YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION--WELL, YOU KNOW WE ALL WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD ---Episode 3

  GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH BEAT DUKAKIS
                                    1988 POTUS ELECTION


   The 1987 stock market crash had sown doubts about the strength of the  U.S. economy, and these were reinforced in 1988 by analyses such as Yale historian Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers, suggesting that the United States might be going the way of Britain. Whereas Ronald Reagan had proclaimed "morning in America," in 1988, Senate Republican leader Robert Dole, Bush's nomination rival, called it "high noon." The economic showdown, many thought, would come with Japan, picture as overtaking the United States in both technology and the valuation of its stock market.
   The reason for citizen concern about apparent global retreat was less interest in foreign policy than in standards of living.  Because the global supremacy ushered in by World War II brought the U.S. golden age, a major decline could further erode what already seemed threatened. Polls taken for the various foreign policy organizations in the seventies and eighties made the point well enough. When asked what should be the priority of U.S. foreign policy, the public answered quite simply : JOBS. GOOD JOBS IN THE UNITED STATES. 

   Periods of Middle American Radicalism invariably touched his nerve. In 1990, with sensitivity to decline running high even before the recession,  Congress considered some vehicles of economic nationalism : proposals to tighten laws regulating foreign takeovers of U.S. companies, to target the lobbying activities and alleged tax evasion of foreign corporations in the United States, and to attach new "Buy American" requirements to U.S. foreign aid and promote exports in the face of German and Japanese advances. Statistics published in June 1990 indicated that the 1980s had been a decade of greed and wealth concentration. Taking that argument into the midterm election, Democrats blocked the Republicans' hoped-for gains. Autumn's preelection debate turned to new taxes. Bush's preoccupation with capital gains rate cuts, and alleged favoritism to the rich ; and by late October reports had the GOP in "free fall." Some party identification polling reported a ten-point Republican drop --- until the Republicans managed to partially refocus the public on the confrontation developing in the Persian Gulf. 

   When the recession seemed to worsen in 1991, even as official scorekeepers judged it as being over, public anger wiped away President Bush's huge gains from the seemingly successful Gulf War. By the end of 1991 the Democrats had won a surprise victory in a special Pennsylvania U.S. Senate election conducted on economic frustration issues, and right-wing populist and extremist David Duke had carried a statewide nomination contest in economically dissatisfied Louisiana.  The president in turn had a combative populist Republican opponent already stumping in the snows of New Hampshire, where the first 1992 presidential primary was just two months away.