I agree with the above poster, I think insider Bush did not really want to be President for another four years, he wanted to go back to Maine.
His Vice President, Dan Quayle was a moron. Look up dumbass in Webster’s and see whose face is portrayed. Quayle was pissing and moaning about Murphy Brown having a kid out of wedlock and family values or some crap. He probably thought Murphy Brown was a real person.
Perot took a lot of votes from President Bush. The Republican base was the south, and in 92, there were two other southern guys in the race.
Clinton was cool and people liked him. Like a redneck JFK. Clinton was young and refreshing, old Bush just old.
A recession in 1992.
Bush would of made a much better Secretary of State than President. he was fairly clueless about a domestic agenda.
The dude raised taxes.
He did not capture Saddam Hussain when he had the whole world, including the Arab states behind him.
As always, it was “the economy, stupid.” Poppy hadn’t publicly attempted to do anything or even show awareness of the slump, but devoted his energies even more to gadding about in Air Force One being the Leader of the Free World while appearing to sell out American jobs. When he wasn’t doing that, he was taking yet another vacation at the rich-guy’s compound in Kennebunkport. After digging around, it seems I still have my “George Bush Anywhere But America Tour” T-shirt, listing all of his foreign trips in 1992 alone (a new record in the Presidential League). It wasn’t so much that his handling of the economy was failing, but that he didn’t seem interested enough in it to even look for a clue.
Lee “Let’s strip the bark off that little bastard” Atwater literally repented on his deathbed, asking forgiveness for the way he’d run the anti-Dukakis campaign. That took away a large part of the residual good will he’d had.
**Black Oak Arkansas’s ** list is pretty comprehensive, actually - the bad outweighed the good in the eye of a majority of the electorate.
This has already been mentioned, but the reason I voted for Clinton in '92 was because Bush didn’t finish the job in Iraq. He left Saddam in power and Saddam’s regime intact.
Most people around here were pretty sure we’d eventually have do the job all over again. Guess what?
I would consider this to be the most important single factor. Many have suggested that losing the election was Bush’s failure. In some ways it was. Clinton will remain however, love him or hate him, one of history’s best politicians. Voters couldn’t help but notice that for personality and vision Clinton trounced Bush.
The Perot excuse holds no water. Every exit poll I’ve ever seen shows that Perot took votes equally from both Clinton and Bush. Same thing in '96 with Clinton and Dole.
I always got the impression that Bush thought his 90% approval rating after the Gulf War would carry him through so he thought his re-election was in the bag.
Lot of good points, but surprised nobody has mentioned the Republican Party’s convention, with the hateful anti-gay rhetoric and Marilyn Quayle’s screeching, “Some of us did not participate in the SEXUAL REVOLUTION!!!”
Bush was obessed and spent too much of his time concerned making war on Iraq. He ignored the american economy and american jobs. He also supported gun control, which eroded his core support.
Like father, like son.
Both bush’s will be one term presidents, and for the same reasons.
nisosbar makes a good point about the debacle of a convention. In their book “All’s Fair”, Mary Matalin and James Carville give their respective views of that travesty, and both of them were pretty darn excited about it. Of course, Matalin was excited because she thought it showed that the Republicans were going to get the vote out and re-elect Bush I, and Carville was excited because he knew the harshness of the rhetoric was going to make a lot of people think twice about voting for a party that was so incredibly eager to hate.
While a poor economy was mentioned a lot in the campaign I don’t think it was really a very big factor in Bush’s defeat.
One factor yet explored is that unlike most incumbant Presidents, Bush’s first election was largely a fluke. It looked like he had a significant margin, but some of it were voters who might have voted for Dukakis if it hadn’t been the Reagan popularity. They were vote for Reagan but checked Bush on the ballot.
There was also the unusual effect the VPs selections made on the 1988 vote.
Around the time of the conventions, Dukakis was actually leading Bush, but voters started to see the VPs. Quail looked weak which made Bush look stronger, Bentsen looked strong which made Dukakis look weaker. There were numerous articles in the papers and items on TV saying “if only Bentsen were at the top”.
So Bush 1988 had very little margin of true support to lose in order to win in 1992.
His son by the way has that issue as well.
I’ve heard that indirectly a number of times too, but I’ve never been able to find a good cite. Know of any?
aahala, my recollection is that Bush’s choice of a nonentity as VP actually hurt him (though not enough to lose more than 10 states to Dukakis). The first big decision he got to make on his own, and he blew it - after 4 years of Dan proving his lack of depth, and Poppy picked him again, and that settled the matter for a lot of people.
i read in ‘parade’ magazine, the sunday supplement to the local paper, the comment on the inside of the front page. that bush’s campaign manager (i’m wanting to say george baker, but i’m probably wrong) was, unaccountably, so busy trying to position himself as a candidate in 1996 that he forgot to do anything for the bush campaign.
The last straw for me, and perhaps a number of core conservatives, was the budget battle of 91-92 during which Bush signed three (or four?) stop-gap spending bills, each time swearing he was not going to sign another one. In that confrontation with the Democrat controlled congress, he simply didn’t have the courage to make good on his threat and let the government shut down. To exacerbate the problem, Bush signed a budget that finally emerged out of Congress which included tax increases, contrary to his defiant “read my lips”.
The reversal on “read my lips” was a glaring chink in the armor and made plum fodder for the sound-bite driven media, but I don’t think was as important to thoughtful conservative voters as was his habitual weakness in the face of the House controlled by Tom Foley and Dan Rostinkowski and the Senate controlled by George Mitchell. The capitulation on the stop-gap bills and the final budget was typical, and as I say, once too many.
Even if Bush had shown enough resolve to keep the devoted Republican voters, I suspect he still would have lost the election, though he might not have taken such a shellacking. As one poster points out, he seemed tired, burned out, and disinterested. Clinton was fresh, energetic, and motivational and as such captured a lot of “swing votes” as well as a number of people who weren’t in the habit of voting. Furthermore, Bush (and Dole) were the last of the WWII era candidates. For many, Clinton perhaps represented the shedding of old skin in a turn toward pessimism.
Frankly, I’m not sure things would have turned out much differently if Bush would have won, except perhaps for the change of power in the House and Senate. And in that respect, Bush losing the election possibly benefitted conservatives.
Aside: As for the “failure to go after Saddam”, wasn’t such a mission prohibited by the UN resolution that GHWB was bound to? If so, a march on Baghdad would have been political suicide. (Cf. the incessant belly-aching about GWB’s attitude toward the UN in the present situation.)