Clinton and Gore stressed a second theme: the economy. Bill Clinton recognized that if the election was about foreign policy, he had little chance to beat George Bush. He correctly sensed that Dad was vulnerable on the economy. His campaign adopted the slogan “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” He accused Dad of being out of touch and even managed to turn Dad’s foreign policy successes against him by suggesting that he hadn’t done enough on domestic issues. For all of Clinton’s lack of discipline in some areas of his life, he was relentlessly disciplined about his campaign message.

Bill Clinton also benefited from a friendly press corps. With their baby boomer background, more liberal views, and Ivy League lawyer credentials, the Clintons fit the mold of many of the baby boomer reporters. In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.)

A classic example of the media’s hostility toward George Bush came in February 1992, when Dad visited a grocery store convention in Florida. Among other products, Dad looked at a new version of an electronic grocery scanner. When he complimented his hosts on their new technology, one reporter concocted the story that he had never seen a grocery scanner before. “This career politician, who has lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades, is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle-class life,” the New York Times reported. It later came out that the reporter who wrote that “firsthand” account wasn’t even at the grocery store convention.

The Democratic National Convention in July 1992 provided a perfect opportunity for Clinton and Gore to showcase their campaign before a national audience. The convention was carefully orchestrated to highlight the theme of change, all the way down to the Fleetwood Mac lyrics that played after Clinton’s speech, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” The message worked. The Democrats had gone into New York roughly in a dead heat with Dad and Dan Quayle. They came out with a twenty-four-point lead.

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AFTER THE Democratic convention, there was general despondency among Bush supporters. I too was concerned, but I had not lost hope. I had seen Dad overcome Michael Dukakis’s lead in 1988. And I believed that he would benefit from the fact that the 1992 campaign was finally down to a two-man race. After months of withering attacks by Buchanan, Perot, and Clinton, Dad would be able to draw a favorable contrast with his opponent on the crucial issues of leadership, experience, and competence. Starting at his convention, he would revitalize his campaign by debunking the perception that he was out of touch and clarifying where he wanted to lead the country.

One way to demonstrate that he had revitalized his campaign was to change its leadership. In August, Dad brought Jim Baker back to the White House, where he would serve as Chief of Staff and coordinate the fall campaign. I know it was tough for Jim to leave a job he loved, Secretary of State, but he was loyal to his friend.

One area where Dad decided not to make a change was with his running mate. Dan Quayle had served the President faithfully, and Dad felt comfortable with his VP. Although Dad recognized that picking a new running mate had the potential to shake up the race, he felt that a change of that magnitude in an election year would look desperate and embarrass his friend. The Bush-Quayle ticket stayed intact.

With Baker back at the helm, Dad and his advisers developed a campaign strategy for the fall. Unfortunately, the first thing they needed to do was consolidate support from the base of the Republican Party—a basic responsibility that should have been fulfilled months earlier but had been delayed by the challenges from Buchanan and Perot. To do that, the campaign largely returned to the playbook from 1988, when Dad had successfully emphasized values that Republicans cared about. Dan Quayle had made major headlines earlier in the campaign when he criticized Hollywood for diminishing the importance of families. Most memorably, he denounced the popular TV show Murphy Brown for featuring “a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ” While sparring with a fictional character struck me as a little awkward, Quayle had an important point: Hollywood was out of touch with the values that mattered to most Americans. George Bush and Dan Quayle were not.

The best opportunity to unite the party against Clinton came at the Republican National Convention in Houston. The convention emphasized the importance of Dad’s family values. Jeb’s teenage son George P. delivered a great speech supporting his grandfather, whom he called “the greatest man [he had] ever known,” and concluded by leading the audience in a chant of “Viva Bush!” Mother spoke movingly about the man she had married almost fifty years earlier. “When George and I headed west after World War II, we already had our first child,” she said. “George was a veteran. He was a college graduate, and he had a job here in Texas. And we eventually settled in Midland, a small, decent community where neighbors helped each other, a wonderful place to bring up a family, and it still is. In many ways these were the best years of our lives.” As she put it, “George’s days in the fields were dusty with long hours and hard work, but no matter when he got home, he always had time to throw a ball or listen to the kids.” She summed up with, “You know, to us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.” Mother was a strong political asset for George Bush. She was a plain speaker who loved her husband and appealed to many Americans with her bluntness and quick wit.

Some of the other speakers discussed family values in a different tone. In a further attempt to unite the base, the convention organizers had agreed to let Pat Buchanan deliver a prime-time speech. Buchanan offered a strong endorsement of Dad, calling on his “Buchanan Brigades” to “come home and stand beside George Bush.” But he also proclaimed that a “religious war” was raging for the soul of the nation, defended the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded,” and accused Hillary Clinton of trying to impose an agenda of “radical feminism.” While it might have helped with some elements of the base, Buchanan’s speech did not convey a kinder and gentler Republican Party. (Because the convention was running late, Buchanan’s speech bumped former President Ronald Reagan’s strong endorsement of Dad—the last speech of President Reagan’s public career—out of prime time.)

In his speech on the final night of the convention, Dad had a chance to close the gap with Clinton. As in the 1988 speech, he sought to remind the voters why his experience, integrity, and vision for the future made him the right man for the job. Unlike the 1988 speech, which was completed well in advance so that Dad had plenty of time to rehearse, the 1992 speech was the result of a chaotic process. I remember being shocked when I walked into a conference room at the Houstonian Hotel and saw senior Bush campaign aides scrambling to finish a first draft of the convention speech three days before it was to be delivered. The speech process symbolized one of the flaws of Dad’s 1992 campaign: It was reacting, not leading.

Dad started his speech by talking about Iraq and the Cold War, and then pivoted to the economy. “When the Berlin Wall fell,” he joked, “I half expected to see a headline, ‘Wall Falls, Three Border Guards Lose Jobs.’ And underneath, it probably says, ‘Clinton Blames Bush.’ ” In the key line of the speech, Dad said that he regretted his decision to accept the tax increase that the Democrats had demanded in the budget compromise. He proposed a new round of spending reductions and tax cuts in the year ahead. Unlike the 1988 speech, which soared and presented a positive vision, the 1992 speech was defensive and relatively flat. Nevertheless, there was a traditional polling bounce after the convention. The Bush-Quayle ticket trailed Clinton-Gore by ten points. Although the Bush comeback had begun, it still had a steep hill to climb.