I'll try not to derail a story centered on Mexico too much with much more personal pontificating on what is and is not possible in the US 1992 election. I will say, come now, which US Presidents can you name who ever, going into the next election when they were legally eligible to run again, threw up their hands and recused themselves in favor of their party coming up with a new candidate? Note that prior to FDR, it was a strong tradition that no one try for more than 2 terms in informal respect to George Washington's example (and the outcome of FDR breaking that tradition was an Amendment formally imposing a two term limit!) so various 19th and eary 20th century Presidents such as say Calvin Coolidge would not really count; clearly if Americans thought it proper normally for a President to serve three or more terms 1928 would have had no problem "keeping Cool With Coolidge" another term (of course Silent Cal dodged a bullet there by retiring!)
So when ever does a sitting President who would either traditionally or legally expect another term run to be customarily and legally open to them, stand down for the good of their party?
I can name just two, not counting cases like Coolidge's--Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968. And Truman's case is a stretch--certainly he was legally allowed to go for a third term, since the Amendment barring anyone else from doing so had a special provision exempting whoever was President when it passed, and that was Truman. As far as the Constitution goes Truman could have kept getting reelected right through the last election before he dropped dead, which was in the early 1970s. But while he had not quite served two entire terms, he had served all but the first month or so of FDR's final term won in 1944, and an entire term in his own right, so pushing for a third term would have put him into "violating the Washington example" territory even if the national outlook had made his final term look rosy and wonderful. In fact of course he was facing quite a meltdown, what with the Korean War which caught him flat-footed and a general surge of McCarthyism; ironically I believe by late 1952 the Keynesian effect of that very same Korean War along with a general opening of the floodgates of military spending, plus the tightened labor market due to young men being drafted for that same war all meant that the US economy was zipping along pretty well. But people were in a deep mood of backlash against 20 years of Democratic ascendency, and Truman lost Democratic leadership of the House again in 1950 and was hardly able to push the sort of New Deal Part II legacy he was aiming for. (According to a biography of him I have read, he also personally felt the Presidency was a burden, and clung to in 1948 mainly out of a dogged New Deal idealism that told him if he gave up, Dewey would roll back much of New Deal and certainly not extend it as Truman wished to. But he still wrote in his diary that any man who wanted this job had to be crazy. I don't personally think he was posturing about that, it's one of the reasons I love him so much). So 1952 was clearly no Democrat's year even before it was known Eisenhower would be the Republican nominee--the Democrats did try to get Stevenson elected but it was a pretty foregone race; they would hardly have done worse and might even had done better if Truman had tried for a third term after all. He certainly would not get it!
So this leaves just Lyndon Johnson as the only real example of a President who could have run for another term but stepped down in order to give his party a real shot at winning when that was in fact possible. In fact Humphrey lost to Nixon by a very slim margin--possibly Nixon would have done better in 1968 and won a clear popular vote majority, if George Wallace had not run as well. But it is also possible some people voting for Wallace would support Humphrey instead and perhaps without Wallace maybe it would have been Humphrey who won...so it was definitely possible for some Democrat or other to win in '68, and again just maybe if LBJ had doggedly stuck to getting nominated and running, perhaps that Democrat might even have been him, though his negatives probably make this ASB improbable.
So this business of "I must step down after my term ends and let some other candidate of my party win untainted by my bad legacy" seems a little bizarre to me; who does this really? Just LBJ! In a vague way Nixon resigning in favor of Jerry Ford might be stretched into a third example, but it is far stretch because Nixon actually resigned from office before--years before--his term expired.
But stretching in all three as examples for Bush to follow, what did it gain the President's party in any of these three cases to issue such mea culpas? In all three cases, the outcome was the other party won the next election anyway. Ford came very close to being elected to be sure, but I don't think you'd say Bush should go so far as to resign in favor of Dan Quayle, and I think aside from any questions about Quayle's own viability on personal merits or lack thereof, Quayle would have seemed even more joined at the hip to Bush than Hubert Humphrey was to LBJ.
Bush will not in fact resign; the Republican party will not abandon him. Their very best shot at retaining the White House would be to deny any culpability and blame any nastiness about Mexico entirely on Bartlett alone, just as OTL neither Bush nor any Republican (nor for that matter any Democrat anyone was listening to) blame themselves for either Saddam Hussein's bad acts or more parallel to Mexico, Manuel Noreiga's in Panama. Never mind that both of these Big Bads were in fact very much creatures of Reagan and Bush policy support right up to the moment they were suddenly declared rouge devils. The policy of pretending US hands were clean and the administration shocked, shocked, shocked I tell you that they could be such bad bad men is exactly what happened OTL, and it seems sure to me to be exactly what Bush will do, with the Republicans in lock step behind him (those who don't defect to Perot anyway) and for that matter, moderate Democrats of the "bipartisan uber alles" school. Machiavelli would surely approve; there is no percentage in Bush admitting the slightest guilt in the matter. Gracefully refraining from a second run would be such an admission implicitly, and any Republican faction suggesting Bush ought to stand down in favor of some other Republican candidate would be scorned for breaking ranks for that reason. They will try to brazen it out, is my prediction.
I don't think our author intends a US invasion of Mexico before November '92, but that would be much more likely an outcome than Bush passing the baton to some other Republican.
Certainly an open scandal about the Mexican cartels and their top level support might be all the pretext Perot needs to throw his own hat in the ring, but he will be defying a Republican party closing ranks around Bush.
Whereas, if Bush did resign or simply indicate he would not run again, that might be enough to get Perot to hold off and sit it out too, depending on who shaped up to the frontrunner for the R nomination; then we are back to a straight D v R race, and given how Clinton or a Clinton clone teetered in the close balance, but still came out of it tipped to win even if by razor thin margins without Perot in the race, it seems clear that major scandal of this kind would only serve to guarantee a Democratic win.
Bush and his advisors surely realize that.
