1988: “Read My Lips: No New Taxes”

Abstract

In 1988, President Reagan became only the second president to be ineligible for a third term subsequent to the passage of the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 being the first. None of the five presidents between Eisenhower and Reagan had completed a second full term. When Eisenhower was term limited in 1960, the Republican Party had nominated Vice President Richard Nixon as their presidential candidate. He lost. By 1988, of the 13 vice presidents who had become president, 9 had done so initially on the death or resignation of the president, not by election. Only four vice presidents had arrived in the Oval Office by election, and only three had made it immediately after serving as vice president. Nixon had to wait another eight years before being elected president. So in 1988, George Bush must have been aware that the vice presidential office was a less auspicious launching pad for a successful presidential campaign than one might have presumed. Indeed, the last serving vice president to be elected directly to the presidency was Martin van Buren in 1836. The only other two were John Adams in 1796 and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, but that was in an era when the vice presidency was awarded to the runner-up in the presidential election, and the vice president was therefore regarded as the president-in-waiting.