Will Old Formula Beat the Bushes? Democrats Used a Struggling Economy and a Large Field of Candidates to Knock George H.W. Bush out of Office in 1992. Will the Same Strategy Work against His Son?

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Byline: Adam Heieck, INSIGHT

President George W. Bush raised more than $40 million during the first seven weeks of a GOP presidential campaign that has dwarfed the efforts of all nine Democratic presidential candidates combined. Bush's approval ratings had been in the 60 percent and above range for months and showed little indication that a significant drop might be imminent something the leaders of the Democratic Party and their friends in the liberal press ignored or denied. Again and again they claimed the president was politically vulnerable, citing reaction to their own front-page complaints about sending troops to Liberia, a failure to turn up an active nuclear program in Iraq and alleged lying about Iraq buying uranium from Niger. So ugly did this calumny become that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said it stopped just short of accusing the president of treason.

No day passed in which the Washington Post, the New York Times or the TV networks and CNN did not show Democratic presidential nominees blasting the president and his decisions concerning war with Iraq. Then, Post columnist David Broder cited July 10 as the day the Bush campaign first saw "the shadow of defeat." According to Broder, the headlines announced that night on all three major TV networks were so pointedly hostile to Bush that a spillover was sure to begin filtering into the views of the general public. "The CBS Evening News that night was [senior Bush …