George H. W. Bush by Curt Smith

Author:Curt Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2014-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Into the Abyss

Bush returned to an administration lessened by the December 4 resignation of Chief of Staff Sununu, who had been accused of using government jets for personal trips, such as skiing excursions, and classifying the trips as official, for purposes such as promoting conservation or Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light.” Once he took a government limousine from Washington to a rare stamp auction at Christie’s auction house in New York. Sununu spent $5,000 on rare stamps, sent the car back unoccupied, and returned to DC on a government jet.

During one week forty-five newspapers printed editorials damning Sununu, some urging his exit. White House counsel C. Boyden Gray ordered him to repay the government more than $47,000 for the flights, which he did, not stilling critics, who acidly assaulted Sununu’s alleged sense of entitlement. Today many of those same people ignore Barack and Michelle Obama’s use of Air Force One and the White House itself as a piggybank, Sununu’s misconduct akin to throwing a spitball in Sunday school.

Bush’s decision to dispatch Sununu briefly reduced criticism of the administration, which revived after the president went to Japan, came home to stump New Hampshire, and began a campaign that even to a GOP Cassandra seemed impossible in 1991 to lose. Sununu’s exit deprived Bush of the person who, though born well-off, had the most sensitive blue-collar intuition of any high Bush aide. Atwater was recently dead. Ailes had left to create Fox News. I thought of Sununu as, first, Pat Buchanan, then Ross Perot, snatched political bodies that had backed Bush in 1988.

As it happened, Sununu proved inextinguishable, remerging in 2012 as an aide to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a man not unlike Bush in policy and person. At seventy-three Sununu became what the GOP lacked in 1992—a take-no-prisoners surrogate. One day Sununu told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that President Obama was “lazy and disengaged.” Most journalists, including Mitchell, thought the criticism shocking. Others, looking at Obama’s vacuous record, felt that Sununu was being kind.

My last December 1991 memo to him mimed others that he received and what nascent talk radio urged daily—the Bush campaign’s need to attack. That year’s March Gallup Poll had given the president a 91 percent approval rating. In November 1992 he got 37.5 percent of the total in the general election—a historic plunge. Like most metooers, the GOP’s free fall was largely caused by playing on the other team’s turf.

The Clintons’ mantra was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Since their media chorus and the GOP campaign agreed, that maxim became the slogan of the election. Bypassed was Bush’s magnificence in Desert Storm—how he literally reshaped the globe. Obscured was Gorbachev dissolving the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991—a land until very recently consigned to oblivion. Ignored was Bush’s integrity—and how lower interest and inflation rates made it much easier to buy a home and afford a family. Forgotten—as if they never happened.

Instead, by Election Day “It’s the economy, stupid” meant two things: (1) the worst unemployment since 1984 and (2) the president’s breaking his “No New Taxes” pledge.

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