Abstract
The verdict of the American electorate on President Bush was passed in November 1992: George Bush joined Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford as the only incumbent presidents since 1945 who failed to get reelected. Moreover, much press commentary suggested that the Bush presidency, rather like that of Gerald Ford, was transitional: if Ford provided a postscript to the Nixon presidency, the four years of the Bush presidency were essentially an epilogue to the Reagan era. Unlike Ford, however, Bush became president with an election victory of his own. Moreover, Bush cannot be dismissed as another Jimmy Carter. Unlike Carter, who was the quintessential outsider and never came to terms with the peculiarities and demands of politics in Washington,1 George Bush was an insider. He had considerable experience in government, and had served a long apprenticeship for the presidency. Consequendy, Bush did not have to engage in the kind of ‘on-the-job training’ that characterized Carter.2
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Notes
M. Glenn Abernathy, Dilys M. Hill and Phil Williams (eds), The Carter Years: The President and Policy Making (London: Frances Pinter/New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984).
Andrew Rosenthal with Joel Brinkley, ‘Old Compass in New World: A President Sticks to Course’, New York Times, 25 June 1992, A1.
Bert Rockman, ‘That Elusive Quality Called “Presidential Leadership”’, Cosmos, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1992, p. 72.
Dilys M. Hill, Raymond A. Moore and Phil Williams (eds), The Reagan Presidency: An Unfinished Revolution? (London: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990).
Sidney Blumenthal, ‘All the President’s Wars’, The New Yorker, 28 December 1992/4 January 4 1993, pp. 68 and 70.
Bruce Miroff, ‘Monopolizing the Public Space: The President as a Problem for Democratic Politics’, in Thomas C. Cronin (ed.), Rethinking the Presidency (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 219.
Barbara Hinckley, The Symbolic Presidency: How Presidents Portray Themselves (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 50.
Thomas C. Cronin, ‘The Paradoxes of the Presidency’, in R.E. DiClerico (ed.), Analyzing the Presidency, 2nd edition (Guildford, Conn.: Dushkin Publishing Group, 1990), p. 53.
See the analysis of this debate in Charles C. Euchner, ‘Public Support and Opinion’, in The Presidents and the Public (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1990), pp. 75–90.
Peter G. Peterson with James K. Sebenius, ‘The Primacy of the Domestic Agenda’, in Graham Allison and Gregory F. Treverton (eds) Rethinking America’s Security (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 59.
Thomas E. Mann, ‘Breaking the Political Impasse’, in Henry J. Aaron (ed.), Setting National Priorities (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990), p. 298.
James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), p. 186.
Dom Bonafede, ‘The Presidents and the Public’, in The Presidents and the Public (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly, Inc, 1990), p. 7.
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© 1994 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hill, D.M., Williams, P. (1994). Conclusion. In: Hill, D.M., Williams, P. (eds) The Bush Presidency. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23402-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23402-8_10
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