41: A Portrait of My Father

by George W. Bush

  Buchanan stayed in the race for several months, filling the airwaves with attacks on the President. He eventually dropped out and endorsed Dad, but his challenge revealed that the Republican Party was fractured. The experience illustrated one of the key rules of political campaigning: the importance of consolidating the base. It was easy for me to do that in 2000, when Republicans of all stripes were hungry to reclaim the White House after eight years. In 2004, I reached out early to key leaders and managed to tamp down any concerns from disgruntled factions of the party. Pat Buchanan prevented George Bush from doing that in 1992. And to make matters worse, Buchanan’s success energized independents, one of whom was about to enter the presidential race.

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  ON THE SURFACE, H. Ross Perot and George Bush had some things in common. Like Dad, Perot was a Navy veteran and a Texas businessman. The son of a cotton broker in Texarkana, Perot had graduated from the Naval Academy and gone to work for IBM. He eventually launched his own company, Electronic Data Systems, which became a pioneer in the computer industry and made Perot a rich man. Dad and Perot knew each other from the Texas business community. From Dad’s perspective, they got along well. Evidently Perot respected Dad at one time, because he had asked Dad if he would be interested in running a Perot-backed oil company after he left government at the beginning of the Carter administration.

  Over the years, something obviously went wrong in their relationship. Dad believed that a problem arose over Ross Perot’s belief that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnam. When the Defense Department reported to President Reagan that there was no evidence of living POWs, Perot—who disagreed with that assessment—opened his own discussions with the Vietnamese government. The President decided that Perot’s trips had to stop and asked his national security team how to handle the situation.

  “I know Ross from Texas,” Dad volunteered, “and I’d be glad to convey the message to him.”

  Perot was convinced that there was a conspiracy to abandon the POWs. After his conversation with Dad, he concluded that George Bush was part of the conspiracy. As Dad would later put it, “Perot shot the messenger.”

  On February 20, 1992—two days after Pat Buchanan’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary—Perot announced on Larry King’s CNN call-in show that he would run for President if grassroots supporters registered him on the presidential ballots of all fifty states. At the time, that seemed like a long shot. Within weeks, however, Perot announced that the Home Shopping Network had been hired to manage the thousands of calls an hour that he was receiving urging him to enter the race.

  Perot’s agenda had some elements that appealed to both sides of the political aisle. He believed in cutting the deficit and reducing government waste. He espoused a populist protectionist message to safeguard American businesses from foreign competition. He was pro-choice and opposed the Gulf War; he also called for slowing the growth in Social Security benefits to balance the budget and called for an expansion of the war on drugs. His unifying theme was antiestablishment and anti-incumbent. And nobody embodied the political establishment more than the incumbent, President George Bush.

  The campaign’s first reaction to Perot was somewhat dismissive. To those who had known Perot for many years, it seemed inconceivable that he could survive on the national political stage. I was worried. Perot had lots of money and had tapped into populist discontent with Washington. The media was thrilled to have a colorful new personality to cover and initially lavished praise on Perot. I monitored his progress from my office building in Dallas, which overlooked a Perot campaign headquarters. Day after day, I watched people in BMWs and SUVs line up to collect yard signs and bumper stickers. It was like watching the disintegration of a political base in slow motion.

  By the summer of 1992, the campaign had no choice but to take Perot seriously. Like Pat Buchanan before him, Perot made relentless attacks on Dad and the Washington establishment that were taking a toll. Then, all of sudden, Perot announced that he was withdrawing from the race. His explanation was difficult to understand. First he said that he did not want to deadlock the Electoral College and force the election to be resolved by the House of Representatives. Later, he would claim (with no evidence) that the real reason he had dropped out was that Dad’s campaign had threatened to ruin his daughter’s wedding. I was amazed that this man was being taken seriously as a presidential candidate. I had also learned not to underestimate Ross Perot. I predicted to friends after Perot’s withdrawal, “He’ll be back.”

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  IN 1988, Dad had run against history in the form of the Van Buren factor. In 1992, he was trying to do something unprecedented. No two-term Vice President who succeeded to the presidency had ever been elected to two full terms of his own. John Adams came close, but Thomas Jefferson got in the way. Two centuries later, George Bush ran into William Jefferson Clinton.

  Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas was not an obvious choice for the Democrats. In 1991, with Dad riding high in polls after the Gulf War, several of the front-running candidates—Governor Mario Cuomo of New York and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey—had decided not to run. Clinton, who was forty-five years old (one month my junior), entered a wide-open Democratic field. Clinton had a charming personality and was a superb campaigner who had been elected Governor five times. He was considered one of his party’s brightest policy minds, and he espoused a “third way” of politics that steered a middle ground between traditional liberalism and conservatism. I remember Dad telling me that he had been impressed by the Arkansas Governor at a White House–sponsored education summit.

  Clinton had a compelling life story. His father had been killed in a car accident three months before he was born. Raised by his mother, he had worked his way out of small-town Arkansas to Georgetown University, a Rhodes Scholarship, and Yale Law School. In a detail that no campaign scriptwriter could invent, his hometown was called Hope.

  The man from Hope also had a lot to overcome. He was seen by some as undisciplined, and he was dogged by rumors about personal indiscretions. He received less than 3 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, and in New Hampshire the media reported allegations of an affair with a former TV news reporter in Arkansas. Clinton responded with a high-profile interview on 60 Minutes immediately following the Super Bowl. He acknowledged making mistakes, and his wife, Hillary, fully defended her husband and their marriage. Shortly thereafter, Clinton shocked the political world by finishing second in New Hampshire behind the heavy favorite, Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. In his speech after the New Hampshire primary, Clinton proclaimed himself “the Comeback Kid.” And he was. He swept the Southern primaries and outlasted Paul Tsongas and California Governor Jerry Brown to clinch the Democratic nomination.

  As the race unfolded, it became clear that Bill Clinton would be a formidable opponent. He understood the importance of clear and simple campaign themes. One of those themes was change. After eight years of Reagan-Bush and four years of Bush-Quayle, Clinton knew that voters were ready for fresh faces. He also recognized the generational changes reshaping the electorate. Clinton cultivated his image, playing his saxophone on late-night TV with Arsenio Hall and appearing with college students on MTV. Clinton doubled down on the change theme by selecting as his running mate Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee, a fellow baby boomer. The message was clear: Their generation’s time had arrived.

  Clinton and Gore stressed a second theme: the economy. Bill Clinton recognized that if the election was about foreign policy, he had little chance to beat George Bush. He correctly sensed that Dad was vulnerable on the economy. His campaign adopted the slogan “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” He accused Dad of being out of touch and even managed to turn Dad’s foreign policy successes against him by suggesting that he hadn’t done enough on domestic issues. For all of Clinton’s lack of discipline in some areas of his life, he was relentlessly disciplined about his campaign message.

  Bill Clinton also benefited from a fr
iendly press corps. With their baby boomer background, more liberal views, and Ivy League lawyer credentials, the Clintons fit the mold of many of the baby boomer reporters. In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.)

  A classic example of the media’s hostility toward George Bush came in February 1992, when Dad visited a grocery store convention in Florida. Among other products, Dad looked at a new version of an electronic grocery scanner. When he complimented his hosts on their new technology, one reporter concocted the story that he had never seen a grocery scanner before. “This career politician, who has lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades, is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle-class life,” the New York Times reported. It later came out that the reporter who wrote that “firsthand” account wasn’t even at the grocery store convention.

  The Democratic National Convention in July 1992 provided a perfect opportunity for Clinton and Gore to showcase their campaign before a national audience. The convention was carefully orchestrated to highlight the theme of change, all the way down to the Fleetwood Mac lyrics that played after Clinton’s speech, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” The message worked. The Democrats had gone into New York roughly in a dead heat with Dad and Dan Quayle. They came out with a twenty-four-point lead.

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  AFTER THE Democratic convention, there was general despondency among Bush supporters. I too was concerned, but I had not lost hope. I had seen Dad overcome Michael Dukakis’s lead in 1988. And I believed that he would benefit from the fact that the 1992 campaign was finally down to a two-man race. After months of withering attacks by Buchanan, Perot, and Clinton, Dad would be able to draw a favorable contrast with his opponent on the crucial issues of leadership, experience, and competence. Starting at his convention, he would revitalize his campaign by debunking the perception that he was out of touch and clarifying where he wanted to lead the country.

  One way to demonstrate that he had revitalized his campaign was to change its leadership. In August, Dad brought Jim Baker back to the White House, where he would serve as Chief of Staff and coordinate the fall campaign. I know it was tough for Jim to leave a job he loved, Secretary of State, but he was loyal to his friend.

  One area where Dad decided not to make a change was with his running mate. Dan Quayle had served the President faithfully, and Dad felt comfortable with his VP. Although Dad recognized that picking a new running mate had the potential to shake up the race, he felt that a change of that magnitude in an election year would look desperate and embarrass his friend. The Bush-Quayle ticket stayed intact.

  With Baker back at the helm, Dad and his advisers developed a campaign strategy for the fall. Unfortunately, the first thing they needed to do was consolidate support from the base of the Republican Party—a basic responsibility that should have been fulfilled months earlier but had been delayed by the challenges from Buchanan and Perot. To do that, the campaign largely returned to the playbook from 1988, when Dad had successfully emphasized values that Republicans cared about. Dan Quayle had made major headlines earlier in the campaign when he criticized Hollywood for diminishing the importance of families. Most memorably, he denounced the popular TV show Murphy Brown for featuring “a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ” While sparring with a fictional character struck me as a little awkward, Quayle had an important point: Hollywood was out of touch with the values that mattered to most Americans. George Bush and Dan Quayle were not.

  The best opportunity to unite the party against Clinton came at the Republican National Convention in Houston. The convention emphasized the importance of Dad’s family values. Jeb’s teenage son George P. delivered a great speech supporting his grandfather, whom he called “the greatest man [he had] ever known,” and concluded by leading the audience in a chant of “Viva Bush!” Mother spoke movingly about the man she had married almost fifty years earlier. “When George and I headed west after World War II, we already had our first child,” she said. “George was a veteran. He was a college graduate, and he had a job here in Texas. And we eventually settled in Midland, a small, decent community where neighbors helped each other, a wonderful place to bring up a family, and it still is. In many ways these were the best years of our lives.” As she put it, “George’s days in the fields were dusty with long hours and hard work, but no matter when he got home, he always had time to throw a ball or listen to the kids.” She summed up with, “You know, to us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.” Mother was a strong political asset for George Bush. She was a plain speaker who loved her husband and appealed to many Americans with her bluntness and quick wit.

  Some of the other speakers discussed family values in a different tone. In a further attempt to unite the base, the convention organizers had agreed to let Pat Buchanan deliver a prime-time speech. Buchanan offered a strong endorsement of Dad, calling on his “Buchanan Brigades” to “come home and stand beside George Bush.” But he also proclaimed that a “religious war” was raging for the soul of the nation, defended the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded,” and accused Hillary Clinton of trying to impose an agenda of “radical feminism.” While it might have helped with some elements of the base, Buchanan’s speech did not convey a kinder and gentler Republican Party. (Because the convention was running late, Buchanan’s speech bumped former President Ronald Reagan’s strong endorsement of Dad—the last speech of President Reagan’s public career—out of prime time.)

  In his speech on the final night of the convention, Dad had a chance to close the gap with Clinton. As in the 1988 speech, he sought to remind the voters why his experience, integrity, and vision for the future made him the right man for the job. Unlike the 1988 speech, which was completed well in advance so that Dad had plenty of time to rehearse, the 1992 speech was the result of a chaotic process. I remember being shocked when I walked into a conference room at the Houstonian Hotel and saw senior Bush campaign aides scrambling to finish a first draft of the convention speech three days before it was to be delivered. The speech process symbolized one of the flaws of Dad’s 1992 campaign: It was reacting, not leading.

  Dad started his speech by talking about Iraq and the Cold War, and then pivoted to the economy. “When the Berlin Wall fell,” he joked, “I half expected to see a headline, ‘Wall Falls, Three Border Guards Lose Jobs.’ And underneath, it probably says, ‘Clinton Blames Bush.’ ” In the key line of the speech, Dad said that he regretted his decision to accept the tax increase that the Democrats had demanded in the budget compromise. He proposed a new round of spending reductions and tax cuts in the year ahead. Unlike the 1988 speech, which soared and presented a positive vision, the 1992 speech was defensive and relatively flat. Nevertheless, there was a traditional polling bounce after the convention. The Bush-Quayle ticket trailed Clinton-Gore by ten points. Although the Bush comeback had begun, it still had a steep hill to climb.

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  THE UPHILL CLIMB became steeper when Ross Perot announced that he would return to the race on October 1. Perot’s reentry meant that he would share the stage at the presidential debates and put his anti-incumbent TV ads back on the airwaves. Just when Dad had started gaining ground, he had to resume fighting a two-front war.

  Perot’s return wasn’t the only setback. In late August, Hurricane Andrew struck the Florida and Louisiana coasts, causing some twenty-five billion dollars in damage and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless. Dad immediately issued a major disaster declaration, which allowed the affected states to receive federal disa
ster aid. But, as in any large-scale relief effort, it took time for the resources to reach those in need. Dad traveled to Florida to show his commitment, sent troops to help man relief stations, and deployed Secretary of Transportation Andy Card to personally oversee the operation. That didn’t stop Bill Clinton, Democratic officials in Florida, or the media from castigating the federal government’s “slow response.” The criticism echoed the theme that George Bush was out of touch or didn’t care. Of course, when it comes to delivering ice and trailers, there is only so much that the President can do. That was a lesson that I would learn years later in my own encounter with the politics of natural disasters after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was frustrating to see critics and opponents exploit the difficult task of dealing with nature’s wrath for political gain.

  When he returned to the campaign trail, Dad pressed ahead with his focus on values. He criticized Clinton’s positions on social issues like abortion and denounced his conduct during the Vietnam War, which included avoiding the draft and protesting on foreign soil during his year at Oxford. Nevertheless, he had trouble gaining traction. Bill Clinton was no Michael Dukakis. While he supported most of the traditional Democratic platform, he was also in favor of the death penalty, welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and a middle-class tax cut (although after he took office, the middle-class tax cut he promised turned into a tax increase). It was hard to portray him as a left-wing liberal. Just as important, Clinton rarely let an attack go unanswered. And his answers always came back to his two overriding themes: change and the economy.