U.S. Politics & Government - 20th Century, Presidents of the United States - Biography, U.S. Politics & Government - 1980-1989, U.S. Politics & Government - 1988-1993

Marching in Place

Name: Marching in Place
Author: Dan Goodgame,Michael Duffy
ISBN: 9780671737207

by Dan Goodgame, Michael Duffy

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Overview

Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Time magazine's White House correspondents, deliver the first hard-hitting, critical assessment of the Bush presidency. Marching in Place penetrates the Bush politicking, decodes the activity--and inactivity--of Bush's first term, and reframes the political choices facing us in 1992. Duffy and Goodgame began covering Bush in the summer of 1988, and since then they have watched, investigated, and chronicled his every move. They saw Bush pull together a coalition of country club Republicans, social conservatives, Reagan Democrats, and suburban independents, spinning a complex and often contradictory web of campaign promises. He was assembling a constituency not to govern, but simply to get elected. President Bush moved into the White House with a resounding electoral victory but no mandate. With his bumbling elocution, his posing with all those puppies and grandchildren, his manic engagement in sports, his nonstop travel, and of course his now famous personal touch, he was hard not to like. The public rewarded him, for more than two years, with record approval ratings. But looking behind the photo ops and small-bore political pronouncements, Duffy and Goodgame saw that Bush's frenetic manner masked a deep fear of change, that his dread of the Republican right wing and of opinion polls had hardened into a refusal to lead at home. For the last three and a half years, Bush has been marching in place, a status quo president in a revolutionary world. After the Tiananmen massacre, Bush's concern was to maintain good relations with the Chinese rulers who ordered the killings. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush looked as if it had landed on his head and emphasized that "we're not trying to cause trouble for anybody." And during the coup attempt against Gorbachev, his first instinct was not to burn any bridges with the hardline insurgents. Even in his finest hour, the Persian Gulf crisis, Bush confined his war aims to the restoration of the st

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In an indictment of the Bush presidency, two White House correspondents for Time portray a do-nothing president who has set no real national priorities. Bush's self-defined custodial role, they charge, has been to perform a holding action for his core constituency, America's ruling class. Duffy and Goodgame accuse Bush of an unprincipled approach to civil rights and fault his irresolution on education, the environment and the war on drugs. While applauding his stubborn resolve in the Persian Gulf crisis, they blast his frenetic ``Rolodex diplomacy'' and his tolerance for human rights abuses and autocracy, as shown by his secret conciliatory missions to Beijing after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Bush's agenda of upholding the status quo no longer appeals to voters who fear America's long decline, Duffy and Goodgame assert; in this bombshell of a book they explain why the policies that got Bush elected may be his undoing. They predict that a second Bush term would be ``more of the same, only less.'' First serial to Time; author tour. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Political buffs, especially those who are anti-Bush, will enjoy this readable account of the incumbent president. The authors, who are White House correspondents for Time magazine, portray a conservative president who reacts rather than leads because he fears making mistakes. The book's title aptly captures the authors' thesis. Though they present an excellent summary of the Bush presidency and its missed oportunities for leadership, deeper insight is found in James David Barber's comparative analysis of 20th-century presidents, Presidential Character (Prentice-Hall, 1992. 4th ed.). For more anti-Bush sentiments, see Ted Rall's Waking Up in America and Tom Tomorrow's Greetings from ``This Modern World , '' p. 100; for other campaign-related books, see ``On the Campaign Book Trail,'' LJ 3/15/92, p. 110-112.--Ed.-- William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport