‘92 NATIONAL ELECTIONS : In the End, Bush Was Out of Touch With Everyday America : The defeat: President failed to recognize recession’s impact on the nation--and on his political fortunes.

HOUSTON —  The headlines in Texas that day last December when George Bush was coming to visit were all about an impending layoff at a General Motors plant near Dallas. Across the country, the news was about the recession. Unemployment was rising. America was worried.

At a muddy construction site, Bush signed a $151-billion transportation bill and then had a working man’s lunch of chicken-fried steak, corn and mashed potatoes with seven hard hats building a highway interchange.

When the $48 tab arrived, the President of the United States, scion of upper-crust Greenwich, Conn. in the winter and Kennebunkport, Me. in the summer, took out an impressive shock of bills.

“Of course I’m buying,” he said. “I’m loaded.”

In that instant, in six words tossed off in jest at the Cafe 121, a roadside hamburger joint, George Bush encapsulated perhaps the most crucial oversights of his presidency: The failure to recognize the impact the recession was having on the fortunes of the nation and its potential impact on his own political fortunes.

The factors that brought his defeat were more than simply a poorly run reelection effort, although his campaign was that. He squandered what opportunities he did have, turning a popularity rating that had soared to the unprecedented range of 90% just 20 months before Election Day to his present nadir: 38% of the popular vote.

Political analysts will point, validly, to the divisive signals sent out by the angry Republican National Convention, or a halting debate performance, or the nearly flawless campaign run by Bill Clinton, or even the final campaign twist: A renewed focus on Bush’s integrity as a result of an Iran-Contra document disclosed four days before the election.

The discovery turned public attention to old questions about Bush’s involvement in the arms-for-hostages deal six years ago when he was vice president--and suddenly, perhaps coincidentally, the momentum he found in the final week of the campaign, when polls showed him closing Clinton’s lead, disappeared overnight.

These factors “would explain a narrow defeat,” said a senior White House official. But they would not explain a defeat of the magnitude Bush suffered.

Rather, the layers of failure are many. Though often interconnected, they can be lifted off the Bush presidency like the pieces of a Russian matrushka doll.

There was the failure to provide the nation with the clear sense of direction it expects from its President. There were the missed opportunities to project the compassion and optimism--which those close to him would say he felt--that help a nation through hard times.

There was the impression--left by his frequent overseas travel and his focus on foreign affairs--that he cared more for the problems in St. Petersburg, Russia, than St. Petersburg, Fla. There was the failure to build a strong White House staff.

In the campaign itself, there was the failure of pride. Against the recommendations of his closest advisers, he refused to recognize the challenge he faced, putting off the formal start of his reelection drive and then delaying an aggressive approach in the campaign.

And there was the loyalty of which Bush is so proud: As a result, he failed to recognize the shortcomings in some of his senior campaign and White House aides, thus entering battle without the strongest troops.

But when the shards of his campaign and, indeed, his entire presidency, are examined, at the heart of the failure stands George Bush, the man who would have had us elect him without telling us why.

The faults go much deeper than a single campaign, or even the peculiarities of this man who from the start charmed the nation by symbolically throwing open the armored windows--albeit via an electric switch--to his quarters on the second floor of the White House 24 hours after taking office. They go to the very nub of who George Bush is, and his grasp on the meaning of the presidency.

Grown bitter over Bush’s inability to halt his inexorable slide, one of the President’s longtime friends nearly rants:

“George Bush will go with the wind. He wanted to be President for the same reason he would want to be president of the student body. It’s achievement without any recognition of what comes with it.

“He didn’t burn with anything. He would give the impression of doing any thing. If we didn’t have an economic crisis, he would have gotten away with it,” the friend said. “And that’s what upended him.”

George Bush, who came of age dropping torpedoes on Japanese targets during World War II, and reached political maturity during the height of the Cold War, summoned reporters to the Oval Office one day in November, 1989. The Berlin Wall--that hated symbol of the division between East and West--was tumbling. On his watch, one of the uppermost foreign policy goals of seven U.S. Administrations was being accomplished in full view of the world.

Bush swiveled in the heavy arm chair behind his desk in the Oval Office. His demeanor was downbeat. There would be no celebration.

“Elated?” he said, answering a question with a question. No, not this President. “I’m not an emotional kind of guy.”

Nor was he one to gloat--not, that is, until it became politically expedient two years later to begin pointing out that it was he who presided over the end of the Cold War.

But as a result of that reluctance, he deprived the nation of a chance to feel its own exhilaration, and to bask, himself, in the reflected glow.

White House officials, campaign aides, and outside advisers complain that just such incidents typify the President’s failure to communicate his goals, and triumphs, to the American people.

“He’s never appreciated the importance of explaining to the American people what he’s doing,” a senior White House official said.

In accusing him of one of the cardinal sins of the American presidency, a senior aide in the Ronald Reagan White House said, “He failed to use the Oval Office as the supreme bully pulpit to rally the country, other than during the Persian Gulf crisis.”

At the end of 1991, as his poll ratings fell and he faced challenges from seven Democrats and Patrick J. Buchanan, who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination from his right, an argument broke out among the staff. Were the President’s problems substantive, or the fault of a missing communications scheme.

“It was two-thirds communications,” argued a senior campaign staff member, looking back. “They never merchandised anything; they never built public support for what they were doing.

“George Bush’s downfall came because words don’t mean anything to him, other than as a means to get elected,” his friend said.

The President’s contempt for speechmaking was picked up by his staff, complained one senior White House aide. “Communications policy was drafted to appease the vanity of the bureaucrat and policy wonk, but not to communicate with the American people.”

“That,” he said, “was a failure.”

When he was running for President in 1988, Bush complained about reporters who sought revealing hints about what drove him.

“Don’t put me on the couch,” he would say to deflect efforts to discern what he saw for the nation’s future.

“It goes back to a genuine contempt for the need to explain yourself,” said a senior White House staff member. “It goes back to a Yankee rectitude. He shields himself from the American people. But they want to see him.”

On the campaign trail this year, he was an angry man, fired up over Clinton’s draft history. But the fire died as he raced through the economic issues that powered Clinton’s campaign.

“Most of the things in public life he’s not dug in on,” his longtime friend said. “If it’s acceptable to the Establishment and the experts,” he said, “it’s acceptable to him.”

A year ago, a young White House staff member named C. Gregg Petersmeyer, who is in charge of the White House “Points of Light” program that recognizes voluntarism, tried to draw attention among his superiors to the idea that the nation had no clear notion of what Bush stood for.

He drew up a grid to encompass the Bush “vision,” in effect, to which the nation could gravitate.

“He spent hours and hours and hours in people’s offices, trying to push the power structure into developing a theme” for the President, a senior White House assistant said. If he had been Budget Director Richard G. Darman or Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, “or someone else of stature, he’d have been listened to.” But he found little interest.

“In retrospect,” the aide said, “he was absolutely right.”

The President was grim-faced as he toyed with the dregs of pancakes and syrup on his plate, the juice of an apple on his chin, while his host, freshman Rep. Peter Smith, spoke.

It was Oct. 23, 1990, one month after he had broken his “no new taxes” pledge. The congressman, the beneficiary of a presidential visit to a fund-raising breakfast, was emphasizing his differences with Bush over the broken promise.

At the moment, it seemed merely an embarrassment, this tongue-lashing of sorts. In retrospect, it foreshadowed a problem that would dog Bush for the rest of his presidency.

For a man so closely identified with politics, Bush has often been tone-deaf to political nuance.

“George Bush stands as a living monument to a lack of political awareness,” Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker said.

“I don’t know what the commotion is about,” he said to one outside adviser as the uproar over the broken pledge swirled about him in the autumn of 1990. “Reagan raised taxes six times.”

The damage quickly got out of hand. But close advisers believe to this day that had he not been so averse to explaining his motives, he could have undercut the problem as a 1992 issue that undermined faith in his word.

The broken pledge hurt Bush in two ways. It cast doubt on the dependability of his word, and it raised the hackles of the Republican Party’s right wing.

In the end, more than anything other than the recession itself, Bush’s reelection effort was haunted by the “no new taxes” pledge most credited with assuring his election four years earlier. In his very success were sown the seeds of his eventual defeat.

Presidential election campaigns may be unlike any other human endeavor. Even the most precisely organized grow exceedingly grueling. They are not for nine-to-fivers.

One week before Election Day, one of the most senior officials in the Bush campaign was wrapping up an interview with a reporter.

If there are any questions over the weekend “give me a call,” he said. “I’ll be home.”

The off-hand comment said as much as anything about the approach so many Republicans took to the reelection campaign, even as Bush’s prospects grew ever more bleak in the wake of three consecutive routs of the Democratic opposition.

Two of the six senior-most aides were part-timers, keeping up ties to the business world. And even among those deeply involved in the effort, there were foul-ups.

Shortly after James A. Baker III became White House chief of staff in August, someone on his staff sought maps of the congressional districts, which they wanted to use at a meeting to plan the distribution of campaign resources.

It was only halfway through the meeting, however, that they discovered a problem. They were working from 1988 maps, drawn up before the 1990 congressional redistricting.

There were other, bigger miscues:

When Bush finally outlined an economic agenda, campaign aides drew up a “saturation” plan intended to keep the subject alive for at least 10 days, so that no American could miss the fact that the President now had an economic plan.

But, complained one well-placed campaign official, such big guns as Baker and Darman refused to help sell it to the public. Within a day or two, the speech had been reduced to a not-very-catchy title, “Agenda for American Renewal,” that Bush mentioned only in passing in his speeches.

The failure to hold to a single theme for more than a day or two was typical, Republican political consultant Eddie Mahe said.

“You’d hear the message one time, and somehow it would just disappear,” he said.

Perhaps that was because the campaign was never able to find a message that would work, a mid-level campaign aide said.

Bush, said a senior White House official shortly before the election, had been “quite disgusted by the campaign (organization) . . . for a couple of months.” But, he said, the President chose to do nothing about it, believing that “at the end of the day he could pull it off.”

There were mistakes of timing. The decision to wait until January to get the campaign organization up and running was, said Mahe, a “critical” mistake.

A senior campaign aide called the late start a serious setback because aides could not as easily factor political considerations into three key economic decisions:

--The handling of the fallout from the budget agreement;

--The earlier effort to portray the recession as having ended in the spring of 1991;

--The decisions, reached toward the end of 1991--at the time of the lunch with the Texas road workers--to delay producing an economic stimulus package until Bush delivered his 1992 State of the Union message.

The problems within the Bush campaign go on and on.

There was Patrick J. Buchanan’s primary challenge, which siphoned off conservatives’ enthusiasm for the President and provided a home for other dissatisfied Republicans. And for all voters, it presented the spectacle of a wounded President challenged from within his own party.

Although the potential trouble facing Bush became clear to senior advisers a year ago, “we thought that in three or four months we could work our way out of it and rehabilitate the President’s image as someone who was concerned about the economy and willing to take steps to make it better,” a senior campaign official said.