Some people think 2012 is a repeat of 1980. I tend to view it as a repeat of the 1992 election. In that campaign President George Herbert Walker Bush decided ran on issues that only appealed to his base. This gave Bill Clinton and Ross Perot an opening to run on issues most Americans were concerned about which was the economy. Barack Hussein Obama has copied George Bush’s 92 playbook.
The news readers from NPR were mum-mum-mumbling in the background the other morning as I was putt-putt-puttering around the house when . . . all of a sudden . . . running counter to every fiber of my being . . . pulling against my every natural inclination . . . I began to pay attention! President Obama, one of the news readers said, was giving a speech in the Midwest to road-test a new theme for the campaign’s final weeks: “trust.”
“There’s no more serious issue in a presidential campaign than trust,” the president said. “Trust matters!” The Midwesterners cheered.At these words my attention loosened and my mind, what’s left of it, flew backwards in time, 20 years almost to the day, and I was sitting in a room in the White House, in 1992, huddled with two other speechwriters around a little speaker set on a table in a high-ceilinged room. We were listening to a closed-circuit transmission from a campaign rally in the Midwest. A different president was desperately seeking reelection. This was President Bush—the first President Bush, I mean, the one that Democrats hated but later pretended to like after they decided they hated his son more.
[….]
Any veteran of the ’92 presidential campaign has learned to identify marks of intellectual exhaustion. The déjà vu this year is especially creepy. President Bush went to a Waffle House to illustrate Bill Clinton’s “waffling” on the issues. He took to calling Al Gore “Ozone Man,” and surrogates warned darkly of Clinton’s unexamined past, just as the president today dwells on Big Bird and “Romnesia,” and his surrogates raise half-baked questions about foreign bank accounts. Both presidents are dignified men, yet their campaigns have felt compelled to abase themselves in the same way for the same reason. They couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Poppy BUsh went on to lose in 92. Judging from the polls, Obama seems destined to repeat this path.
