Primaries Past (1996): Clinton's Charisma and Cash Too Much for Dole

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 fifth in the series. See Patch’s story on the 1980 campaign , the 1984 campaign , the 1988 campaign and the 1992 campaign here.

In many ways the 1996 presidential race is similar to the race so far this year, and those similarities are not just that a group of Republicans have lined up to take on a Democratic president of middling popularity.

Much like now, where frontrunner Mitt Romney is considered a moderate, the same could be said of Bob Dole in 1996. One of Dole’s strongest challengers was Steve Forbes, who had no political experience, but promoted a flat tax, just like Herman Cain did this year. Both Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann have much in common from a domestic policy perspective with Pat Buchanan, who was a thorn in the side of both Dole and George H.W. Bush. Dole had a challenger very similar to himself, if less well-known, in Lamar Alexander, much like Romney has in Jon Huntsman.

Comparisons have been made between Ross Perot and Ron Paul—though the former ran as the Reform Party nominee in 1996—that extend beyond that they both hail from Texas and share the same initials.

There was no one quite like Newt Gingrich in 1996, just as there isn’t this year.

The main difference between Dole and Romney is that Dole had much more experience on the national stage and was a career politician. The Kansas native was elected to the House in 1960 and to the Senate in 1968. He was the Vice-Presidential nominee, running with Gerald Ford, in 1976. He ran for president in 1980 and in 1988, with his 1988 run a formidable challenge to Bush.

So, with his abundance of experience and the fact that he was a war hero (his right arm was seriously injured and left minimally functional), it was no surprise that Dole was the pre-ordained frontrunner.

But that status was quickly cast into doubt as the race began; it was a race where South Carolina would play a key role.

Dole got off to a rocky start when he lost to Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, in caucuses in Alaska and Louisiana. Dole won in Iowa, but then lost to Buchanan in New Hampshire, a state that had given Buchanan 37 percent of the vote against President Bush in 1992.

When Dole and Forbes split the Dakotas, Arizona and Delaware in the last week of February, the race was truly up for grabs, with South Carolina up next on the primary calendar.

The Palmetto State had been unkind to Dole in 1988. He had secured the support of fellow senator Strom Thurmond back then, but it carried little weight as Bush won the state easily with the help of native son Lee Atwater at the helm of his campaign. In 1996, however, the establishment rallied behind Dole and he won South Carolina. The race was effectively over at that point. A few days later, Dole won all of the primaries on Super Tuesday by at least eight points and began preparing for his race against Bill Clinton.

The problem for Dole was that Clinton had been preparing for him all along. With no real challenge from his own party, the former Arkansas Governor was able to marshal support and refine his message months ahead of Dole.

Clinton linked Dole with the wildly unpopular Gingrich and told voters that a Dole presidency would threaten Medicare and Medicaid, which scared many seniors.

In addition, the longer-than-expected primary campaign cost Dole precious dollars, which might have helped to eradicate the impression that Dole, who was 73 at the time, was too old to be elected, a perception that was accentuated in comparison to Clinton, who was more than 20 years his junior. Dole didn’t help his image as a grandfatherly type by constantly referring to himself in the third person. In the end, the lack of cash and the charisma of Clinton would be too much for him to overcome.

If Clinton’s victory was not quite a landslide, it was certainly decisive. He won 31 states to Dole’s 19. The popular vote total was 49 percent to 41 in Clinton’s favor.

Perot earned just over eight percent of the popular vote, less than half of his total from 1992.

The 1996 election showed signs of the blue state-red state division that emerged in the contentious election of 2000. Clinton won only four states in the south, but won all the states in the Northeast and on the West Coast. He won every state that ran along the Mississippi River. Those states would split in 2000.

Postscript

• Dole is the only person in the history of the two major U.S. political parties to have been his party's nominee for both President and Vice President and lost.

• After losing, Dole became a product pitchman selling Pepsi and VISA and, most notably, Viagra.

• Clinton oversaw some of the most prosperous economic conditions in the country’s history during his second term, and when he left office in 2000 the national budget was operating at a surplus. However, those successes were overshadowed by Clinton’s affair with an intern, an affair he initially denied and led to his impeachment by the Republican-controlled House.