 1988, but to create a miracle and stage perhaps the biggest comeback in American political history.

Still, you would never know it from his demeanor, which publicly retains the blinders-on focus of a veteran politician aiming relentlessly for the wire and fully convinced he will get there first.

Hey! he says at every stop: The Braves did it, came back in the ninth inning to hustle their way into the World Series! Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney--he was 11 points back in the polls a week out from his election, and he won! And there’s always Harry S. Truman, written off by those silly media guys only to come back and defeat Thomas E. Dewey!

Bush takes sustenance from them all.

“I am going to win this election,” he said in Vineland, N.J., where the main drag had been blocked off Thursday to accommodate several thousand Bush supporters on the morning after he whistle-stopped through North Carolina.

“Don’t listen to those nutty pollsters trying to tell you how to think! I wonder how many people out here have ever been called by a pollster?”

He scanned the crowd. Ha!

“Not many showed their hand,” he said delightedly. “One guy and we got about 10,000, 15,000 people here. I don’t know who they talk to, but they’re inhaling and we’re gonna win this election.”

If Election Day is a political lifetime away, as the Bush campaign insists in its effort to convince people he can still turn it around, then the events of four years ago have receded into far distant memory.

Until, that is, Bush tumbles into view and reprises the campaigner who alternately charmed, appeased and bullied his way to victory in 1988.

Day after day, now as he did then, Bush pounds home his greatest hits: Give me a line-item veto and a balanced budget amendment and I’ll get that deficit under control, Congress be damned--and that guy I’m running against, he’s just a liberal, wants to ruin the world.

His biggest problem then was overconfidence, so Bush went from state to state, planting his own seeds of doubt about an election whose outcome seemed clear from September onward.

Everywhere, he touted the latest statistics from the government: Unemployment at 5.2%, a 14-year-low, Bush exclaimed little more than a week before his last election; manufacturing jobs rose 100,000 in a single month.

At precisely this point in the 1988 campaign, Bush cheerily declared in Los Angeles that “from top to bottom” Americans were “better off than eight years ago.”

“When you consider what this election is all about, this one central question rises above all others,” Bush declared then. “Are you better off today than you were eight years ago?”

These days, those words echo grimly.

In speech after speech, Bush acknowledges the lagging economy, which includes a jobless rate half again higher than it was four years ago. He assumes partial responsibility himself, but doles out just as much to the Democratic-controlled Congress and to global economic trends out of his control. And he insists it could be worse.

“We’ve got to change things,” Bush told more than 10,000 people gathered in Ridgewood, N.J., on Thursday. “But what we don’t need to do is go back to what it was like when the Democrats controlled the White House and the Congress. . . . “

“I want to remind you what it was like. Interest rates--some here are too young to remember--21.5%. We don’t want that for the United States. Inflation was 15%. . . . We cannot go back to the failed policies of the past.”

But as Bush indicated, the constant references to the Jimmy Carter years do not always resonate well with audiences almost a generation removed from the last Democratic President.

Indeed, much of the voting public appears to have determined that the policies that failed them occurred on Bush’s watch. So he is increasingly dependent on the issue of “trust” to drive voters away from Clinton and Perot.

In some ways, that thrust is a descendant of the attack Bush launched against his 1988 foe, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, who was lampooned by the GOP campaign as an elitist who was unpatriotic and coddled criminals to boot.

This time around, Bush has settled on depicting Clinton as one whose character flaw arises when he “waffles” on the issues, while Perot’s ideas do not always pass muster with reality.

On Wednesday morning, with a bow to the television cameras forever in his wake, Bush wandered into a Waffle House in Spartanburg, S.C., for what he called “a little symbolism,” using the ubiquitous Southern restaurant to extend his imagery against Clinton. At every turn that day, he blistered Clinton for his vacillations about the Persian Gulf War.

By the next day, the two images had fused together in a remarkable turn of Bush-speak: “Leadership--that is a waffle house, and we can’t have it for the American people.”

If Bush’s lingo is as creative as ever, his campaign this year contrasts poorly with 1988. That campaign was comported with military discipline; this year’s version has been beset by troubles from its inception. Even in the last few days, as Bush mounted a more focused attack than he had in weeks, enough inconsistencies abounded to make voters wonder who was steering the course.

In North Carolina, for example, Bush made repeated pleas for congressional term limits--always within moments of touting the presence of North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond. Together, the two conservatives have served in the Senate for 58 years.

If there is one way to discern Bush’s mood, it is with his language, which continues to stretch the dictionary.

At this time four years ago, Bush’s state of electoral excitement led him to all sorts of verbal excess. Narcotics traffickers became “those narced-up terrorist kind of guys.” Democrats, whom Bush had been saying wanted “a tax collector in every kitchen” instead of their traditional “chicken in every pot,” suddenly became purveyors of an entirely new concept: “A kitchen in every pot.”

He is living up to his past. In the last week, he christened Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore “Ozone Man”--in cryptic honor of Gore’s environmental designs.

He cast his lot against not only “nutty pollsters” but also “crazy pollsters,” as well as “crackpot dads”--those being the sort who threaten to sue Little League coaches with the aid of “a big trial lawyer.” Clinton, as Republicans like to point out, has the support of many trial lawyers.

In the last days before the election, Bush’s upbeat demeanor has led to an unanswerable guessing game among those who follow his presidency: Does he think he has lost the election--and has come to terms with it? Does he think he has it won? What does he know that pollsters--not to mention Clinton’s buoyant troops--don’t?

He came closest to answering Thursday, when Harry Smith of CBS-TV’s “This Morning” asked if Bush would be able, on the day after the election, to pinpoint what went wrong.

“I am absolutely convinced that I am going to win this election,” the President said. “And I know what the polls say and I know what the commentators say. But if I started talking hypothetically about if I lose, I would undermine what I’ve got inside of me, the spirit that takes it to the American people.”

But the pressure of defending a troubled presidency does show. While he is campaigning with certain verve, his words occasionally emerge brittle and defensive. His many references to the presidency border on bittersweet.

“We’re blessed with a bunch of grandkids, blessed with five wonderful children, and so life has treated us pretty good,” Bush told several thousand people in Thomasville, N.C., last week.

“But when people are hurting in this country, you feel it. You feel it right in your heart. And so I want to win this election not because I need this job, but I want to continue to serve the American people and lift up the hopes of these kids.”

In the last campaign of his political life, the 68-year-old Bush is taking solace from loyalists like Richard Petty, whose expertise in politics ends at the racetrack’s edge. The king of stock-car racing pondered Bush’s plight the other night at the North Carolina state fairgrounds in Raleigh, and decided all was well.

“In 1967, I was in a race in Nashville, Tenn.,” said Petty, his trademark black cowboy hat nearly obscuring his face from the view of several thousand Bush partisans. “I was 14 laps behind at the beginning of the race. I kept on plugging, boys in the crew kept on plugging, kept on working at it and at the end of the race we were four laps ahead.

“We can do that here, OK?”

Minutes later, Bush moved onstage and heralded Petty: “Fourteen laps behind and moving and ended up four ahead--I like that.”

Earlier that day, Bush invited two television correspondents to his railroad car as his campaign train coursed through North Carolina. One asked: Did he know the campaign would be like this?

“Nobody ever said it would be easy,” the President said. “And it isn’t. But it’s worth the fight.”