‘92 NATIONAL ELECTIONS : NEWS ANALYSIS : In the End, Bush Was Out of Touch With Everyday America : The defeat: President failed to recognize recession’s impact on the nation--and on his political fortunes.

The headlines in Texas that day last December when George Bush came to visit were all about an impending layoff at a General Motors plant near Dallas. Across the country, the news was about the recession. Unemployment was rising. America was worried.

At a muddy construction site, Bush signed a $151-billion transportation bill, then had a workingman’s lunch of chicken-fried steak, corn and mashed potatoes with seven hard hats building a highway interchange.

When the $48 tab arrived, the President of the United States, scion of upper-crust Greenwich, Conn., in the winter and Kennebunkport, Me., in the summer, took out an impressive shock of bills.

“Of course I’m buying,” he said. “I’m loaded.”

In six words tossed off in jest at a roadside hamburger joint, Bush encapsulated perhaps the most crucial oversights of his presidency: The failure to recognize the impact the recession was having on the fortunes of the nation, and its potential impact on his own political fortunes.

The factors that brought his defeat were more than a poorly run reelection effort. He squandered what opportunities he had, turning a popularity rating that had soared to the unprecedented range of 90% just 20 months ago to his present nadir: 38% of the popular vote.

To be sure, Bush made a valiant effort to overcome his disabilities in the waning hours of the campaign. Last June, polls showed him 30 points down; he lost by five.

And he was gracious in defeat, pledging to cooperate with Democrat Bill Clinton and sounding much like the George Bush who was inaugurated nearly four years ago--the man who offered his hand to his political opponents. But somehow all that got lost in the bitter effort to hold his office.

There was the failure to provide the country with the clear sense of direction it expects from its President. There were the missed opportunities to project his compassion and optimism that help a nation through hard times.

There was the impression--left by his frequent overseas travel and his focus on foreign affairs--that he cared more for the problems in St. Petersburg, Russia, than St. Petersburg, Fla. There was the weak White House staff.

In the campaign itself, Bush disregarded the recommendations of his closest advisers and refused to recognize the challenge he faced. He put off the formal start of his reelection drive, then delayed an aggressive approach.

And there was the loyalty of which Bush is so proud: He did not recognize the shortcomings in some of his senior campaign and White House aides, thus entering battle without the strongest troops.

But when the shards of his campaign, and his entire presidency, are examined, at the heart of the failure stands George Bush, the man who would have had us elect him without telling us why.

Bitter over Bush’s inability to halt his inexorable slide, one of his longtime friends nearly rants:

“George Bush will go with the wind. He wanted to be President for the same reason he would want to be president of the student body. It’s achievement without any recognition of what comes with it.

“He didn’t burn with anything. He would give the impression of doing any thing. If we didn’t have an economic crisis, he would have gotten away with it. And that’s what upended him.”

George Bush, who came of age dropping torpedoes on Japanese targets during World War II and reached political maturity during the height of the Cold War, summoned reporters to the Oval Office one day in November, 1989. The Berlin Wall--that hated symbol of the division between East and West--was tumbling. On his watch, one of the uppermost foreign policy goals of seven U.S. administrations was being accomplished in full view of the world.

Bush swiveled in the heavy armchair behind his desk. His demeanor was downbeat. There would be no celebration.

“Elated?” he said, answering a question with a question. No, not this President. “I’m not an emotional kind of guy.”

White House officials, campaign aides and outside advisers complain that just such incidents typify the President’s problem in communicating his goals, and triumphs, to the American people. “He failed to use the Oval Office as the supreme bully pulpit to rally the country, other than during the Persian Gulf crisis,” said a senior aide in the Ronald Reagan White House.

When he was running for President in 1988, Bush complained that reporters sought revealing hints about what drove him, about his goals for the nation’s future.

“Don’t put me on the couch,” he would say.

A senior White House staff member called it “a genuine contempt for the need to explain yourself.”

“It goes back to a Yankee rectitude,” the aide said. “He shields himself from the American people. But they want to see him.”

On the campaign trail this year, he was an angry man, fired up over Clinton’s draft history. But the fire died as he raced through the economic issues that powered Clinton’s campaign.

“Most of the things in public life he’s not dug in on,” his longtime friend said. “If it’s acceptable to the Establishment and the experts, it’s acceptable to him.”

A year ago, a young White House staff member named C. Gregg Petersmeyer, who is in charge of the White House “Points of Light” program that recognizes voluntarism, tried to draw attention among his superiors to the idea that the nation had no clear notion of what Bush stood for.

He drew up a grid to encompass the Bush “vision.”

“He spent hours and hours and hours in people’s offices, trying to push the power structure into developing a theme” for the President, a senior White House assistant said. If he had been Budget Director Richard G. Darman or Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, “or someone else of stature, he’d have been listened to.” But he found little interest.

“In retrospect,” the aide said, “he was absolutely right.”

The President was grim-faced as he toyed with the dregs of pancakes and syrup on his plate, the juice of an apple on his chin, while his host, then-freshman Rep. Peter Smith, spoke at a breakfast in Burlington, Vt.

It was Oct. 23, 1990, one month after Bush had broken his “no new taxes” pledge. The congressman, the beneficiary of a presidential visit for a fund-raiser, was emphasizing his differences with Bush over the broken promise.

At the moment, it seemed merely an embarrassment, this tongue-lashing of sorts. In retrospect, it foreshadowed a problem that would dog Bush for the rest of his presidency.

“George Bush stands as a living monument to a lack of political awareness,” Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker said.

“I don’t know what the commotion is about,” Bush told one outside adviser in the autumn of 1990. “Reagan raised taxes six times.”

In the end, more than anything other than the recession itself, Bush’s reelection effort was haunted by the “no new taxes” pledge most credited with assuring his election four years earlier. In his very success were sown the seeds of his eventual defeat.

One week before Election Day, one of the most senior officials in the Bush campaign was wrapping up an interview with a reporter.

If there are any questions over the weekend, “give me a call,” he said. “I’ll be home.”

The off-hand comment said as much as anything about the approach so many Republicans took to the campaign, even as Bush’s prospects grew ever more bleak, in the wake of three consecutive routs of the Democratic opposition.

Two of the six most senior aides were part-timers, keeping up ties to the business world.

Even among those deeply involved in the effort, there were foul-ups. When Bush finally outlined an economic agenda, aides drew up a “saturation” plan intended to keep the subject alive for at least 10 days, so that no American could miss the fact that the President had an economic plan.

But, complained one well-placed campaign official, such big guns as White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and Darman refused to help sell it to the public. Within a day or two, the speech had been reduced to a not-very-catchy title, “Agenda for American Renewal,” which Bush mentioned in speeches only in passing.

There were mistakes of timing. The decision to wait until January to get the campaign organization up and running was critical, said Republican consultant Eddie Mahe. A senior campaign aide called the late start a serious setback because aides could not as easily factor political considerations into three key economic decisions:

--The handling of the fallout from the budget agreement;

--The earlier effort to portray the recession as having ended in the spring of 1991;

--The decisions, reached toward the end of 1991--at the time of the lunch with the Texas road workers--to delay producing an economic stimulus package until Bush delivered his 1992 State of the Union message.

The theme of the Republican National Convention in Houston also proved to be a mistake. The hard conservative edge it projected, as exemplified by Patrick J. Buchanan’s divisive speech, thrilled the party’s right wing but repelled moderate voters.

And the preparation of the President’s address, which was to be the jumping-off point for his bid to overtake Clinton, was a comedy of errors. Raymond Price, a friend of Bush who had been a chief speech writer for President Richard M. Nixon, was brought in to write it. But, a senior campaign aide said, “No one told him, ‘Here’s what you should do: Write the speech that tells everyone why to vote for George Bush.’ ”

The White House “young Turks” wrested control from Price, and Robert Zoellick, the deputy chief of staff who came in with Baker, took over. He delivered a much-too-long 60-page draft on Tuesday morning, 2 1/2 days before Bush was to speak.

White House speech writer Steven Provost labored over it around the clock in his hotel room to finish it before Thursday night, the aide said. And right behind Provost were campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter, Darman, Zoellick, Bush’s 1988 media adviser Roger Ailes, and from time to time the President himself, all “looking over his shoulder, saying ‘do this, do that, don’t do this.’ ”

From others within the campaign there was criticism that the chiefs were too late in awakening to the fact that 1992 was not 1988, and that the magic political potion of crime, patriotism and fear of tax increases that had worked so effectively against a hapless Michael S. Dukakis would turn harmless when doused over Clinton.

Then, a mid-level campaign aide said, “we kept talking about trust and trust and trust. The problem is that people don’t trust Bush.”

Finally, there was also a lack of willingness on the part of senior aides to do--as Bush himself had said he would--whatever was necessary to win.

When the campaign produced a controversial television advertisement arguing that Clinton’s economic plan would raise specific individuals’ taxes by specific amounts, none of the senior officials would defend the ad in public. “That’s profiles in courage,” a senior campaign official groused.

At the end of a long campaign day, a senior Bush aide considered the history of the campaign and White House staffs.

“For 10 years,” the aide said with only some exaggeration, they have been driven to work, “eaten in the White House mess, lived in nice houses. A lot of these people have been around forever. How could they think they knew about the real world?”

It was a frank complaint--one more about the aides upon whom Bush relied so heavily.

At the campaign, there was criticism of the White House and the two chiefs of staff who preceded Baker: John S. Sununu and Samuel K. Skinner.

Bush, said a senior campaign strategist, “started to have doubts” about Skinner in March, three months after the former transportation secretary was installed at the White House. But “he wanted to gut it out and he didn’t see any easy solution.”

At the White House, there were complaints about the campaign staff. “Teeter was totally miscast,” a senior White House official said, complaining that the campaign chairman put too much faith in the “focus groups” he had assembled to assess public attitudes toward political issues.

“Every time we got something going that fired up our people, Teeter got turned off by the focus groups,” he said.

But what was missing most, this staffer said, was someone who could stand up to the President and tell him just what had to be done to get his campaign moving.

Four years ago, Ailes did that.

“I know you don’t like this stuff, but you’re going to lose,” he would say. “You understand that? Lose!”

This year, the campaign aide said ruefully, “The President had no one on his White House staff like that. Not a single person.”

In November, 1990, during the Persian Gulf buildup, Bush received four memoranda urging him to pay more attention to the economy. He resisted.

Eight months later, at a meeting at Camp David, Md., called to plot the campaign, the matter came up again. “He took notes, but he didn’t jump on it,” a participant said.

Weeks later, at a Republican meeting on Mackinaw Island, Mich., William Kristol, Quayle’s chief of staff, called for a more activist agenda. He was denounced as an alarmist.

And, as 1992 approached with the economy in a mire, what one White House official described as “a very vigorous argument” broke out among senior Administration officials over the shape of the economic growth package the President would present in his State of the Union message.

In short, despite a year of warnings, Bush entered the campaign “making the assumption . . . that the economy would get better,” a former White House official said. There was no worst-case scenario.

So Bush will head into retirement: Winters in Houston, most likely, and summers in Maine.

“He really was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” said the former White House official. To a nation struggling with recession, “he gave the impression he couldn’t relate. You got speed golf, or ‘Of course I’m buying. I’m loaded.’ For all the hype of pork rinds and horseshoes, he really was George Herbert Walker Bush of Kennebunkport. That’s it.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this story.

The Final Count

Electorial votes listed in each state.

*

George Bush ALABAMA: 9 ALASKA: 3 ARIZONA: 8 FLORIDA: 25 IDAHO: 4 INDIANA: 12 KANSAS: 6 MISSISSIPPI: 7 NEBRASKA: 5 NORTH CAROLINA: 14 NORTH DAKOTA: 3 OKLAHOMA: 8 SOUTH CAROLINA: 8 SOUTH DAKOTA: 3 TEXAS: 32 UTAH: 5 VIRGINIA: 13 WYOMING: 3 *

Bill Clinton: ARKANSAS: 6 CALIFORNIA: 54 COLORADO: 8 CONNECTICUT: 8 DELAWARE: 3 WASHINGTON D.C.: 3 GEORGIA: 13 HAWAII: 4 ILLINOIS: 22 IOWA: 7 KENTUCKY: 8 LOUISIANA: 9 MAINE: 4 MARYLAND: 10 MASSACHUSETTS: 12 MICHIGAN: 18 MINNESOTA: 10 MISSOURI: 11 MONTANA: 3 NEVADA: 4 NEW HAMPSHIRE: 4 NEW JERSEY: 15 NEW MEXICO: 5 NEW YORK: 33 OHIO: 21 OREGON: 7 PENNSYLVANIA: 23 RHODE ISLAND: 4 TENNESSEE: 11 VERMONT: 3 WASHINGTON: 11 WEST VIRGINIA: 5 WISCONSIN: 11