TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/083192/0831990.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 4KB | 77 lines

                                                                                THE WEEK, Page 14

NATION

Playing for The Big Bounce


Bush cuts into Clinton's lead as he rallies his fractious party


    George Bush sees his life as a series of "missions assigned"
and "missions accomplished." Accordingly, he set several goals
for himself at the Republican Convention in Houston. He needed to
reunite his splintering party after a brutal primary campaign.
If he couldn't explain exactly what he wanted to do in a second
term, he at least needed to remind a majority of Americans why
they voted for him in 1988. And he needed to shave roughly half
of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's 25-point lead in the polls.

    By the time the Republicans had executed what may have
been the largest balloon drop in political history Thursday
night, Bush looked ready to move three more missions to his
"accomplished" column. In his acceptance speech, he played the
stature card, reminding Americans that on his watch the Berlin
Wall fell, communism crumbled and Kuwait was liberated. After
wrangling for weeks with advisers over how to reconcile his
respectable record abroad with his listless performance at home,
Bush reduced his pitch to two sentences: "This election is about
change. The question is, Who do you trust to make change work
for you?" Translation: "I'm not perfect, but the other guy's
worse."

    Striking themes more political than presidential, Bush
attacked Clinton as a dangerous liberal who would raise taxes
and has dithered at times of personal and national crisis. While
perhaps not inspiring, Bush's lesser-of-two-evils pitch seemed
to be working: by week's end polls showed that Bush was
narrowing the gap as the relentless Republican attacks began to
cut into Clinton's favorable ratings.

    But Bush skipped gingerly around any discussion of the
economy in his 56-min. speech. And the centerpiece of his
economic proposals was a familiar package of tax cuts he has
proposed to Congress several times before, supplemented by a
hokey plan to allow taxpayers to donate up to 10% of their
income tax payments to reducing the federal debt.

    Before Bush's finale, the convention had a schizophrenic
quality not often seen at G.O.P. gatherings. Night after night,
the party's fault lines were laid bare for the nation to see.
Patrick Buchanan's darkly apocalyptic speech Monday night all
but raised the specter of race war, only to be followed minutes
later by Ronald Reagan's soaring tribute to Bush and America's
future. Wednesday, Barbara Bush gently prodded the conservative
delegates to broaden their party's sometimes narrow definition
of family, while warm-up act Marilyn Quayle championed a
zero-tolerance approach to "family values." But it was Mary
Fisher, the HIV-positive daughter of a top G.O.P. fund raiser,
who held the Astrodome rapt with her insistence that AIDS
victims "have not earned cruelty and do not deserve meanness."
Coming after several days of antigay rhetoric, Fisher gave what
many believed was the bravest speech of the week.

    Such divisions may be a harbinger for the G.O.P. Without
communism to kick around, without the prosperity that has helped
Republicans hold the White House for 20 of the past 24 years,
the party is groping for a new philosophical glue to hold its
various constituencies together. Even if Bush can unite the
factions this year, their increasingly irreconcilable
differences guarantee that the G.O.P. is itself in for some
"change" before it gathers again in 1996.