Matthew Beck, a deputy sheriff from Pleasanton, Calif., stood up in the White House Rose Garden Wednesday morning and asked George Bush a question that's been on a lot of Americans' minds lately. "I'd like to know," Beck said, "why I should vote for you."
"That's a good one," Bush replied, as if Beck had just got off a real knee slapper. "That is good."
The President then launched into what has become the essential message of his re-election bid: "I think in the final analysis people are going to say, 'Who has the experience, who has the temperament to take on these big problems day in and day out?' Not that I'm perfect, but I've got a proven record of being tested by fire. I think that's a good reason to ask for some more time as President." Basically, explains the Chief Executive's general campaign chairman, Robert Mosbacher, with a fine disregard for grammar, Bush "will be the lesser of three evils."
That the White House has begun to resort to that least persuasive of arguments fully four months before the election suggests how clouded Bush's political future has become. The President of late seems more melancholy than usual, flashing with uncharacteristic anger in public, seemingly haunted by unseen furies. At a political fund raiser in Detroit last week, he complained that this "weird, peculiar" political season comprised little more than "endless polls, weird talk shows, crazy groups every Sunday telling you what you think." But less than 48 hours later, Bush himself was appearing live from the Rose Garden on the CBS This Morning show. The network's producers had plucked 125 somewhat perplexed people from a White House tour to ask questions while the Commander in Chief shifted uncomfortably on a wrought- iron lawn chair.
Bush knew he had to go on the offensive. A day later, the Labor Department would report that the nation's unemployment rate had risen in June to 7.8%, the highest in more than eight years. Bush called the jobless rate a "lagging indicator" in a recovering economy. But within an hour of the department's announcement, the Federal Reserve dropped the prime rate by half a point, to 3% -- the lowest level since 1963 -- in yet another attempt to jump-start a sputtering economy. But that news eventually drove stock prices lower as investors feared that the combination of more unemployed workers and falling interest income would conspire to depress corporate earnings.
The bad economic news may also explain new polls, released last week, that show a continuing slide in Bush's standing. A Washington Post-ABC News survey for the first time put Bill Clinton in the lead with 31%, followed by Ross Perot with just a fraction less and Bush with 28%.
Meanwhile, a summary of 41 statewide polls by the Hotline, a daily report on politics, shows that Perot is leading in 22 states to Bush's 12 -- enough to carry the Electoral College. Clinton, the Hotline said, was ahead in only four states, but that was twice what he held in the Hotline's last survey.