Primaries Past (1992): Clinton Proves He's the Comeback Kid

Every Tuesday from now until the Republican Primary on Jan. 21, Patch will look back at the primaries in South Carolina from 1980-2008, with an emphasis on the GOP. Every Republican winner in South Carolina earned the nomination, in electoral history. This is the fourth in the series. See Patch’s story on the 1980 campaign the 1984 campaign and the 1988 campaign .

The reversal of fortunes that led to George H.W. Bush losing his re-election bid for the presidency in 1992 might very well be unprecedented in the modern political era. Falls from grace are a matter of course in political life, but Bush’s was especially sudden.

In the spring of 1991 Bush had overseen a resounding military victory over Iraq in the first Gulf War, expelling Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in short order. More significantly, he was president when the Iron Curtain fell, bringing an end to the half-century crisis that was the Cold War. Bush’s popularity at one point reached 89 percent.

But by the winter of the following year he would be fending off a primary challenge from a television journalist.

In the time between the end of the Gulf War and the start of the primary season, three key events occurred that would lead to Bush’s ouster.

• First, the economy turned sluggish which is never good news for any incumbent.
• Second, Bush’s trusted political adviser Lee Atwater died of a brain tumor.
• Last, in early 1992 Ross Perot became a player on the national political stage. Perot ran as an outsider and decried the culture of Washington, where he viewed the two major parties were two sides of the same corrupted coin.

Though the Democrats would ultimately claim the presidency, they initially had trouble even finding candidates to run, owing to Bush’s apparent invincibility. Bill Bradley, Al Gore and Dick Gephardt all stepped aside, the latter two having run strong races in 1988. And, as he would seem to do so often, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo would flirt with running and then opt to sit out.

The Democrats were left with top candidates of Massachusetts Gov. Paul Tsongas, former California Gov. Jerry Brown, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and the eventual winner, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

If Bush’s demise was a shock, so too was Clinton’s survival. On more than one occasion it appeared that Clinton was on the brink of dropping out.

With Iowa a foregone conclusion in Harkin’s favor, the political universe settled on New Hampshire.

Early polling showed Clinton with the lead in New Hampshire over Tsongas. But then a woman named Gennifer Flowers claimed that she and Clinton had had a long-term affair while he was the Attorney General of Arkansas. Clinton went on national television with his wife Hillary and called Flowers a liar (Clinton would later admit under oath during his presidency that he had been unfaithful to his wife). Clinton’s poll numbers fell. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

In the days before New Hampshire voters went to the polls, papers from Clinton’s college years were leaked to the media, which seemed to confirm suspicions that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. But that still wasn’t all.

Clinton also admitted that he had smoked marijuana while in college, but said he did not inhale.

Clinton ended up losing New Hampshire to Tsongas by 15 points. Afterwards, in a bit of political spin that would make Karl Rove proud, Clinton claimed that his loss to Tsongas was inevitable—not because of his own mis-steps, but because as the Senator of a neighboring state, Tsongas was the clear favorite all along. Somehow, it worked.

Clinton went on to win most of the primaries on Super Tuesday and appeared on the way to the nomination. Except he wasn’t. That’s when Brown emerged as a challenger. Extolling the virtues of a flat tax, term limits and running a campaign that raised money in small amounts thanks to a 1-800 number, Brown found support with a segment of the Democratic Party that was skeptical of Clinton’s moderate approach. Brown performed well in Illinois and Michigan, won in Connecticut and the race was on all over again. The primaries in New York and Wisconsin, held on the same day, would either clinch the race for Clinton or give rise to the possibility of a brokered convention, an eventuality no one in the party wanted.

Brown saw to it that the latter wouldn’t happen. He was asked if he would consider Jesse Jackson as a vice-president and said, “yes.” The response—in light of Jackson’s “hymietown” comments from 1984—doomed Brown to many New York voters. His affiliation with anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakhan didn’t help either. Brown lost by only three points in Wisconsin, but was routed in New York and the race was over.

On the Republican side, Bush didn’t lose a state, but he was threatened from the right by former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who lambasted Bush for breaking his “no new taxes” pledge.

The most interesting and arguably the most memorable character of the 1992 presidential race was neither Bush nor Clinton, but a diminutive squeaky-voiced Texas billionaire named Ross Perot.

For months, Perot had been criticizing everyone and everything in Washington, DC. He appeared on a cable news program in February 1992—the height of the primary season—and was asked by the host what it would take for him to run for president. Perot said if voters got him on the ballot in all 50 states he would, in fact, run. So they did and he did.

By June of 1992, the possibility of a third party candidate winning the presidency was as real as it has ever been in the 20^th century. Perot had tapped into much the same distrust of the establishment as Jerry Brown had but he had far more resources—namely his own. Numerous polls showed Perot leading both Clinton and Bush, sometimes by double digits.

But then Perot started behaving erratically and he suddenly withdrew from the race in mid-summer, citing family reasons that were never fully clarified. Perot returned to the race in the fall but his credibility had seriously eroded.

Perot’s departure would have seemed to help Bush, but it was Clinton who took advantage of it.

After the Democratic Convention, Clinton received a huge bump. He gave a speech that addressed the many disaffected voters to whom Brown and Perot had appealed, describing a “New Covenant” between elected officials and the public.

Meanwhile, at the GOP convention, Pat Buchanan proved again to be a thorn in Bush’s side. Buchanan delivered a controversial speech claiming that the country was involved in a “culture war.” Given the scuffling state of the economy it gave the impression to many voters that the Republicans were out of touch with what was going on in the country.

Clinton was always a step ahead of Bush in 1992. Anticipating that Bush might attack him for avoiding the draft, Clinton chose Al Gore, who had enlisted in Vietnam, as his running mate.

After their convention, Clinton and Gore went on a bus tour across much of the country, meeting voters in informal settings. The two young candidates in their 40s were a stark contrast to Bush, who was in his late 60s and his running mate Dan Quayle, who had never shed the label of being an intellectual lightweight.

Clinton presented tactical problems that Bush‘s team could never solve. Bush had attacked Michael Dukakis in 1988 for being soft on crime. Being that Clinton was in favor of the death penalty, that was impossible in 1992.

Bush was able to paint Dukakis as a member of the northeastern elite, but he could not do that with Clinton, who was born and raised in Arkansas.

In the end, Clinton won 32 of 50 states, including the southern states of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Louisiana. Clinton’s win gave the Democrats the presidency after having it for only for four of the previous twenty-four years.

Postscript: 

• Several states that went to the GOP in 1988 – California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Vermont – went to Clinton in 1992. They have been considered reliably Democratic ever since.

• Despite leaving the race and re-joining it late, Perot still won 19 percent of the popular vote, the best showing by a third party in 80 years, since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.

• For one of the few times, South Carolina’s role in the primaries was perfunctory. Both Bush and Clinton won the state by 40 points or more. Bush won here in the general election, 48-40 with Perot earning 11-and–a-half percent of the vote.