VDH: Remembering the False Gloom and Doom of the 1992 Elections—and the Upcoming Midterms.
[Lee] Atwater’s canny but hardball 1988 tactics had turned off establishment Republicans. So in 1992, Republicans reverted to the notion of losing nobly rather than winning ugly and resumed unilaterally playing by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. The result of Democratic demagoguery was that the sober and competent elder Bush was branded a heartless elitist who had wrecked the economy and defended Kuwait only for “blood for oil.” And without Atwater, the Bush team utterly failed to refute such caricatures and counterattack.
Third, and most important, the anemic Bush reelection campaign never refuted the Clinton-Gore economic hysteria. That “recession” deception had drowned out the historic foreign policy achievements of Bush’s four years, from the successful policies that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the decisive 1991 Gulf War.
Despite overwrought claims about a recession or even a new Great Depression, in truth, the recession had ended in March 1991. In fact, final GDP growth for 1992 was a robust 3.52 percent. That was hardly a recessionary indicator. Indeed, the election-year growth proved even stronger than in Clinton’s first year of governance in 1993.
While unemployment was still high at 7.5 percent, the 1992 stock market nonetheless grew by 7.6 percent. And the 1992 inflation rate had stayed moderate at 2.9 percent.
In other words, the economy had already begun to recover from the 1990–91 recession, which—to reiterate—had officially ended 20 months before the 1992 election.
One cause—eerily now familiar—of the earlier 1990–91 downturn was that oil prices had initially doubled after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. military response. But prices collapsed as soon as Operation Desert Storm began, despite the later torching of the Kuwaiti oil fields and continued uncertainty in the Gulf. Yet by the November 1992 election, oil prices had long been back to pre-invasion levels.
In short, the Democrats’ charge that 1992 saw the worst recession in 60 years was absurd. (The 1973–75 and 1981–82 recessions were far worse than the 1990–91 recession.)
Read the whole thing. As the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” In December of 1992, Time’s leftists gloated that the economic turnaround was “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”