“This country’s not coming apart at the seams, for heaven’s sakes,” the president said. This was 1992, as George Herbert Walker Bush—successor to the landslide popularity of Ronald Reagan, steward of the United States’ triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, victor in a real shooting war in Kuwait—tried to understand why he was up on the debate stage with not one but two people who were running on the message that the public was sick of how things were. Why couldn’t the incumbent president show them that America wasn’t really in crisis?
There was plenty to be upset about at the dawn of the 90s: a deep recession and “jobless recovery,” rampant crime, the gutting of once-reliable employment sectors, official malfeasance, rioting. But as John Ganz writes in When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, the mood wasn’t a matter of rational cause and effect. “People wanted to be pissed off, but the specifics were too irritating and difficult,” Ganz writes. “Reality had to be left behind.”
