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President Bush: A Sure Thing?
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19549 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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11 / 1991 |
2,625 Words |
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A. James Reichley
A. James Reichley is a retired senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution. |
As Thomas E. Dewey discovered in 1948, an American presidential election is never a sure thing. In that year, despite almost universal predictions by politicians, pundits, and pollsters right up to election day, Harry Truman rolled to victory over Dewey, his Republican opponent, by more than four percentage points in the popular vote and a margin of more than 100 votes in the electoral college.
American voters have shown they can change their minds and often do not focus closely on a presidential campaign until the last few weeks before election. It is easy to forget that in 1988 Michael Dukakis led George Bush in the polls by 13 percentage points in the week after the Democratic convention in July. Early responses to pollsters may indicate no more than top-of-the-head reactions, subject to alteration by events or more considered weighing of choices.
This being said, it must be stated that George Bush one year before he must face the voters is in a very strong position for reelection. If the president's health stays good and if the economy does not go into a nosedive in the summer or fall of 1992--both at this point reasonable assumptions--Bush in all probability will be reelected, perhaps by a very large majority.
If the chances for Bush's reelection by a possible landslide are strong, two interesting questions remain: Why is this so? And what will it mean, if it happens, for the nation's political future?
A number of objective factors, quite apart from Bush's current standing in the polls, favor his reelection. First, Americans tend to give incumbent presidents a second term unless the first term has been absolutely disastrous. During the twentieth century, only three incumbent presidents who had come to office through election and sought a second term were defeated: William Howard Taft in 1912, Herbert Hoover in 1932, and Jimmy Carter in 1980. Taft faced a split in the Republican party and the consequent Bull Moose insurgency led by his popular predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt; Hoover sank because of the effects of the Great Depression; and Carter was burdened by double-digit inflation, high unemployment, and voter anger over the captivity of American hostages in Iran.
Even Gerald Ford, who reached the presidency through succession rather than election and suffered from the taint of Watergate and an extended economic recession, came within one percentage point of winning a full term in 1976. And Truman, another president
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