As political pundits of all stripes discuss the difficulty Republicans will face in trying to unseat President Obama next year, Byron York of the Washington Examiner urges them to remember the lessons of 1991.
“Will anybody run against George Bush in 1992?” asked Juan Williams in the Washington Post on March 10, 1991. “There are no candidate footprints in the pristine snows of New Hampshire this winter and the Iowa cornfields are untrampled.”
March passed, and then April, May, June, and July, and still Democrats searched for candidates willing to challenge Bush. One by one, the big names — Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Mario Cuomo — decided not to run. Bush was just too strong.
The Democratic field that finally emerged seemed decidedly lackluster: Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey, Bill Clinton, Douglas Wilder and Tom Harkin. After an undistinguished primary season, one of them would be the sacrificial lamb to run against Bush.
Today, 20 years later, there’s no need to elaborate on how it turned out. All you have to say is that the prize went to the candidate who took a risk when others shied away.
Now we’re in a political season in which it is Republicans who seem hesitant to challenge an incumbent president. And we’re seeing the emergence of a new conventional wisdom: Barack Obama will be very, very tough to beat.
What a change. Back in 1991, the pundits discussed how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job approval rating of 90 percent. Now, they’re talking about how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job approval rating of 48 percent.
