In late February 1991, in the wake of the successful completion of the First Persian Gulf War, in which the United States, leading a coalition of allies, liberated the country of Kuwait by repelling the invading forces of Iraq, then under the control of dictator Saddam Hussein, President George Bush’s approval ratings as measured in the polls soared to a fraction under 90 percent, the highest that had ever been observed since pollsters began measuring approval ratings during the second term of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration (the previous record, 87%, was enjoyed by President Truman after his swearing in as president upon the death of FDR and during the final months of World War II; FDR’s highest measured approval rating was 84%, which at that time had only been exceeded, briefly, by Truman). Bush’s ratings remained above 70 percent through the remainder of the spring and into summer, and even as late as July and August of that year, the president enjoyed approval ratings oscillating between 70 and 75 percent, and they remained above 60 percent well into October.
With the 1992 campaign season around the corner, no Democrat considered a run against the president to be anything other than a quixotic enterprise. Under this measurement, Bush seemed invulnerable, and in comparison to other popular presidents who enjoyed similar numbers measured within the same time frame (i.e., the October before election year), his approval ratings matched Eisenhower’s and Reagan’s, slightly exceeded Kennedy’s, and had only been surpassed by Lyndon Johnson, who went on to win in a landslide. All other presidents measured at this time fell far below these figures; thus Bush was in good company and in a solid position. His prosecution of the First Persian Gulf War was widely praised at home and abroad, and a second Bush term seemed guaranteed. But the opinion and approval of the American voters is decidedly fickle, particularly in the age of mass media and the endless news cycle; and within just two months, in mid-December as the year was drawing to a close, his ratings rapidly fell to 50 percent, a full twelve-point drop from October and almost forty points when compared to his highest level ten months earlier; and by the opening of the following year—election year—his numbers dipped below 50 percent, never to recover, reaching a low of 29 percent that August in what can only be described as a genuine reversal of fortune. Bush, who seemed invincible throughout 1991, now appeared doomed.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” Arkansas governor and 1992 Democratic nominee for president William Jefferson Clinton quipped while instructing the media on what matters most in presidential campaigns, a pithy and insightful comment on the causes of the electorate’s historical pattern of fickleness and impatience. Bush’s record abroad, while initially inspiring to most, could not deflect damage that had occurred to his presidency owing to a soured economic situation. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, Bush’s strength—foreign policy—seemed less vital when compared to the economic downturn. Clinton’s Reaganesque line defined the decline and fall of the Bush presidency as well as encapsulating, in one moment, the native brilliance of this new star within the Democratic Party. Given Bush’s strong position in 1991, many of the party’s heavy-hitters, such as New York governor Mario Cuomo, displayed no interest in running. None of the party’s more prominent leaders were looking to lead a futile campaign against such a strong incumbent, at least a strength that the polls were indicating in the year prior to election season. Clinton, who had been the youngest person to serve as governor in the state of Arkansas, had been noticed for some time now as a potential national figure and possible future candidate for president, but he almost squandered his growing reputation with a garrulous, meandering nominating speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1988.
Nonetheless, Clinton, known to some as the “Comeback Kid” for his reputation of resilience (a nickname that some associate with his uncanny ability to shake off personal indiscretions and land catlike on his nimble political feet), joined a crowded field that included former California governor Jerry Brown, who had briefly made noise in 1976; former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas; Iowa senator Tom Harkin, Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, Virginia governor Doug Wilder, Pennsylvania governor Robert Casey, Colorado representative Patricia Schroeder (briefly and never officially), and former Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who had famously challenged President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and was credited as having been a crucial player in ending LBJ’s presidency.
Clinton’s early campaign received the kind of blow that causes less resilient candidates to fold. After the Iowa caucus, which Harkin easily won, as it was his home state, a scandal surrounding Clinton’s marriage surfaced involving allegations of infidelity reminiscent of those circulated against Colorado senator Gary Hart in 1988. In Hart’s case, his campaign was mortally wounded by the allegations and the manner in which Hart had responded to them. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was herself a savvy campaigner, closed ranks and charged full ahead into the allegation, appearing on a broadcast of the television news show 60 Minutes to candidly share their personal life and, in the process, completely defuse the situation. It was an intelligent decision masterfully executed. In the following New Hampshire primary, Clinton, who before the broadcast appeared to have been in trouble, finished second to Tsongas, who was the favorite going into the primary, given his familiarity to the voters there (Tsongas being from a neighboring state). Clinton’s second-place finish, while nine points behind Tsongas, was double that of the third-place candidate, Kerrey; thus it was evident that his campaign had shaken off the scandal and was back on track.
On Super Tuesday, Clinton made huge gains, sweeping the southern states and winning heavy support elsewhere; Tsongas’s campaign was seriously weakened, never to recover. For a time, Governor Brown surged forward, as he had against Governor Carter in 1976, to challenge Clinton with wins in Colorado, Connecticut, and Vermont, briefly gaining the momentum; but again the Clinton campaign recovered (even winning in Brown’s home state of California); thus as the convention commenced in New York City, Clinton held all the cards, eclipsing what by then was Brown’s meager support. Clinton locked up the nomination, and his choice for the vice presidency, Tennessee senator Albert Gore Jr., was accepted by acclamation. At one point, Gore was considered by many to be, along with Cuomo, one of the likely nominees against Bush; but an accident involving his son caused him to take a hiatus from politics as the campaign season opened. Clinton, identifying himself as a “New Democrat” (in language reminiscent of Hart) and promising a “third way” between the left and the right, moved energetically toward the confrontation with the president.
In an effort to appeal to a larger cross-section of the American people, the Democratic platform followed Clinton’s lead and took moderate positions on a number of issues, careful not to propose expensive new government programs. Significantly, the platform identified reducing the national debt as a leading priority. To accomplish this, the platform proposed to put “everything on the table; eliminate nonproductive programs; achieve defense savings; reform entitlement programs to control soaring health care costs; cut federal administrative costs by 3 percent annually for four years; limit increases in the ‘present budget’ to the rate of growth in the average American’s paycheck; apply a strict ‘pay as you go’ rule to new non-investment spending; and make the rich pay their fair share in taxes.” Additionally, the platform proposed to make health care available to all Americans regardless of “pre-existing conditions” by putting “tough controls on health costs.” The platform also reaffirmed the Democratic Party’s position on the right to choose an abortion, and it supported background checks for those wishing to purchase firearms and a prohibition on the sale of assault weapons.
Following the convention, the Clinton-Gore team would stump hard, touring the country as a duo in a campaign bus and advertising their youthful enthusiasm and their innovative, pragmatic approach to governing. They were intent on abandoning the politics of the past and the old, failed methods of government that had become entrenched in Washington, and they promised a presidency that would build a “bridge to the twenty-first century.” In contrast to most presidential candidates in the latter half of the twentieth century, Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate since Franklin Roosevelt who had not served in the military. Gore served in Vietnam, but Clinton, who had been criticized by his opponents for his refusal to join the military during the Vietnam War, had no military record, and thus he was the first presidential candidate from a major party since Thomas Dewey, President Truman’s 1948 Republican challenger, not to have served in the armed forces (Dewey was sixteen at the end of World War I). With Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow” adopted as the campaign theme, the Clinton-Gore collaboration was clearly emblematic of a new generation. Clinton saw a connection between himself and President Kennedy, whom he at one point met as a young man, and even Clinton’s mannerisms at times seemed to emulate JFK. Clinton, while not as charismatic and sophisticated as Kennedy or that other magnetic personality of the post-World War II era, Ronald Reagan, was nonetheless at ease with people, quite capable of speaking to any kind of audience in a welcoming manner, exuding the kind of personal warmth and affability that gave both Kennedy and Reagan, as well as FDR before them, such broad appeal. In a word, Clinton was a natural politician—genial, quick on his feet, confident, good-natured, comfortable in his skin, and at his best before crowds. These qualities, combined with a quick intellect and hidden toughness, made Clinton the dominant politician of his times, and along with Reagan the most accomplished campaigner since Kennedy.
As Clinton’s image deflected scandal and innuendo over infidelity and allegations of draft evasion to ascend in the polls, President Bush’s popularity continued to decline rapidly. In addition to an economic downturn, which Bush was slow to take seriously, he had incurred the wrath of the Republican right, beginning with what the conservatives took to be an act of betrayal: the decision to support tax increases against his own 1988 pledge to fight against “new taxes,” pronounced with pugnacity through the famous “Read my lips” line coined in his acceptance speech. Conservatives by and large had never really adopted Bush; he was seen as too moderate, even liberal to some, and with the reneging of his promise not to impose new taxes, the conservatives bolted, provoking controversial pundit and former aide to the Nixon White House Pat Buchanan, a leading conservative figure since the 1970s, to declare his candidacy as a challenge to the president. In the New Hampshire primary, the president won 53 percent, but Buchanan took just under 38 percent, a high number against an incumbent, and to some, reminiscent of the damage done to Lyndon Johnson by Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (although the margin of victory was not nearly as narrow as it had been in 1968). The Buchanan campaign was stoked to move forward, stirred by images of storming the castle in a spasm of “pitchfork” populism that exposed Bush’s vulnerability. The president eventually went on to defeat Buchanan (as well as Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, whose provocative but idiosyncratic challenge to both Bush and Buchanan received much press but scarcely any votes) in the primaries, and to take the nomination. But the damage was inflicted and the soft spots revealed, and Bush found himself having to walk on eggshells when dealing with the conservative wing.
At the convention, Buchanan stole the show with his clarion call announcing a “culture war,” with Clinton and the Democrats on the wrong side of the line. Moderates in the party were put off by Buchanan’s jeremiad, but the party’s far right wing was once again energized. Even though their candidate could not dislodge Bush, the conservatives felt the strength needed to influence the party’s platform and agenda. Specifically, the conservative wing managed to win the inclusion of a number of socially conservative planks that could potentially alienate moderate Republicans as well as many centrist independents. Following Buchanan’s lead, the platform scolded the Democrats and the “liberal left.” “Our opponents,” the platform read, had “declared that the dogmas of the Left were the final and victorious faith. From kremlins and ivory towers, their planners proclaimed the bureaucratic millennium. But in a tragic century of illusion, Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward failed to summon a Brave New World. One hundred and fifty years of slogans and manifestos came crashing down in an ironic cascade of unintended consequences. All that is left are the ruins of a failed scoundrel ideology.”
The platform further accused the Democratic Party of waging war against traditional cultural values. “Elements within the media, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Democrat Party are waging a guerrilla war against American values,” the platform maintained; “they deny personal responsibility, disparage traditional morality, denigrate religion, and promote hostility toward the family’s way of life.” The platform also opposed “any legislation or law which legally recognizes same-sex marriages and allows such couples to adopt children or provide foster care.” Among many other things associated with conservative policy, the platform reaffirmed Republican support for a constitutional amendment to protect human life and “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”
Another wrinkle was added to the campaign with the addition of a particularly strong third-party challenge. During the late spring of 1992, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot announced his intention to conduct an independent bid for the presidency. Perot argued that neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party had any intention of dealing seriously and maturely with the growing debt and deficit spending. Perot also argued that both the major parties supported free-trade agreements that led to millions of well-paying American jobs shifting permanently abroad, specifically to Mexico and Asia. Even though Perot had little confidence that Bill Clinton would deal with the growing federal deficit or oppose free-trade agreements, Perot reserved his strongest criticism for President Bush. Perot’s blunt, plain-spoken, businessman’s style and persona appealed to a number of centrist, non-ideological Americans disaffected by the more conservative tone of the GOP and disappointed in Bush’s leadership in failing to steer the party away from the right, as well as to those Americans who either did not trust Clinton’s character (in the wake of the infidelity and draft evasion scandals) or were not persuaded by the ostensibly new Democratic Party that they represented. Perot, armed with graphs, charts, and the data behind them, promised to “open the hood, look inside, and fix the problem” of an ailing economy and uncontained national debt. The appeal of Perot excited many: In June, the polls surprisingly showed Perot in the lead, polling 39 percent of participants to Bush’s 31 percent and Clinton’s 25 percent.
However, the Perot campaign was troubled by internal dissent, sparked primarily by Perot’s disagreement with his leading advisers. Perot also expressed concern that a three-way race might cause the election to be thrown into the House of Representatives (as it had in 1800 and 1824), a possibility that he considered damaging to the democratic process. His numbers did begin to show signs of slipping downward, plunging to 25 percent only a few short weeks after his peak. Thus, to the disappointment of his followers, Perot announced on television his withdrawal from the race. Perot would also later claim that his withdrawal was out of fear over dirty tricks that were being used by the Bush campaign to invade his family’s privacy with the intent of sullying his family’s reputation. But in early October, Perot reentered the campaign, just in time to participate in the presidential debates against Bush and Clinton. Perot’s campaign, which had gathered significant support just a few months earlier, had been irreparably damaged by his withdrawal; nonetheless, with his hat back in the ring, the election once again had a new shape.
For the first time, the now-standard presidential debates included a third candidate, in this case Perot. Four debates were held and, again for the first time, different formats were used—e.g., one debate was held as a town hall event rather than in the standard lectern-centered format. In the first debate, Perot’s humor and blunt manner seemed a refreshing contrast to both of the major-party candidates. Clinton, who was capable of charming audiences, was unexpectedly reserved and low-key throughout much of the debate, but he was roused to defend himself when the president criticized him for his youthful participation in antiwar protests. Exhibiting strong disapproval of Clinton’s choices, the president asked how he could have protested against his own county and in a foreign land (Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford at the time of his antiwar activism) “when young men were held prisoner in Hanoi or kids out of the ghetto were drafted.” Bush, needing to score a winning blow to help bolster his sagging poll numbers, angled for the killing blow: “It’s not a question of patriotism,” the president instructed the viewers, “it’s a question of character and judgment.”
Clinton, who had been fairly unemotional the entire evening, became agitated and turned toward President Bush to respond with strength. “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong,” Clinton noted, effectively going on to further explain that, against McCarthy’s tactics, “a Senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism. I was opposed to the war but I love my country.” Even though post-debate polls showed that the highest number of viewers—47 percent—felt Perot had won the day, Clinton’s swift and emotionally charged rebuttal of the president, made all the more effective owing to the well-targeted reference to the president’s own father, was the key moment; 30 percent of those polled felt that Clinton had won the debate, while Bush managed only 16 percent. To many observers, the debate proved that Clinton would not defer to the president, who was a war hero, on issues of character and patriotism, and thus it was a pivotal moment in his campaign.
Things got worse for the president. In the second debate, held in the style of a town hall forum, Bush seemed disinterested, distracted, even bored. At one point, he was caught on camera checking his watch; at another point, he appeared not to be paying close attention to the questions. While neither Clinton nor Perot was necessarily impressive that night, Bush’s apparent disinterest was hard to miss and incessantly commented upon in the post-debate chatter. This helped Clinton more than Perot: Post-debate polls indicated that well over half of the viewers saw Clinton as the winner, just 16 percent believed Perot to have won, and only 15 percent felt that Bush had performed the better of the three. Bush fared better after the third debate, with viewers concluding the two major-party candidates to be about even, but Perot was again elevated by a 38 percent plurality as the winner (the rest of the viewers split between Bush and Clinton).
Throughout the campaign, Clinton ran as a centrist, critical of both the right and the left. His promotion of his ideas as representing a new kind of Democrat was compelling to a large population of voters weary of the old political language framed by tired dichotomies of the “left” and the “right.” Furthermore, the Clinton campaign was far more effective in deflecting attacks on his character and competency than the Dukakis campaign four years earlier. Then, the Bush campaign successfully depicted Dukakis as “too liberal,” too “soft on crime,” and lacking the fortitude needed for the Oval Office. Bush’s campaign operatives were even more aggressive against Clinton, for given Clinton’s personal past, they had far more ammunition than they had against Dukakis. But the difference this time around was found in the Clinton “war room” strategy, on guard twenty-four hours a day for immediate counterattack. Bush’s other main strength, his foreign policy experience and achievements, was underplayed in the press to Clinton’s advantage, and the theme “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” as well as a combination of Kennedyesque youth and vigor and Reaganesque affability, provided the Clinton-Gore challenge with substantial force.
On Election Day, Governor Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote, winning just under 45,000,000 votes, or 43 percent of the voting electorate, with President Bush taking just over 39,100,000 popular votes (about 37%), and Perot showing just over 19,700,000 (or slightly under 19%). Historically, Perot’s 19 percent of the popular vote is the third-highest percentage of the total vote to go to a third-party candidate, exceeded only by Theodore Roosevelt (27% in 1912) and Millard Fillmore (22% in 1856), who were both former presidents at the time they ran on a third ticket, and surpassing Senator La Follette’s 16 percent in 1924. However, unlike Teddy Roosevelt, Millard Fillmore, LaFollette, or, for that matter, George Wallace (1968), Strom Thurmond (1948), and James Weaver (1892), Perot’s impressive third-party run did not produce any votes in the Electoral College, as Perot, while finishing strong in some states, did not manage to win even one. There, in the Electoral College, Clinton’s plurality was converted to a solid majority, winning 370 electoral votes (or 69%) to the president’s 168 (31%). In the popular vote, President Bush’s percentage was the second worst received by an incumbent; President Taft (who also lost in a three-way race) finished lower with 23 percent. If we count John Quincy Adams’s election in which he won the White House in 1824 with just 31 percent of the popular votes cast, President-elect Clinton’s popular vote was the fourth lowest in history for a winning candidate; along with the younger Adams, only Abraham Lincoln’s 39 percent in 1860 and Woodrow Wilson’s 41 percent were lower (Richard Nixon’s 1968 plurality of 43.4% was a fraction higher than Clinton’s in 1992).
But Clinton’s victory in the Electoral College was certainly more convincing. Dominating the Northeast and the Midwest, he also showed strength in every other region of the country, including the Deep South—where Bush still carried more states, but Clinton managed to cut into what had since the 1960s become an important region for the GOP—and the Intermountain West, where the GOP had also recently been dominant. Clinton won the two biggest states—California, now, with an enormous 54 electoral votes, the Electoral College colossus; and New York (33)—as well as taking other leaders in the electoral vote: Pennsylvania (23), Illinois (22), Ohio (21), New Jersey (15), and Georgia (13). The biggest states won by Bush were Texas (now, thanks to the 1990 census, the third-largest prize with 32, just one vote behind New York), Florida (25), North Carolina (14), and Virginia (13). Clinton became the first Democrat in history to win the White House without winning Texas since its annexation in 1845 (Democrats Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Franklin Pierce were elected prior to Texas joining the Union), and only the second Democrat (Kennedy being the first) to win election without Florida. In looking more closely at the results by county, Clinton drew strength throughout every region of the country with the exception of the Great Basin, the Great Plains, and a large swath of the rural Midwest (which was countered by Clinton’s strength in the more densely populated midwestern urban areas).
Even though Clinton fell seven percentage points shy of a popular majority, his election signaled a significant change in the mood of the country. After rwelve years of Republican control of the executive branch, a new kind of Democrat was back in the White House—not unlike 1976, when eight years of Republican control produced another “new” kind of Democrat in Jimmy Carter. Thus the Reagan-Bush years were bookended by the ascent of two Southerners who ran as outsiders and promised a new, pragmatic approach to governing. Whether or not the Clinton presidency would follow President Carter’s fate would remain to be seen. But for the moment, it was clear that the political pendulum had shifted back toward the Democrats, and a new youth movement was under way.
American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu and http://www.presidencyucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25847#ixzz1meEUz4EE.
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