IN 1972, America was in rotten shape. U.S. forces were being pulled out of Vietnam, and it was clear that in the long term, Communist victory was inevitable. Inflation was spiraling out of control, and the wage-and-price controls imposed by the government to stop it weren’t working. Cities were wracked by waves of violent crime never before seen.
Yet the sitting Republican president, Richard Nixon, won 61 percent of the vote in November 1972 against Democratic nominee George McGovern.
It’s important to remember 1972 when considering the course of events in 2004. Not because the situations are analogous – they’re not – but because there’s an idea commonly held across the political spectrum that bad news in an election year is automatically a problem for the incumbent president.
The 1972 example suggests just how wrong this idea is – and why John Kerry has an uphill climb against George W. Bush.
Nixon’s colossal victory over George McGovern was due to a variety of factors. Nixon dominated the news throughout 1972 with major initiatives like a secret trip to China and the signing of an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union. And he bullied the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, into a dollar-printing spree to keep economic growth rates high through the November election.
(The Watergate dirty tricks that would bring down his presidency in 1974 had nothing to do with his win, but they do help shed light on the sort of blackmailing techniques Nixon and his henchmen used to get Burns to do their bidding.)
More important, though, McGovern was an astonishingly weak candidate whose major issue was the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. But rather than seeking to prevent that defeat, McGovern embraced it as the nation’s fate and its just deserts. “Come home, America” was his campaign slogan.
Now, God knows Nixon wasn’t exactly Mr. Cheerful, but he wasn’t a defeatist. He was terrifically ambitious, at least when it came to foreign policy, and he moved ahead aggressively on many fronts at the same time. He was doing things.
Yes, much of what Nixon did turned out to be bad news for the country in the years to come. By forcing the Fed to print money, he helped create the stagflation of the 1970s. His détente policies caused the Soviet Union to become vastly more aggressive in pursuit of its imperialist aims throughout the decade.
But the fact remains that faced with crisis, both abroad and at home, Nixon acted. And that fact not only saved what might otherwise have been a doomed presidency, but it gave Nixon the second-largest margin of victory in the history of American presidential elections.
Contrast this tale with the stories of two subsequent presidents who did not win second terms – Jimmy Carter and George Bush the Elder. The world was coming down around Jimmy Carter’s ears in 1980 – hostages in Iran, Soviets in Afghanistan, sky-high interest and inflation rates. And he did . . . practically nothing. He stayed inside the White House, authorized a single lame effort to rescue the hostages and consulted his pre-teen daughter Amy about the danger of nuclear weapons.
In 1992, Bush the Elder was running with an economy in lousy shape, and he just tried to wait it out. He offered no major initiatives of any kind during that election year, and did nothing dramatic. He thought he was going to be OK because his treasury secretary had told him to reappoint Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman because Greenspan assured him the Fed was going to help Bush the way it had helped Nixon. But Greenspan didn’t flood America with printed dollars, and the Elder Bush got 38 percent of the vote.
What does all this suggest about the current election season? President Bush needs to keep moving forward. He is most successful when he is most bold, and he must continue to pursue bold policy aims throughout the year. If he can reinforce the perception that he is an energetic leader, he will be nearly unstoppable – even if the news continues to be problematic.