It might seem as though nothing could be better for a person running for president than to be president already. No one can carp about the
”electability” question. The trappings of office are excellent campaign symbols.
The details of candidacy that the public never sees-fresh shirts, well-pressed suits, campaign props that work, fawning toadies to fawn and toad and get out the crowds-are usually very well handled. The news media so eagerly await his every word that a president can just about tell them exactly what to say, if not how to say it.
Then there is money. There are few dinners anywhere in the world that are worth $1,000, but an incumbent president has no trouble getting thousands of supporters to pay just that to watch him eat and hear him speak.
All of this is true, as second-term presidents could attest.
The only big problem with incumbency, as George Bush well knows, is that an entire nation, with all its recent good and bad news, hangs around your neck.
That is Bush`s problem as the Republican presidential campaign skips along toward the inevitable coronation in blistering Houston in August. His presidency has become a public measure of the nation`s economic and social health, and that is the challenge with which he must cope until November.
It`s not exactly like the Ancient Mariner`s albatross, because at least the symbolic bird was dead, unchanging. Nations, on the other hand, are very changeable. It is more like having a big applause-o-meter embedded in your chest, or perhaps like having a chimp with a loud horn waiting just offstage to honk whenever your numbers go down.
The numbers go up, and everyone says Bush is in better shape. The numbers go down, and the news media, in the chimp`s role, predict doom with a loud honk. Are you better off today than you were a year ago? What about a day ago? And an hour ago?
A year ago, Bush was the American Caesar, full of bluster and waving flags and military success. The applause-o-meter was over 80 percent, among the highest favorability ratings in history.
Now, depending on which numbers you read, Bush is down in the low 40s or high 30s. Half the likely voters in Illinois don`t want him re-elected. There is very little confidence that he can pull the nation out of recession or handle the vast deficit.
And it is a long, long way to November.
One important rule for the rest of the campaign is that Bush forget about Patrick Buchanan. The first round of primaries proved Buchanan is going nowhere and collecting the votes only of disgruntled Republicans who want to go back to either 1910 or to Barry Goldwater`s 1964 campaign.
Buchanan is now like a conservative Republican cousin who comes to dinner, eats with his fingers and just won`t shut up. Soon enough, he will go home to suburban Washington to sit in his Mercedes-Benz and ponder just what went wrong in the depressed auto-land of Michigan, where he was soundly defeated by Bush last week.
Bush`s problem is the nation, with its economic fits and starts and confusing, ongoing method of measuring its own well-being. People are not very good at reconciling the conflicts in this process.
”HOUSING STARTS UP” headlines screamed just a few days ago. At the same time, a journalist reported that those jobs cut by Marshall Field`s are not just disappearing for a while. They are gone.
General Motors is going to shed 75,000 employees and not for the temporary shutdowns that usually hit auto plants. Forever. No housing starts for them. This is a huge chunk of American industrial mythology evaporating on Bush`s watch, and there is nothing he can do about it.
Is the president`s re-election in danger?
Yes, even without getting into a measure of Gov. Bill Clinton and his strengths and weaknesses and the issue of whether his poor state of Arkansas, about last on the lists of many things, is a grand training ground for the presidency.
The numbers that measure perception are not going Bush`s way. Even though factory production is up, his favorable-unfavorable ratio across the country is still bad. Only two weeks ago, national polls indicated either Clinton or now-departed Paul Tsongas could match him in an election.
Bush`s best ally is Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, appointed by the president and hardly a radical Democrat, and his power to toy with the money supply. No incumbent wants tight money in a presidential election year. One sure way to heat up an economy is to lower interest rates, a process we already have seen. Bush could use some of those lower interest rates, in, say, mid- to late September. There would be just enough time to heat up everything, but not enough time for the Council of Economic Advisers to cover its eyes and shout, ”Oh, no! Inflation!”
Lower rates will lead to an increase in borrowed money for many purposes, the construction of housing being one of the most important.
Sooner or later, once housing construction starts again, inventories of dishwashers and washing machines, hot tubs and microwaves, carpeting and lawn ornaments, air conditioners and pastel-colored toilets, the essentials of life in modern America, will drop, assembly lines will be called back into action, framers and joiners will have money to spend, and Bush`s numbers will start to improve.
A military adventure overseas, perhaps against Iraq, might also improve Bush`s numbers. But then again, it might not. The polls show much of the glitter has worn off of the Persian Gulf war. Bombing runs on Baghdad or Iraqi nuclear targets might inspire some voters, but only if they achieved a clearly stated goal.
How much do Bush`s numbers have to improve to guarantee re-election?
There are some intriguing details behind Bush`s 1988 election performance that could turn into disadvantages this year, assuming the economy does not blossom overnight and the president does not succeed in solving all the nation`s problems.
There were 14 states that Bush won by an eight-point margin or less in 1988, and among them were some of the fat ones of Electoral College politics- California, Illinois and Pennsylvania-and lots of smaller ones that add up, including Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado and Connecticut.
There were also some states Michael Dukakis, the Democrat, won. New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Hawaii were among them.
Assuming the economy remains sour in those big states and his own negative numbers remain high, Bush might have a bit of a battle in places he won by eight points or less.
At Northwestern University, Kenneth Janda, the Payson S. Wild professor of political science, looked at the question from a slightly different perspective and came up with a formula to measure the impact of a decline in Bush`s performance compared to 1988.
All of this is based not on popularity figures from polls, but on actual voting patterns.
If Bush does exactly as well as he did four years ago, Janda says, then the population shifts recorded by the new census will favor the Republican Party. His electoral vote count will increase to 431 of the available 537, a huge victory.
The 13 states that lost electoral votes were almost all in the Midwest or the East, where Democrats have their strengths. The eight states that gained seats are in the South and West, where Republicans have done well. California, for example, now holds 54 electoral votes, 10 percent of the total.
Janda`s projection shows that if Bush were to drop one point in voting support in each state, he would lose Illinois and Pennsylvania, with a total of 45 electoral votes, but would still win with 38 states and 386 electoral votes.
At a two-point drop, he would lose five more states, but still carry 33 and win the election with 303 electoral votes. At three points, he still wins, carrying 30 states and 289 electoral votes.
But if he runs four points worse than he ran four years ago, he will carry only 28 states that have 263 electoral votes, seven short of what he needs. He loses.
There are some other curious aspects to Janda`s information.
The assumption that only a Southern Democrat can win the White House by taking back Southern states is wrong, he says. All of the manipulation of Super Tuesday may well be meaningless.
Any Democrat can win-without capturing a single Southern state-if Bush runs four points behind his 1988 performance, Janda`s projections show. For Democrats to win Southern states, the president would have to run six points behind the 1988 record.
If all of this is true, then Bush faces a bigger challenge than anyone might want to admit at this point. The South, after all, is the new Republican electoral vote base. What an irony should it become meaningless.
The broader problem is that, among the general electorate, Bush has slipped by virtually every political measure.
A strong economic revival might turn that around and give the president good numbers on the applause-o-meter of public opinion.
At very least, Bush will need enough of an improvement to make incumbency an asset again, instead of an albatross.
