Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  Figure 26. Bill and Hillary Clinton on their wedding day, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1978. Elected governor at thirty-two and a candidate for president at forty-five, Bill Clinton became the first major-party nominee from the Baby Boom generation. With a high-powered career of her own, his wife Hillary was an unconventional political spouse, and bewildered a conservative Arkansas electorate by not changing her last name after their marriage. Courtesy William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

  By 1988, Clinton’s national star was rising. He became chair of the National Governors’ Association and played a major role in advancing support for the Reagan administration welfare reform bill, the Family Support Act. Welfare reform became a signature issue for Clinton, who found a compelling way to talk about the importance of providing aid without fostering dependency. He talked about his childhood as the son of a struggling single mother, he talked about the empowerment that came through work, he talked about giving poor people “a hand up, not a hand out.” His only setback came at the 1988 Democratic Convention, when he gave such a long-winded speech that the biggest applause came when he finally said, “in conclusion.” He bounced back. In 1990, Clinton became the DLC’s first chair from outside Washington.25

  As the next election cycle neared, more people in the party agreed that it was time for new blood. It was time for New Democrats. First, however, they had to defeat a sitting president who looked pretty hard to beat.

  The Incumbent

  Born into power and economic privilege, George H. W. Bush’s upbringing could not have been more different from that of Bill Clinton. His father, Prescott Bush, was a Wall Street banker who went on to serve as a U.S. senator from Connecticut. A classic Northeastern Republican, Prescott Bush was a patrician politician of the old style who passed on to his son his decorous manner and belief in the honor of public service. From his mother, Bush inherited a ferociously competitive streak that came out in games of sports and games of politics.

  George Bush turned eighteen the day of his prep school graduation, in spring 1942. The next day, against his parents’ wishes, he enlisted in the U.S. navy and became its youngest pilot. He served three years and went on 58 combat missions. On one of these, he was shot down by the Japanese and had to bail out over the Pacific. Eventually rescued by a U.S. submarine, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism under fire.

  Graduating from Yale after the war, Bush chose to leave New England behind and moved his family to Texas to seek his fortune in the oil industry. His move to Texas gave him a front-row seat in witnessing the Sunbelt revolution and the changes it wrought on the Republican Party. When he first ran for Congress in 1964, he was criticized as a carpetbagger from the North, and lost. Yet the changing demographics of 1960s Texas started to work in Bush’s favor. More Republicans were moving from North to South. The strength of the Democratic Party was weakening in Texas in the wake of civil rights. Bush ran again in 1966 as a Republican moderate. Lifted by votes from his fellow transplanted Northerners, he won.

  In the 1970s, Bush worked in a series of jobs in Washington that demonstrated his great party loyalty and helped him develop a strong reputation as a leader in foreign policy. He served as Nixon’s ambassador to the UN, Ford’s ambassador to China, and director of the CIA. In between, he took on the thankless job of head of the Republican National Committee in the thick of Watergate. He first ran for president in 1980, as a more moderate alternative to Reagan. But 1980 was not the moderates’ year, so he ended up accepting the vice presidential post.26

  Bush did not have Reagan’s masterful communication skills, nor did he share his straightforward conservative ideology. Yet he and Reagan became close to each other during their eight years in the White House, and Bush had some significant influence on the Reagan agenda, particularly when it came to foreign policy. Foreign policy was certainly the defining realm of Reagan’s second term and Bush’s first term, as the two men presided over the end of the Cold War and the rise of a new world order.

  Reagan came into office with an aggressive stance against the Soviets, beefing up defense and referring to the USSR as an “evil empire.” He supported efforts to curb the spread of Marxist and socialist-leaning governments around the world. This included Nicaragua, where a scheme to funnel arms to a conservative counterinsurgency would result in the Iran-Contra scandal—an affair in which both Reagan and Bush were implicated.27

  By the time Reagan left office, however, the U.S.-Soviet relationship had changed profoundly. Reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had instituted policies of openness and economic change, glasnost and perestroika. Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s summit meetings in the late 1980s were headline-grabbing moments that foreshadowed the end of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union and tearing down of the Iron Curtain happened in Bush’s first year in office. But with the old Soviet enemy gone, a new set of threats rose to the forefront.

  In August 1990, Iraq invaded the small but oil-rich nation of Kuwait in an attempt to gain the smaller nation’s resources and strategic position on the Persian Gulf. Bush mobilized an international coalition—including the Soviets—to halt the invasion and beat back Saddam Hussein’s forces. Framing this as a critical moment for the international community of nations, “not another Vietnam,”28 Bush and his military commanders were determined for this to be a war conducted chiefly by air and long-distance missile strikes, not by American boots on the ground. “Operation Desert Storm” was a huge military and political triumph. It was smooth, aggressive, and quick. It showed off all the high-tech wonders of the modern U.S. military.

  The war also showcased the sophistication of the political message machine the Republicans had built over the previous decade. Remembering how much negative press attention hurt the American effort in Vietnam, the White House put strong restrictions on how the war could be reported. Journalists were embedded in military units and their movements were strictly contained. Most reporters didn’t even get to go into Iraq at all, but had to report from U.S. government facilities in Kuwait. When the war ended in March 1991, President Bush had approval ratings as high as 90 percent. The president rejoiced, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”29

  Figure 27. President George H. W. Bush talks with troops in Saudi Arabia, 22 November 1990. Fought aggressively with high-tech weaponry and carefully managed press coverage, the Gulf War was a huge political victory for Bush. As his popularity soared, many prominent Democrats concluded his reelection was inevitable, and chose to stay out of the 1992 race. Courtesy George Bush Presidential Library.

  What Bush and the Republicans did not fully internalize, however, was the degree to which the Cold War had provided the rhetorical and ideological glue for the Republican conservative ascendance. Reagan had been masterful at turning the struggle with the Soviet Union into a Wild West parable of good guys versus bad guys, “us” versus “them.” His tough talk about the Soviets in the early years of his presidency gave him the political cover to enter into a new, less belligerent dialogue with Gorbachev later. Reagan and his supporters continued to claim credit for the fall of the Iron Curtain and disintegration of the Soviet Union, even though it was clear that the end of the Cold War sprang from many causes.

  The quick and effective Gulf War helped keep the jingoistic spirit alive, but amid the chants of “USA! USA!” it was clear that the Republican Party needed a fresh way to articulate what it stood for, and whom it stood against. Many conservatives—particularly evangelical Christians—had already concluded they had identified the new enemy, and “it was us.” As many conservatives saw it, the cultural relativism and permissiveness set in motion by the 1960s had created a culture of “political correctness” that permeated American schools and universities, boardrooms and bureaucracies. In their desire for social equality, liberals had become soft on crime. In their promotion of rights for women and sexual minorities, they had contributed to the breakdown of the family. In the opinion of these conservative
s, the 1960s had not been an era of progress and increased individual rights. Instead, it had ushered in an era of cultural permissiveness and government intrusion that had trampled on these rights. There was a war going on in America between the people who wanted to preserve traditional cultural values, and those who wanted to destroy them. It was time to fight back.

  Bush had tested this theme of a “culture war” in the 1988 election with great success. The New England Ivy Leaguer and his similarly preppy vice presidential nominee, Dan Quayle, went populist, courting evangelicals and lashing out at intellectual elites and out-of-touch Washington types. The genteel Bush had no hesitation going dirty. He hired as his campaign manager Lee Atwater, a young and steely South Carolinian operative known for his relentless and sophisticated political attacks. Atwater crafted a series of hard-hitting television ads portraying Mike Dukakis as a weak-kneed failure and poster child for the cultural elite. One ad showed Dukakis sitting awkwardly in a tank, a helmet propped on his head, looking more like a child playing GI Joe than a commander-in-chief. Atwater exploited this unfortunate photo op to the hilt. There was the infamous “Willie Horton” ad, which showed a menacing mug shot of a black felon let out of prison on a Massachusetts furlough program. Atwater perfected the art of playing on voters’ fears about race, the economy, and pointy-headed intellectuals stomping on individual rights. He took George Wallace’s message and updated it for the 1980s, and in the process, made George H. W. Bush president.

  If the 1992 election had been about foreign policy, Bush would have been the stronger candidate. He still glowed in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Yet that glow wore off quickly, and 1992 turned out to be an election that hinged on the economy and the domestic agenda. Within a few months of the end of Desert Storm, the U.S. economy started to struggle. For liberals, the slump seemed proof that Republican economic politics didn’t help the little guy. For conservatives, it reminded them that Bush had promised not to raise taxes, and had gone back on that promise. Bush had never been an undiluted conservative like Reagan, and he didn’t have the communication skills to turn a sour-economy story into a Morning in America. The worsening economy started to hack at Bush’s approval ratings, but they were still at 60 percent by fall 1991.

  This happened to be the critical moment when Democratic contenders needed to decide whether to throw their hats in the ring. Waiting much longer would put them behind on fundraising, and would disadvantage them in the early primaries. Looking at the boost the Gulf War had given Bush in the polls, the biggest Democratic names—Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, Sam Nunn—concluded that the president was not going to be beatable. Yes, the economy was slowing, but the conventional wisdom concluded the election would still be won or lost on foreign policy.

  This situation opened things for a fresh crop of candidates who had not run before. There were three senators, all identified with DLC-style centrism: Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Tom Harkin of Iowa. There were two Sunbelt governors: Douglas Wilder of Virginia and Jerry Brown of California.

  Then, in early October, there was another governor: Bill Clinton. He stood in front of the Old State House in Little Rock and announced he was running for president. “You’d expect a governor of Arkansas to become president of the United States about as soon as a great world statesman would emerge from Bolivia or Portugal,” cracked Washington commentator Morton Kondracke. Yet even Kondracke recognized that Clinton now delivered a compelling message in a charismatic package. He had taken the neoliberal and centrist creed and redefined it, calling for “every last American citizen to assume personal responsibility for the future of this country.”30

  George Bush was the inheritor of the Reagan mantle on the Republican side, but the career and ascendance of Bill Clinton, the New Democrat, is really where one can see the culmination of the Reagan Revolution. Clinton’s centrist Democratic ideas bore the influence of Reagan’s beliefs about cutting government spending, about individual responsibility, about less regulation. And, just as important, Clinton also learned from Reagan the importance of communicating your message in an inspiring way, and from hammering that message home every day, every hour, and every minute of a presidential campaign.

  CHAPTER 8

  The CNN President

  I hear you’re the smartest guy in the race. That’s sorta like saying that Moe’s the smartest of the Three Stooges.

  —New Hampshire voter to Bill Clinton, January 1992

  By 1992, CNN had gone from being Ted Turner’s outlandish idea to a serious news outlet whose influence radiated far beyond the size of its viewer audience. It had become regarded as “the fourth network” that presented a formidable challenge to the business model of network nightly news.1 The Gulf War of 1990 and 1991 was CNN’s breakout moment, a fast-moving and highly visual war that matched the fast-paced rhythm of cable news. On air 24 hours a day, CNN was able to break stories before the broadcast networks could get them, and the cable network could provide video content to local news outlets that were in fierce competition for ratings. It became a global power, setting up different international feeds that beamed out of its Atlanta headquarters into nearly every continent. On ordinary news days, the networks still ruled; CNN mustered only about 10 percent of the U.S. viewership NBC, ABC, and CBS could draw. Yet in the opening days of the conflict in the Gulf, CNN scooped its competition by being the only news outlet with reporters on the ground in Baghdad as the U.S.-led Coalition forces began their high-intensity barrage of air bombing. CNN’s American audience surged to 150 percent of the usual network news share; millions more watched around the world.2

  The network continued to be a news-breaker and newsmaker in 1992, even though its audience share never quite returned to the dizzying heights of Desert Storm. Domestic crises garnered high ratings. In late April, Los Angeles exploded into violence. An all-white jury had acquitted police officers accused of beating a black motorist, Rodney King. Angry residents lashed out at the injustice, turning their anger on local businesses, most of which had white or Asian American owners. The images of a burning neighborhood, of looting and violence on the streets, flashed across TV screens and newspapers. The network’s audience share doubled. Two months later, earthquakes in Southern California triggered a surge in CNN audience, and in late August the devastation of a major storm, Hurricane Andrew, caused an even bigger spike. CNN was event-driven television, and in its pursuit of ratings it helped turn the ordinary processes of a presidential election year into suspenseful, personality-driven media events. And if a bad story about a candidate started running on CNN, campaign staff needed to stop it—immediately—or else it would spread like a virus to the rest of the media universe.3

  In February, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot went on the network’s marquee interview program, Larry King Live, to announce that if his supporters got him on the ballot in all fifty states, he’d run for president as a third-party candidate. Perot and CNN were tailor-made for each other. Both presented themselves as independent iconoclasts, in the business of speaking truth to power, and not beholden to any particular political interests. CNN’s audience was more affluent, older, and had a higher percentage of male viewers than the major networks. It was an audience not only more inclined to be interested in national politics, but also to be receptive to Perot’s no-nonsense style and hard-hitting message. CNN styled itself as the home of crusading television journalism. Perot believed he was on “a crusade for America itself.”4

  The Straight Talker

  For over two decades, American voters had become increasingly suspicious of Washington and the political insiders that filled it. After the construction of the interstate highway ringing Washington, the term “inside the Beltway” became shorthand for political business in the nation’s capital. By the early 1990s, the term had morphed into an insult. With the country in an anti-government mood, partisan infighting on the rise, and an increasing number of voters identifying themselves as political independents, being a Washin
gton insider had turned from asset to liability. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had urged Americans to embrace rule by bureaucratic experts as the path to true reform. Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors had argued successfully that only a large and strong central government could steer the modern nation. Even Richard Nixon had overseen the expansion of social programs and government regulatory powers. Now, political reformers found the bureaucrats and experts the source of the problem.

  Figure 28. H. Ross Perot on Larry King. Attesting to the power of CNN not only to report the news but to make headlines on its own, Perot became a major presidential contender through a series of appearances on the network’s evening talk show, Larry King Live. AP Photo.

  Ross Perot capitalized on this sentiment to great effect, positioning himself as 1992’s ultimate outsider. He condemned career politicians for not understanding the issues, for being beholden to special interests, for forgetting the real America. In reality, however, Perot was a creature of Washington, a man who had grown wealthy after securing government contracts, and gotten wealthier through savvy lobbying of Congress to get more contracts and favors. One frustrated Bush campaign official complained Perot “was everything in real life that he was railing against in politics.”5

  Perot was born in 1930 in Texarkana, Texas, only about thirty miles away from the small town of Hope, Arkansas, where Bill Clinton came into the world sixteen years later. Although his parents weren’t poor, growing up in Depression-era East Texas was a struggle. Perot wrangled horses and delivered newspapers to make an extra dollar. When his boss at the newspaper cut his commission, Perot confronted him until the boss, amused by this determined, big-eared kid, gave in. He went to the U.S. Naval Academy and then served four years of military service, leaving to sell computers for IBM.