Gary Johnson ended up taking more votes away from Hillary than Trump.
And ended up not getting that many anyway.
Posted on 12/03/2018 8:35:07 AM PST by SeekAndFind
After twelve years of GOP rule, the political winds were not at his back in 1992.
The passing of George H. W. Bush has brought forth a multitude of tributes praising his public leadership and personal virtue — to which I say “Amen.” Bush, in my opinion, was one of the great presidents of the 20th century. He has too long been overshadowed, first by Ronald Reagan, the great leader of the conservative movement who beat him for the 1980 GOP nomination; then by Bill Clinton, the youthful and “cool” governor from Arkansas who defeated him in the 1992 election; and finally, by his own son, George W. Bush, who won the second term that his father could not, but whose tenure was much more controversial.
It is not my purpose here to enumerate the reasons that Bush 41 was such a good president. Instead, I’d like to stipulate that he was, and try to understand why his successes in office were insufficient to win reelection in 1992. Ultimately, his presidency was cut short by forces outside his control.
Governing a country as diverse and complex as ours is no little feat. It is not just that presidents have to manage the foreign and domestic affairs of the nation; they also have to tend to their political coalitions, which are never set in stone. Usually, this is too difficult to accomplish for more than eight years.
The biggest problem that most presidencies face is the business cycle, with all its vagaries. Presidents are quick to take credit for good economies, but this means they get stuck with the blame for recessions. The business cycle has been a major factor in presidential politics going all the way back to 1840, when Martin Van Buren was bounced from office partly because of the Panic of 1837.
Holding together an electoral coalition for more than eight years is also difficult. Coalitions do not form out of midair, nor are they purely the product of demographic forces outside of anybody’s control. They have to be built and maintained by political entrepreneurs who see an opportunity to craft a majority around personalities and policies. The factions that make up the constituent parts of a majority need not be in harmony with one another on all matters. In fact, the prospects of disharmony increase over time — as a president at first passes legislation that unifies his coalition, what is left are items that do not bring the party together and may even drive it apart.
These are the challenges that a single president faces over eight years. They become enormously greater over the course of twelve years or more. Expansions in the business cycle rarely last for more than a decade, which means that a recession tends to be right around the corner after a third consecutive victory. And if the party has been in office for that length of time, when the recession comes, it will likely get all of the blame (as opposed to a recession at the beginning of the first term, which can be blamed on the failures of the other side).
The coalitional politics get trickier, too, thanks in part to the 22nd Amendment, which states, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Franklin Roosevelt’s coalitions in 1940 and 1944 (when he was reelected to his third and fourth terms) were at least in part personal in nature. Voters stayed with FDR because of him. But with the establishment of a two-term limit, a party must find a new candidate, who may not be able to re-create the old coalition.
Factor into this the possibility of negative external shocks, such as wars or domestic crises, that make voters want change, and you wind up with the tendency that has characterized much of our national politics: two terms and then out, for each party. It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but it is pretty evident in our history.
Bush defied this general trend by winning a third consecutive term for the Republican party — a testament to voter confidence in Reagan-Bush governance. Alas, winning a fourth term would have been truly extraordinary. Only the Jeffersonian Republicans, Lincolnian Republicans, Teddy Rooosevelt–McKinley Republicans, and FDR Democrats have managed that. And at the risk of “special pleading,” one can argue that side factors in these cases helped the incumbent party win a fourth consecutive term (or more). Westward expansion left the Federalist opponents of Jefferson electorally isolated; the Civil War and Reconstruction gave the Lincoln Republicans a boost; the unlikely rise of Teddy Roosevelt transformed the Republican party and extended its rule; the Great Depression’s end and the foreign troubles that led to World War II gave FDR and Truman multiple terms beyond two.
Bush had no such political winds at his back. The economy sank into a recession in 1990. It was a mild one, in historical perspective, but the recovery from it felt very slow, making Republican “trickle-down economics” an easy target of Democratic ire. And the politics in Bush’s own party had grown untenable. The GOP coalition created in 1980 was built on tax cuts, military-spending increases, and cuts in domestic spending. The latter proved politically impossible, but the Republicans still cut taxes and increased military spending, yielding a massive budget deficit. This, in turn, divided the Reagan coalition by the 1990s: Conservative Republicans were still demanding spending cuts, while moderate Republicans and middle-of-the-road voters still opposed them.
Between the recession and the politics of deficit reduction, Bush’s reelection was a tough prospect. The country at large was ready for a change, and Republicans were eager to reset their political coalition. If Bush had first been elected in, say, 1980, I think he would have been easily reelected four years later. But to be elected as a Republican in 1988 after eight years of GOP governance made for a very difficult challenge indeed.
It says a lot about the quality of his governance that he has been remembered so fondly. We should remember that getting reelected is not a necessary condition for being a good president. Sometimes we the people are so “itchy” for a change that we fail to reelect a president who was in fact very good at his job. That was the case with George H. W. Bush.
1. The "deep state" was already there before he arrived.
2. Its impact on most Americans didn't really become obvious until the internet age and the implications of the PATRIOT Act on advanced forms of communication.
“Jack booted Thugs”
Gary Johnson ended up taking more votes away from Hillary than Trump.
And ended up not getting that many anyway.
Why Bush 41, a Great President, Won Only One Term""A thousand points of light"
He was NOT a great President. And America decided if we had to have a Democrat for President, We'd elect a real one.
If it wasn't for Reagan he would never have been VP and then President...Never happen.
Only a few of the reasons.
Bullbleep.....Bush started backtracking on Reagan’s accomplishments before the ink had dried on his inauguration paperwork. THAT is why he lost.
Ever since Ronald Reagan had to demand that the mic in front of him be turned on, my distrust for GHWB began. By the time his first term was over, so was the interest in New World Order, Kinder Gentler Nation and no NEW TAXES, America was looking for a new kind of distrust that Bush didn’t offer.
In terms of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet Union, Bush was just at the right place at the right time to watch and minimally interfere when it happened - it was the endpoint of a process that his predecessor set in motion. To say that he was responsible for "winning the Cold War" is like saying that the purpose of a building is for the coat of paint on its roof.
On the domestic front, he was a Rockefeller Republican whose policies were little different from "moderate" Democrats. He raised taxes (should have come as no surprise after he called supply-side economics "voodoo economics"), attacked the NRA, opened our borders, and did many other things that wouldn't be out of place in the Clinton administration.
In Virginia 2013 Ken Cuccinelli lost to Terri Mcauliff (the Clinton lackey) because the libertarian siphoned away some support.
Virginia Gubernatorial General Election, 2013
Democratic
Terry McAuliffe
47.8%
1,069,789
Republican
Ken Cuccinelli
45.2%
1,013,354
Libertarian
Robert Sarvis
6.5%
146,084
N/A
Write-in
0.5%
11,087
Total Votes
2,240,314
Election Results via Virginia State Board of Elections.
Read my lips! Ross Perot
Great Presidents don’t sell their nation away to the New World Order, Jay.
Bwahahaha!!!
Could the NR be any more exposed than it already has been???
Wasn’t he being condemned as a serial groped by the metoos a year ago?
Thanks!
I should have done my own research.
This article is worth reading by those who still believe the "Perot gave us Clinton" myth.
We are once again treated to endless disrespectful rounds of I am more conservative than thou virtue signaling against a great man George Bush Sr.
The parades of critics here prefer Michael DukakKkis and Bill Clinton.
Those were the options in 88 and 92.
Let’s stop pretending that Bush was a conspiracy against conservatives. The character assassination of Bush and Quayle in 92 was the beginning of the essential culture war we are now experiencing.
The townhall debate style was literally invented to help Clinton win.
Fight true enemies. Do not be deceived.
Things were going pretty well until it was revealed the VP couldn’t spell potatoe......media spent days, maybe weeks, hashing that one over.
He was not a great POTUS.
Bush was a sitting president that won only 37.4% of the popular vote in esentially a 3 way race.
That’s not Perot’s fault. Bush was clearly rejected by the voters. Bush wasn’t winning in 1992 on his record.
He won one term because he did not show much interest in campaigning against Clinton until about 2 weeks before the election.
A couple of weeks after his loss, a reporter asked him why he didn’t campaign much. His response was that, as the incumbent, he thought he would win against the governor of Arkansas, so he didn’t see the need to campaign.
As the polls narrowed, he finally started, but it was too little, too late. And the ‘read my lips’ broken promise didn’t help him much either.
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