Issues in the 1992 Presidential Campaign
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The 1992 Republican presidential campaign was unsuccessful, and clearly its persuasive techniques were inadequate to overcome the perception that President Bush was not able to cope with the domestic problems that most concerned Americans. At the same time, he was seen as better able to cope with foreign affairs than was his opponent, Bill Clinton, but in a time of recession when there was no war in which America was directly involved, the domestic agenda held more sway than did foreign concerns. The campaign in 1988 had been successful in painting Michael Dukakis as incompetent in the face of rising crime, and the infamous Willie Horton ad (though not produced by the campaign) had been one of the persuasive techniques used to accomplish this and to make George Bush seem the candidate able to address this concern. In 1992, the Republican campaign centered on several images and symbols, including the amorphous "family-values" promulgated in particular by Vice President Quayle. An analysis of some of these issues and the way they were communicated shows the failure of the persuasive techniques used by the Republicans in the 1992 election and why these techniques were a failure. Family values and the issue of taxes became central to the Bush campaign. Larson (1992) emphasizes the need for a campaign to develop goals, strategies, and tactics: Every campaign establishes persuasive goals or objectives for a product, person, or idea; articulates strategies for getting to the
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ially striking since it concerns events that occurred on the public stage just two years ago. . . Second, Congress forced me is Bush's only defense against the charge that he is already a proven betrayer of the voters' trust (Kinsley, 1992, 6).
Kinsley further notes that the matter of trust goes to the main issue in the campaign--Bush's economic stewardship--and this was specifically the matter that Bush had to address in his campaign in a persuasive way if he was to succeed.
The Republicans can be seen as running two campaigns, the first one attempting to position the candidate as trustworthy and as being the best person to defend the public from the rampaging democratic Congress. The other played off certain core American values and tried to create an image of George Bush as representing these values as a bulwark against the rising tide of crime, secularism, and lack of patriotism. Blumenthal (1992) describes this strategy as an appeal to nativism, or a desperately defensive nationalism. This was the ideological core of the Republic strategy, whereas the tax issue was a pocketbook matter. Blumenthal points out that Bush had used the nativist approach before in 1988 by citing images such as the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag
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Approximate Word count = 1650
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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