I held my nose and voted for Bush-I in 92 based on what I knew at the time. I was P.O.ed over the "read my lips" tax increase that the spineless Bush allowed the Dems to box him in to. I realized that Clinton was nothing but a two-bit corrupt southern governor when I watched his Super Bowl "60 Minute" lip-biting act but had still not totally written him off. It was the information I got afterward on both him and more importantly, the Hilda-beast, that made me see them as a potentially dangerous pair. Her involvement with "Neighborhood Legal Services", Elenor Holmes Norton's "Children Defense Fund," AND The Institute of Policy Studies made me see that she at least was a Marxist biding time in a corrupt little backwater like Arkansas in an effort to bring all her 1960s Radical Left dreams to reality. Anyone who has a Stalinist like Michael Lerner as a personal 'guru' is a clear and present danger to the republic. When she became the darling of the media and the "co-presidency" stuff started, every alarm in my body pegged at 10.
I also never bought in the little-lop eared hustler from Texas. Call it a 'gift' but I think growing up in the neighborhood that I did, I have an innate ability to pick hustlers out of a crowd. I am convinced to this day that the only reason Perot was in race was a promise by the Clinton's to give him a big cut of their Socialized Medicine scam. (Same as he did with Medicare). The intention of the Perot candidacy was not to win anything, but to divide those of us who could see through Clinton's hustle and who couldn't bring ourselves into voting for a two-bit draft dodger to allow Clinton to win with just the hard Democrat vote. It worked like a charm. Clinton only got 43% of the vote but won in a walk. Minus Perot, Bush would have won easily.
Your concern at the time was how Bush handled the aftermath of the Gulf war. Mine wasn't. The Iraqi opposition at the time was not a crowd that would have been any better for US interests than Sadam was. The Kurds couldn't hold power for a month without cutting each other's throats while at the same time driving Turkey away from the Western Camp. And the Marsh Arabs would have been sucked-up by the Iranian fundamentalists in a Tehran minute and accomplished the same damn thing through the mosques in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that we went to war with Sadam over. IMHO, Bush-I's decision not to move on Baghdad and to simply attempt to isolate Sadam and allow time for some secular, Sunni based opposition to develop inside Iraq was the best of several distasteful options. The Clinton foreign policy team is the one who fell short on that strategy. They allowed the sanctions to become a joke because they were more interested in UN wine and cheese parties than they were in geo-politics or American interests.
Just my thoughts.
And all very good. It was a bad year for the voters in 1992, no doubt about it. I was for Perot until he imploded.
Your take on Hillary is especially interesting.
Walt
I don't blame Bush I for not getting a good outcome on getting rid of Saddam. There were no good choices, as you suggest.
I DO blame Bush I for his maladroit policy that got us into the Gulf War in the first place. And he shouldn't have encouraged the rebels if he wasn't going to back them up.
I think our present mess stems largely from all that.
You won't find me saying anything good about Clinton now, count on that.
Walt