Talking Back by Andrea Mitchell

Author:Andrea Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2005-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The contrast became apparent during a White House press conference in June 1992, when a reporter asked Bush why he wanted to be reelected.

The president said, “That’s what Barbara was asking me a few minutes ago.” What was his answer to his wife?

“I’d say, hey, I want to continue this job to help this country…. It’s worth finishing the job. Nobody likes the primary process.” It was hardly a sweeping vision for a second term. There was no energy to his self-presentation; he seemed like a spent force. If he had great ideas for the next four years, he didn’t project them. Despite his popularity after the first Gulf War, Bush seemed vulnerable.

As we went through the fall campaign, the Clinton-Gore team seemed to click with their theme song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” The first baby boomer candidates for president and vice president were outfoxing Bush. And despite a serious effort by Jim Baker to talk Bush into dumping Quayle in favor of a candidate who could represent “change,” Bush, according to one advisor, was “reluctant to pull the trigger.”

The contrast between the optimism and hope Clinton had projected at his convention and the weariness Bush was conveying became even more pronounced after the Republicans gathered a month later in Houston. Despite a rousing performance by Ronald Reagan, there was nothing moderate about the party’s platform, or the opening night speech by Pat Buchanan, who climbed on board with an attack on Bill Clinton’s patriotism, whipping up the crowd with the cry that Clinton was “not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”

On the floor, moderates like Kansas senator Nancy Kassebaum were dismayed at other speakers like Marilyn Quayle, who was just as harsh as Buchanan. Prominent Republican women, one by one, took me aside, questioning what was happening to their party. It was a warning sign of what was to come on Election Day: moderates and independents, particularly women, would abandon Bush in droves. Campaign organizers were blamed for letting Buchanan speak in prime time. I was told that the candidate’s son, George W. Bush, held Secretary of State Jim Baker accountable for resisting appeals to quit his cherished cabinet post before the convention and take control of the campaign.

The mood in Houston that August was ugly, inside the hall and out. One day a fight almost broke out at a downtown restaurant when one hundred Young Republicans besieged Democrats, brought to Houston by party chairman Ron Brown to present opposition “spin.” The Young Republican activists pounded on the windows and walls as Brown tried to show reporters new campaign ads. They were too angry to interview, alternately chanting “Libs go home” and “Millie, not Hillie,” a juvenile comparison of the president’s dog to Bill Clinton’s wife. Bush gave a strong speech, attacking Clinton and the Democratically controlled Congress, but the impression the country had was that Buchanan, not Bush, was the face of the Republican Party.

The

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