Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  Figure 29. The Arsenio Hall Show taping, Paramount Studios, Hollywood, 3 June 1992. Democratic candidate Bill Clinton also took advantage of free media, including making appearances designed to appeal to young and minority voters. A saxophone-playing Clinton appeared on the wildly popular late night talk show hosted by comedian Arsenio Hall. AP Photo/Reed Saxon.

  Yet the way the Clinton campaign wrested control of the media story reinforced this trend of style over substance, entertainment over news. Not too long after the Los Angeles riots, Clinton appeared on African American comedian Arsenio Hall’s popular late night talk show, wearing sunglasses and playing his saxophone. He went on MTV, answering questions from twenty-somethings on both serious and un-serious topics. Bill and Hillary wanted to talk about policy, but their media advisor Mandy Grunwald warned, “if we don’t do that in a sexy way, we will be eaten alive.” This approach reached new audiences, and it also solved a money problem. The intensity of the primary battles had drained the campaign’s war chest. Unable to pay for their own commercials, the Clinton team found ways to get on television—and make news—for free.24

  It worked. It was risky, but it worked. Clinton’s campaign had more message discipline and understanding of the spin cycle than the competitors. The people at the head of the campaign had spent lifetimes in politics, yet for many of them this was their first presidential campaign. Because they had been so far outside of the political establishment, they had little difficulty in breaking its rules. They took advantage of the intersection between tabloid journalism and serious journalism, they responded to the demands of cable television, and they weren’t as beholden to traditional Democratic constituencies. But Clinton himself was the most important weapon. For all his personal flaws, he possessed an extraordinary blend of political talent: an encyclopedic grasp of the policy issues, capacity to deliver pungent sound bites and pointed attacks on his opponents, and ability to make anyone with whom he interacted feel like the most important person in the room.

  As he stumped through state after state, Clinton was able to speak a language of government reinvention and social compassion that resonated with many different groups, conveyed with charm and sincerity that made audiences fall in love with him. Robert Kennedy had been the last politician able to build such an effective “black and blue” coalition between African American and working-class voters. As the primary season drew to a close, and rivals fell by the wayside, an exhausted and road-tested candidate and his aides realized that they at last had the nomination.

  Clinton capped it off with another made-for-TV moment: the announcement of Tennessee Senator and DLC stalwart Al Gore as his running mate. The event was so smoothly choreographed that Bush campaign staffers watching on CNN cringed as they saw it. It was a beautiful summer day in Little Rock. Against the red brick background of the Arkansas governor’s mansion, in front of a group of cheering supporters, the Clinton and Gore families stood together. They were picture-perfect, with wholesome children and smiling blonde wives, already seeming like the best of friends.

  By picking Gore, Clinton was going against longstanding conventional wisdom: to pick a vice president who was different from the president and appealed to different constituencies. FDR had picked John Nance Garner, then Harry Truman—two men about as different from the patrician New Yorker in background, region, and politics as you could get. The same thing happened when Kennedy picked Johnson, Nixon picked Agnew, and Reagan picked Bush. In contrast, Al Gore was nearly the same age as Clinton, from the state next door, with the same centrist politics. The choice was a bet that voters cared less about factionalism and more about having leaders who were young, moderate, fresh faces. Perhaps most important, both were from the South, the region whose politics were most in flux, and whose support was ever more crucial to winning a national election. Few Democratic liberals liked to acknowledge that the segregated “Solid South” had been the key to the party’s dominance of national politics through much of the twentieth century. Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began the steady hemorrhaging of Southern support from the Democratic to the Republican column. By 1992, only mid-South states like Arkansas were continuing to elect Democrats on a regular basis. Young leaders like Clinton and Gore might persuade their fellow Southerners to return to the Democratic fold, even just for one election.

  The week after the Gore announcement, the Clinton troops moved triumphantly to New York City for the convention. Unlike the other Democratic Conventions we’ve explored thus far, it was slickly stage-managed and largely controversy-free. Reforms instituted after the chaos of Chicago ’68 had turned the primaries and caucuses into the places the nomination was decided; the convention no longer served as the moment of decision. The multiple balloting of yesteryear was a dim memory by 1992, but the wall-to-wall press coverage remained, and intensified in the cable-news era. Conventions turned into well-scripted political theater, rather than actually choosing a nominee: “the role of the assembled delegates instead was to serve as extras in the crowd scenes and finally to arrive at a long foregone conclusion.”25

  The 1992 Democratic Convention showcased the biography and vision of Bill Clinton, with the handsome Al Gore as his New Democrat sidekick. It was, Newsweek reported, “one long infomercial spread over four evenings of free prime television time, and Bill Clinton flung himself at it as hungrily as a starving man at a banquet table.” And in the carefully choreographed program, with its audience-tested references to “working families” and “empowerment” instead of poverty or inequality, the Democrats “signaled [their] determination to win back the voters who have deserted them over the past 20 years.”26

  For the first time, the national polls put Clinton in first place, ahead of Bush and Perot. Afterward, the Clintons and Gores went on a multistate bus tour that extended their post-convention bump in the polls. They rolled through the heartland, holding euphoric rallies in front of thousands as the campaign theme song played again and again: “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow/don’t stop, it’ll be here soon … don’t you look back.” Things were looking up.

  But Clinton still had image problems. People didn’t like him or trust him. He had a 15 percent approval rating. The campaign ran focus groups to see what the problem was. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, one woman put it this way: “Look, if you asked Bill Clinton what his favorite color is, he’d tell you ‘plaid.’” On top of that, James Carville mused, “we were not the insurgent candidate in an insurgent year. With Perot in the race, it was going to be hard to convince people that we were the ones with new ideas.”27

  The Elephants in the Room

  George Bush had problems, too. First, the president had an unexpected primary challenge from conservative Patrick Buchanan. An aide to Nixon and Reagan who had become one of the most articulate defenders of “family values” and conservative ideology as a speechwriter and pundit, Buchanan had a formidable intellect and an ability to tap into the ardent conservative base. Bush had been Reagan’s vice president, but conservative true believers still perceived him as a moderate. “He is constantly pandering to a conservative constituency, hoping to ward if off by throwing a bone or two,” observed one columnist, but it never seemed authentic. In contrast, Buchanan was all red meat. He spoke of himself as a “paleoconservative” and styled his crusade as a movement of “peasants with pitchforks.” He was isolationist, anti-immigrant, and anti-tax. “We love the old republic,” Buchanan trumpeted, “and when we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers.”28

  In the New Hampshire primary, Bush won, but Buchanan was competitive enough to make the media pay attention. The 24-hour news cycle played up the fact that the incumbent president might have weak support within his own party. Suddenly, a boring GOP primary season was getting newsworthy. So the Bush campaign fought back. The next big fight was in Michigan, and the Bush spin machine fed stories to the media about Buchanan owning a foreign car—a deadly sin in the Moto
r City. Bush trounced Buchanan in Michigan, and that was the end of the Buchanan campaign’s chances.29

  However, it wasn’t the end of Buchanan. He gave a speech at the Republican Convention in August that hard-right conservatives applauded, but that alarmed nearly everyone else. He tore into both Hillary and Bill Clinton for promoting an agenda that was dangerously liberal, and he played on the culture-war anxieties that had been percolating through Republican rhetoric in the 1988 race. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” he cried from the convention podium. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.”30

  Other speakers at the GOP convention sounded similar themes. Yet they were playing to the base, not to the general voter. This was a fatal mistake in an era when political conventions had ceased to be business meetings and become televised sales pitches. The economy still struggled, and the Republicans seemed to be all about waging culture wars. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, a once and future presidential candidate, observed that after the Democratic Convention, “the Democrats turned Madison Square Garden into a giant repair shop, where old broken-down liberals became shiny new moderates.”31 In contrast, the Houston gathering of the Republican Party showcased the ugly underbelly of conservative politics, replacing Reagan’s message of hope and uplift with adversarial and bitter themes. “George Bush, Prisoner of the Crazies,” ran one post-convention op-ed headline.32

  The divisive Houston convention came on the heels of a campaign that, even beyond the Buchanan challenge, seemed deeply uninspired. Running as an incumbent has advantages and disadvantages. For George Bush in 1992, it was a disadvantage. The modern presidency is a bubble. Every minute of a president’s day is scheduled. Protocol dictates what can be said, and when the president can say it. People around the president may be reluctant to be fully honest. White House aides can’t work directly on campaign business, meaning that a wholly separate campaign operation needs to be launched, and the president has to keep tabs on both. On top of it all, the president has to hold down a full-time job, and a time-consuming one at that.

  While Bill Clinton was a born campaigner and Ross Perot delighted in the spotlight, George Bush deeply disliked having campaign business pull him away from doing the job of governing. On top of that, he had been in the White House bubble for twelve years. It was easy for him to seem out of touch. The two sets of Bush staff people—White House and campaign—argued more often than they agreed. Throughout the primary season and into the summer, they fought over message, over scheduling, over tactics. Bush let it happen. “The White House now is like Noah’s Ark without Noah,” chortled one Clinton advisor. “They’ve got two of everything except a leader.”33 The warring factions of the Bush campaign could not seem to get their footing in a race where the Cold War was no longer the big issue, and where the economy mattered rather than foreign policy, and where the media rules had changed.

  But perhaps more than anything else, being the incumbent was George Bush’s great disadvantage because 1992 was the year when change was topmost on voters’ minds. Four decades of being let down by Washington, and three-plus decades of feeling squeezed by the economy and threatened by increasing crime, had left many voters—particularly the critical one-third that identified neither as Democrat nor as Republican—looking for a white knight.

  Ross Perot became the focus of this populist energy for all the spring and early summer of 1992. The Texas businessman continued his Larry King appearances and carefully stage-managed press conferences. Thousands of people gave their signatures to petitions to get Perot on the November ballot. Former Johnson White House press secretary Bill Moyers remarked with some amazement, “the Perot phenomenon is certainly for real, and it’s sustained.”34

  In mid-May, the first national poll came out that put Perot ahead of both Bush and Clinton in the presidential race. This turned him from TV star to serious candidate. He stunned both Democrats and Republicans by hiring two of their own to run his campaign. One of them, Hamilton Jordan, had worked for Jimmy Carter. The other, Ed Rollins, had been campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign.

  Perot’s campaign was remarkable on many levels, but perhaps the most important was that it was the beginning of a new phenomenon in politics: the self-financed candidate. Campaigns were so expensive, and the ability of a candidate to campaign using their own money was a huge advantage. They didn’t have to spend all that time fundraising. And they could pitch themselves to voters as an outsider candidate—beholden to no one.

  That’s what Perot did. Both the Bush and Clinton teams thought that Perot’s money would turn off middle-class voters. It didn’t. CNN analyst William Schneider noted in amazement that June: “The fact that Perot is self-made, that he did it himself, is a source of admiration for most people and in fact they treat it as a virtue. They say, at least he won’t be bought and paid for…. To an awful lot of voters, right now, the fact that he’s an extraordinarily wealthy man is seen as an advantage.”35

  Clinton’s people thought Perot was a quack, but took his effort quite seriously. On the other hand, Bush’s friends and advisors from Texas had known Perot for a long time, and they firmly believed he was a crackpot. They thus did little to acknowledge his candidacy, figuring he would blow himself up at some point. The Republicans had Pat Buchanan to battle; Perot seemed like an unimportant sideshow. So they let his momentum go unchecked throughout the spring.36

  Only one thing could stop Perot’s surge: the candidate himself. As soon as Rollins and Jordan joined the team in late spring, they realized they had signed up for a campaign like none they’d ever experienced. Rollins thought he had the perfect campaign playbook in Reagan 84, and urged the Perot team to follow the lock-step communications plan that had brought Republicans such a huge victory. “It may have been perfect,” another Perot staffer chided Rollins, “but you had a robot candidate.” In contrast, Perot willfully resisted staying on script. He had gotten to the top of the polls by being himself, the straight talker, the antithesis of slick. As Clinton’s poll numbers began to climb before the Democratic Convention, Perot stubbornly resisted launching a major television ad campaign to remind voters that he, Perot, was the real candidate of change. Perot didn’t think he needed these kinds of expensive tactics, even though he could afford them. “You’re a Rolls-Royce,” he spat to one advisor. “All I need is a Volkswagen.” Carolyn Cepaitis, a Perot organizer in Michigan, agreed. “The commercialism is unnecessary, and ineffective. A lot of people don’t trust it anymore.… We’d much rather deal with the real person.”37

  At the very same time, Perot’s honeymoon with the press began to end. When he was not a serious candidate, merely a talking head on Larry King Live, the regular media didn’t look at Perot very closely. When he started to lead the polls and build a real campaign organization, reporters started digging deeper. They started asking tougher questions, seeking more details of his policy positions, and Perot couldn’t provide satisfying answers. Their digging unveiled much of the kookiness Bush’s Texas hands had seen for years. Perot appeared to have many of the same paranoid and authoritarian qualities that had felled Richard Nixon: keeping lists of enemies, paying private investigators to spy on his family and close associates. Former employees called him a “dictator.”38

  One day after the end of the Democratic Convention, the pressure cooker exploded. Over four days, Perot dropped ten points in the polls. He had been unable to persuade any heavy hitters to join on as his vice presidential nominee. He fired Rollins on 15 July. The next day, he abruptly announced he was dropping out of the race altogether. Why? His work was done, Perot said; he had gotten the political system to pay attention to his message of change. With a Democratic revival, Perot said, it was all but certain that his continued presence in the race would c
reate a deadlocked result in November, and he didn’t want to subject the American people to such chaos. It was a terrible blow to the many who had worked on the Perot movement. “I can’t believe it,” lamented one Florida woman. “I keep wanting to say it’s a Republican tactic, but of course it’s not. I am mortified. I am hurt.” Said another Florida supporter in disgust, “he’s a little spoiled billionaire, and he didn’t have enough guts to stay in the race.” “Ross Perot’s supporters deserved better than Ross Perot,” concluded one editorial.39

  At first, the Bush campaign thought Perot’s dropping out was a huge boon to their cause. It wasn’t. People who supported Perot were the people who wanted change. With Perot gone, they mostly switched over to the other “change” candidate: Bill Clinton.

  “For People, For a Change”

  The buoyant Democratic Convention and Perot’s retreat had left the Clinton team energized but worried. They would need even more message discipline and organization in the general campaign. They knew that Americans still had deep reservations about Bill Clinton, and that much of the campaign momentum came from voters’ greater disillusionment with George Bush. The Clinton people also knew they were going up against some formidable campaign managers, with three White House victories under their belts. By summer, Bush had persuaded former secretary of state James Baker to come in and run his campaign, imposing organization and tamping down the infighting between the campaign and the White House. The GOP establishment started to mobilize money and support. The president was going to be a formidable competitor.