Day it rained on the Bush parade

and he failed to do anything about it. He claimed that there was no

recession, that it would correct itself, that it was Congress's fault,

that he would get around to proposing something, some day, later.

There was an election for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania on November 5,

1991, and the Republican candidate, a former governor and former federal

Attorney General, and a close friend of the President's, lost badly. The

result shook Mr Bush: this was a state which he has to win if he wants

to be re-elected.

Two months before, the Republican, Richard Thornborough, had a lead in

the polls of 40% over his obscure Democratic rival Harris Wofford. Mr

Thornborough campaigned on the Bush record, and insisted that there was

light at the end of the economic tunnel. Mr Wofford campaigned lustily

on the theme that the Republicans cared nothing about the state of the

economy and the disintegration of the nation's health care system. He

accused the President of travelling the world instead of staying at home

and minding the shop.

Mr Bush was due to leave for a Nato summit in Rome on the day after

the election. The Democrats sold a T-shirt with the slogan ''George Bush

went to Rome, and all he brought me was this lousy recession''. He also

planned to visit Japan later in the month.

The Democrats carried Pennsylvania by 55%. The President reacted to

the bad news the next morning by announcing, on his way to the airport

bound for Rome, that he would postpone the trip to Japan. That made him

look foolish and indecisive.

What Mr Bush failed to understand was why the country had turned

against him. After Operation Desert Storm, he had an approval rating of

88%. In the summer, his rating was well over 60%. He claimed the credit

for defeating communism as well as Saddam Hussein, and basked in the

glory of all those victory parades.

What is more, the economy was not in desperate shape. This was a

recession, but less severe than the one in 1982, let alone 1929.

During the 1991 election campaign, the White House made much of the

fact that the gross national product had risen at an annual rate of 2.4%

in the third quarter. That meant that the recession was over.

It turned out later that the rise was considerably less, and the rate

of growth declined again in the fourth quarter and in the first half of

1992.

Another ominous sign was the Consumer Confidence Index, which had

dropped from 73% in September to 60% in October. It is now down to

barely 40%. The latest GNP figures were announced a week ago, and the

President is once again boasting of the third quarter growth figure,

2.7% this year. Economists view the figure with deep scepticism.

A couple of weeks after his trip to Rome, the President announced in a

speech in New York that he favoured putting a lid on interest rates

charged by credit card companies. Wall Street dropped 120 points the

next day. He was asked at a press conference what should be done to

revive the economy, and replied ''What's needed? What would help? I'm

trying to sort that through.''

One Republican consultant, Eddie Mahe, remarked: ''It's just causing

distress and dismay among Republicans that's almost like a physical

pain. It's almost schizophrenic, the way the President keeps lunging in

different directions. They have to stop the haemorrhaging with this

disarray, this lack of planning, this lack of thought, this lack of

vision, this lack of coherency. George Bush is hurting himself every

time he opens his mouth.''

In January 1992, Mr Bush finally made his trip to Japan. It had been

planned as a strategic excursion, designed to examine the US-Japanese

role in the post-Cold War world. All that was scrapped in the light of

the economic problems and the Pennsylvania election, and Mr Bush

announced that the purpose of the trip was ''Jobs, jobs, jobs.'' In

other words, he would try to persuade the Japanese to open their market

to American goods.

He took along a group of car company executives, who did not impress

the Japanese. They kept asking their visitors why they paid themselves

several million dollars a year while their companies were losing huge

sums of money. They replied that it was all Japan's fault for not

importing American cars. The Japanese observed that it might help if the

Americans made cars with right-hand drive (Japan drives on the left but

all Japanese cars sent to America have left-hand drive).

John Scully, director of Apple Computers, is supporting Bill Clinton

this year largely because of this incident. He finds it incredible that

Mr Bush should choose leaders of the most backward section of American

industry to confront Japan. Mr Bush took a dozen executives with him,

not one of them from the hi-tech end of the market. There is a footnote:

the most aggressively anti-Japanese of the car executives was the head

of General Motors. The corporation is on the verge of bankruptcy, and he

has just been fired.

Then Mr Bush was taken ill at a state dinner, and threw up all over

the Japanese Prime Minister. All in all, it was a disastrous trip.

The White House promised that the President would reveal his new

economic programme in his state of the union address to Congress at the

end of January. It was a flop. Mr Bush failed utterly to enunciate a

coherent plan: all he could say was that the market would take care of

the situation, and Congress should pass a balanced budget amendment.

He did not say that Congress should pass a balanced budget, nor

propose how to get one. He wants, instead, to amend the Constitution so

that Congress would have to balance the budget -- probably in 1998 or

1999.

In the course of the next few months, Mr Bush had to go through

Republican presidential primaries. His challenger was Pat Buchanan from

the far right. Mr Bush won every contest, but Mr Buchanan won a steady

25%-30% of the Republican vote, and so scared the President that he set

himself to reassure the right wing of the party by agreeing with

everything Mr Buchanan proposed.

So he spent his time denouncing liberals and affirming his antipathy

to abortion, homosexuality, liberals, and the media, and his enthusiasm

for God and country. In the meantime, the recession continued, and still

Mr Bush failed to come to grips with it.

He made two other major speeches, one at the Republican convention in

August, another at an economic club in Detroit in September. Neither of

them was memorable. He has still failed to persuade the country that he

understands people's worries or that he has a coherent plan to deal with

them.

The Houston convention was another disaster. It showed Mr Bush the

prisoner of the right -- and though most of them will vote for him, many

of the conservative disaffected will vote, instead, for Ross Perot.

There is a celebrated poster in Clinton headquarters in Little Rock,

Arkansas. All it says is ''The economy, stupid.'' It means that this is

the only matter that will count in the election. Mr Bush has struggled

throughout the campaign to divert public attention from the state of the

economy by painting Mr Clinton as a weak, unreliable, dishonest clown.

He has had some success: he has cut the Democrat's lead from 20% to

somewhere between 5% and 10%. But unless there is a miracle tomorrow it

will not work. The issue is still the economy, and Mr Bush's failure,

despite all the warnings he had a year ago, to do anything about it --

or even to appear to have an idea of what to do about it.