Once Again, a President Pays the Price for a Sour Economy : Politics: Election outcome echoes 1980 race that cost Jimmy Carter the White House. Both contests were referendums on the incumbent.

The Reagan-Bush era in American politics ended Tuesday just as it began 12 years ago--with the massive repudiation of a President undone by economic distress.

“It’s 1980 over again,” said University of Pittsburgh presidential scholar Bert Rockman, co-editor of “The Bush Presidency,” recalling Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in that election--a contest that also elevated 1992’s toppled incumbent, George Bush, to the vice presidency.

“Now, as then, people are reacting against the economy and the incumbent,” Rockman said.

Thus, despite all the odd twists and turns taken by the 1992 road to the White House, the ending was shaped by the oldest law of presidential politics.

“Whenever you have an incumbent President running for reelection, it’s always a referendum on him,” said Austin Ranney, UC Berkeley political scientist. “When things are going good, people say: ‘Why change?’ But if things are not going so good, particularly with the economy, people say: ‘Do I want want another four years of this guy?’ ”

And the answer that comes back under those circumstances is almost invariably what it was on Tuesday--a resounding no.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s decisive victory also seemed to contravene claims that have been advanced by Republicans--and generally conceded by Democrats--as explanations for GOP domination of presidential politics for more than a decade.

The GOP strategists contended that their party had assured itself of a permanent lease on the White House by fashioning a message that appealed to the electorate’s aversion to government--particularly the threat of higher taxes and increased spending--and its reverence for traditional values.

Bush and his team expended everything they had in time, energy and money to pound those themes home against Clinton in 1992, as the GOP effectively did against Democratic rivals Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. But these time-tested battle cries failed to arouse voters preoccupied with the nation’s prolonged economic slump.

Indeed, Clinton’s support withstood this buffeting even though his proposals for raising taxes by $150 billion and spending by $220 billion, as well as the fact that he was beset by allegations of philandering and shirking the draft, made him in some ways an easier mark for such attacks than either Mondale or Dukakis.

But whatever his shortcomings, Clinton clearly demonstrated the good sense and the will to grasp his best asset in the campaign and exploit it to the fullest.

A sign prominently displayed in Clinton headquarters in Little Rock, Ark., summed up his strategy: “It’s the economy, stupid.” And throughout his long march to the White House, he never passed up a chance to cite the rising figures on layoffs, bankruptcies, foreclosures and other gloomy indicators of decline that fueled dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration.

Still another sign of that discontent with Bush’s stewardship was the emergence of independent candidate Ross Perot as a force in the campaign. “You don’t usually get (such) candidates when the country is satisfied,” said American University political analyst Alan J. Lichtman.

Tabulations from a Los Angeles Times exit poll of more than 10,000 voters around the country etched the national mood. Roughly seven out of 10 voters said the nation is on the wrong track, and close to 40% reported that their own financial situation was worse now than it was four years ago.

“It’s very hard to reelect an incumbent when you have (so many) people saying the country is all screwed up,” said Republican pollster William McInturff, who was part of Bush’s successful 1988 campaign.

Added Democratic consultant Mark Mellman: “Those of us who work in campaigns think what we do has a tremendous impact on the electorate. But the fact is that most of what happens in a presidential campaign is determined not by the candidate’s strategy but on underlying fundamentals.”

In this case, the underlying fundamentals clearly favored Clinton. The most significant one cut to the core of Bush’s political problems--that the four years of his presidency recorded the slowest economic growth of any such period in the post-World War II era.

“I think the economy has obliterated everything,” said Saul Shorr, a Philadelphia-based Democratic consultant who contrasted the economic atmosphere this year with the favorable conditions in 1988. For all the criticisms of the campaign Dukakis ran that year, Shorr contends that any Democrat--including Clinton--would have had a hard time winning then.

“I think to most Americans in 1988, Bill Clinton would have been Dukakis with a Southern accent and a draft deferment,” Shorr said. “And in 1992, Dukakis would have come across much like Clinton--only a bit more severe.”

History also suggests that voters passing judgment on presidents who have presided over a poor economy seem to operate with a presumption of guilt rather than innocence.

“The question of whether (the President) is responsible for what’s happening is irrelevant,” Ranney said. “Voters ask themselves: ‘What can we do to make things better? Not a helluva lot. But one thing we can do is vote the ins out and hope the outs will do better.’ ”

Which is not to say that the economic trends alone make or break presidents. Presidents have the power to influence the economy--or at least the public perceptions of economic conditions--and some have been willing to try, notes William Leuchtenburg, a biographer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In his 1936 campaign for reelection, with the nation still far from recovered from the Great Depression, Leuchtenburg says Roosevelt told then-Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: “I don’t care how you do it, I want the price of cotton to be at a certain level.”

And, Leuchtenburg adds, he instructed the heads of the New Deal’s public works agencies not to lay anyone off before Election Day.”

These and other measures helped F.D.R. win 48 states against Republican Alfred M. Landon in 1936.

Bush, by contrast, preferred to wait things out as the economy languished in 1991 and into this year, lulled by the optimistic forecasts of his own advisers and his own disinclination to use federal power to prime the economic pump. Hoping to revive public confidence, he argued that conditions were not as bad as critics contended and promised they would get better soon.

These efforts backfired; their main result was to make the President seem either uninformed or insensitive or both.

“Bush suffered politically,” McInturff said, “because in voters’ minds he did not recognize the problem fast enough and wasn’t aggressive enough in dealing with it.”

By the time Bush finally unveiled a blueprint for recovery--his “Agenda for Economic Renewal”--it was too late to alter the voters’ judgment on him as a negligent economic manager.