What Year Is It?

See if you can guess when these quotes were written:

A. Pending a snap back to the reality of recession and to matters that he handles less adroitly, Bush is riding as high as any president in recent memory.... Bush's success was timely for him and the nation.... his approval rating had sunk to 58 percent, largely because of the worsening economy and a perception that his domestic policies were aimless. Then came full-fledged recession, something that would have kept tugging at Bush's popularity had it stayed in the limelight. Instead, months of tension and then war smothered most bad news about the economy. Experts say that his victory could sustain him in the months ahead as his administration embarks on controversial new...proposals to roll back benefits to the middle class in many federal programs.

B. ''What Republican primaries are consistently showing . . . in very diverse states is that voters are saying 'We've got major problems with the president. We'll vote for anybody else,' '' said David Mason, a presidential analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation. Mason said that even a relatively small loss of support could prove politically fatal for Bush....''When you go through the electoral amounts, if you assume he suffers a little bit in the whole region running from New York to Illinois plus California, he could very easily lose,'' Mason said.

C. "In the past few weeks the Democrats have been building a platform against Bush....The gist of it is that Bush has neglected domestic leadership in his concentration on foreign affairs. He would rather help...Iraq than the mill hands of South Carolina. He's an abominable no-man - no to abortion, no to highway projects, no to civil rights, no to everything here at home."

D. If you really want to get a sense of where this election is going, there's a different gauge you might want to try. It's based on completely unscientific questions that are answered by your own thinking, and the thinking of friends, neighbors, people you strike up a conversation with at the bank or in the mall....I literally cannot count the number of people who've told me, "I voted for Bush last time, but not this time...."

ANSWERS: A) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3/1/91; B) Same, 3/5/91; C) Same, 8/19/91; D) Chicago Sun-Times, 9/8/92