After 12 years, the Reagan-Bush revolution appears to be in its Final Days. Staffers have not exactly draped black crepe over the White House, but within the West Wing can be heard the whine of axes grinding and the churn of Xerox machines cranking out resumes. Barring the greatest performance in the history of presidential debates on Monday night, the appearance of a terrible ghost from Bill Clinton’s past, or an act of God, George Bush seems fated to be a one-term president. The Republican Party may not even make it to Election Day before a period of mourning sets in.
Before acceptance, of course, must come denial, anger and depression. As he left the stage on Thursday, Bush gave a less-than-gung-ho reply when a TV reporter asked him how he’d done. “I just don’t know,” he muttered. In a conversation last week with an old and close friend, Bush grudgingly conceded that his days in the Oval Office may be numbered, but he refused to accept the blame for it. The timing was bad, he said. The recession lasted too long. The cold war ended too soon. Anyways, he said, there’s still time. “It’s been a screwy year.”
That thin hope keeps Bush’s inner core of top advisers whistling as they pass the political graveyard. Pulling all-nighters, they thought up snappy comeback lines for the president, none of which Bush managed to use. (When Clinton pledged to be the president of change, Bush was supposed to shoot back, “like you changed your story on avoiding the draft?”) Before the second debate, when tracking polls showed a slight narrowing in the race, Bush campaign strategist Charlie Black jauntily declared a return of the Big Mo. He neglected to mention a very big But: according to the Bush campaign’s own polling data, the gap between Bush and Clinton had not closed in many key states. After Thursday night’s fade-out, the staffers were left grasping at an even flimsier document: a fax-smudged advance copy of the December Penthouse, in which Gennifer Flowers purports to detail her steamy love life with Clinton. Even Bob Guccione, the Penthouse publisher, refused to vouch for Flowers’s credibility.
The only road left to the Bush campaign was the low one. Bush advisers urged the president to shed his diffidence and come out swinging against Clinton in the final debate. Dan Quayle had scored with his harsh attacks on Clinton and Al Gore during the veep debate, although the vice president appeared manic at times. (Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote that Quayle’s “forced laugh was reminiscent of Richard Widmark’s when he played weirdos in films noir of the ’40s.”) The president’s last campaign-ad buys will make the unsubtle point that the president’s opponent is a liar.
Lower down in the Bush-Quayle campaign ranks, the blame game has begun in earnest. “It’s like living the ‘Lord of the Flies’,” said a staffer. “We haven’t been able to eat Bill Clinton so we’ve begun eating each other.” While staffers were not sending out their curricula vitae over the White House fax machines, they were sticking pins in the already deflated reputations of Bush’s former chiefs of staff. It was all John Sununu’s fault, some argued. He foolishly thought the president could surf back into office on his gulf-war surge. No, it was Sam Skinner’s, said others. The former transportation secretary couldn’t organize a car pool. The one person everyone could agree to trash was Richard Darman. The wily budget director had given his best friend, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, a self-serving account of the Bush administration’s failure to manage the economy. The plot of the four-part series was: Darman tried to do the right thing, but low-rent pols (Jim Baker, the president) stopped him. Staffers jokingly put a Bush-Quayle sticker on Darman’s Mercedes, to remind him whom he was voting for, and yukked it up over a Christopher Buckley parody in The Wall Street Journal of Darman’s memoirs, entitled “A Legend in His Own Mind.” One cabinet secretary was more blunt. The only way Bush could repay Darman, he said, was to buy 30 minutes of TV time, take Darman on stage and shoot him.
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, only Jim Baker has escaped universal scorn from the staff. The president’s best friend has obviously failed to play miracle worker in his latest role as chief of staff and campaign czar, but most aides shrug that the patient was too far gone by the time Baker arrived in late August. Baker does have bitter critics in the office of Vice President Quayle. The veep’s aides accuse Baker of a lack of boldness; Baker loyalists scoff that the Quaylemen are just sore because they have been cut out of the loop.
Inside the First Family, depression has sunk in. Friends say that George W., Bush’s eldest son, and the president’s daughter, Doro, are particularly low over their father’s apparent demise. When George Bush announced in the debate that his wife, Barbara, probably could have won the election but it was “too late,” the First Lady wore an expression on her face that must have reflected her true feelings 44 years ago when her husband announced that they were moving from Connecticut to Midland, Texas.
In his public moods, the president himself alternates between the odd passivity he showed in the debates to flailing on the campaign trail. Hoarse and tired after the Thursday debate, his syntax a shambles, Bush laced into Clinton for evading the draft at a sparsely attended rally at Middlesex County College in Edison, N.J. For good measure, he also denounced a group of hecklers, most of whom were not even born during the Vietnam War, as “draft dodgers.”
But that is the sad and angry side of Bush. There is also a stoic and strong Bush, and he showed himself in a private conversation with a friend last week. He hadn’t decided where to live if he lost the election, he said. But “if it happens, it happens. There’s life after this and a damn good life.” Bush could decide to go out with dignity-and leave the last assaults to surrogates. More likely, he will follow the rough-and-tumble code of the schoolboy and play hard to the end.
