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DESPERATION


"It's not good..."

Mary Matalin plopped down next to the President and handed him over a stack of papers mostly compiled of polls the campaign had run the night before. The results were devastating - if the election were held that day, it's likely Bush would have lost in a fifty-state landslide. His opponent Bill Clinton, a once little known governor from a little known state, had surged 30 points overnight after accepting the Democratic Nomination.

"These numbers ... they'll go down. This bump won't last. We'll be fine - we'll be fine when we have our own convention," the President said in a desperate, forced reassurance. It was clear he, nor the campaign, believed any of it, but what else could be said ... what else could be done? President Bush, who a year ago had an approval rating above 80%, now found himself staring down the stark possibility of not only losing, but losing in a lopsided fashion rarely reserved for incumbents.

Bush's hope was that he could actually do what he tried to convey to his staff - namely rebuild his campaign at the convention and take down a popular, charismatic governor who was soundly beating him across the board. But even then, Bush knew it would take a stroke of luck to defeat Clinton. Grit and determination worked in movies, but rarely in real life. This wasn't solely about convincing the American people Clinton was an untested governor of a small state - a draft dodger whose foreign policy experience could be summed up by a collection of world atlases he had lying around his office in Little Rock. Americans knew that and they didn't care. Something else was going to have to happen for Bush to fight back and it wasn't just going to be a convention.

A few years prior to the campaign, long before Lee Atwater became sick and eventually died, he confided in many White House staffers that the one candidate they should fear was Bill Clinton. No one took him too seriously because, after all, Clinton's debut at the 1988 Democratic Convention was as flat as a day old Coke. This election was also going to be about foreign policy and there, the White House often joked, Clinton was a typical Democratic lightweight and all the southern charm in the world wasn't going to change that.

This was the Bush campaign's first mistake - assuming the election would be about foreign policy ... Iraq and the fall of the Berlin Wall. If Atwater had been alive by the time the President began his reelection campaign, he would have told Bush that the economy would creep its way into the political discourse and that the campaign would certainly be at a disadvantage running against a candidate like Clinton. Yes, foreign policy was the President's strength, but with an impending recession - would it matter?

Clinton, though, was fiery. He wasn't a typical Democrat. He spoke of a new way - a Third Way of politics. It wasn't just talk, either, as his policies were defined by centrism - from his proposal to reform welfare, to his support of the death penalty. Clinton was not Mike Dukakis, who the Bush campaign could paint as soft on crime and scare middle of the road voters from Middle America into shifting their support.

Sure, there were stories about Clinton and the possibility of infidelity and a false report earlier in the primary season that someone close to the Governor was ready to go public with allegations of an affair. But campaigns are always filled with those uncertain, unproven stories that float around the inner-circles and amount to very little. The story never stuck and the allegations just remained rumors for months.

It didn't hurt Clinton's standing and the mainstream media did little to report on it, no matter how many calls the Bush campaign placed and how much digging they found themselves doing.

The polls Mary Matalin presented the President were vomit-inducing for any campaign staffer. Americans didn't trust George H.W. Bush, especially after he went back on his own tax pledge from four years prior. Worse, they trusted Bill Clinton. Clinton wasn't bogged down by scandal or broken promises. The whisper campaigns heard on the campaign trail did little to damage his overall support and in the head-to-head, he had opened up nearly a thirty-point lead - which seemed downright inconceivable to the staffers as they pored over the polling data.

Clinton had been aided by a quick primary that saw him surge to a surprising victory in New Hampshire over Paul Tsongas and easier than expected wins over Jerry Brown in later states. Though Brown tried to flank himself to Clinton's left, in the end, the momentum Clinton gained out of his New Hampshire victory was too much for Brown to overcome and, after a disappointing finish in the Connecticut primary, Brown eventually dropped out well before his California firewall.

That allowed Clinton the opportunity to campaign for the general election long before most expected when the primary season kicked off in January. Without an opponent from the left, Clinton could shore up his support in the middle and even though Ross Perot and the President remained ahead of him in the polls, the margins narrowed to the point where most in the media considered any lead insignificant.

By the time the Democrats met in New York, and Clinton had asked Tennessee Senator Al Gore to run with him, the Governor had already opened up a considerably strong lead, and it only ballooned after the convention - especially when independent candidate Ross Perot announced he was ending his campaign. That's where Mary Matalin and the Bush Team found themselves. What was once a race within striking distance, the President was now on the verge of being lapped by his opponent.

It wasn't good and deep down, even President Bush knew it.
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