the inevitable clinton victory
BARNES, FRED
The Inevitable Clinton Victory By Fred Barnes Was President Clinton's defeat of Bob Dole inevitable? Absolutely. It's the one thing that at least some Dole aides and nearly everyone advising the...
...He hit the economic cycle right, avoiding a recession in his first four years...
...The president's men give Clinton a large chunk of the credit for this...
...Not Jack Kemp...
...Not so...
...Yet he won...
...It looked like something [more] might be coming out of the special prosecutor's office," he says...
...Clinton made sure that wasn't possible by repositioning himself to the right...
...The president doesn't have to have been responsible for creating either peace or prosperity...
...And he lacked national-hero status or towering charisma...
...He was beyond the help of strategists and consultants...
...The administration was "untainted" by a "major" scandal...
...Something more than a scandal is required to trump their experience: No president in the 20th century failed to win reelection because of a scandal...
...Absent a recession, George Bush would have won reelection in 1992...
...In any case, the fact that he won despite flaws underscores the fact that peace and prosperity are controlling...
...It's the one thing that at least some Dole aides and nearly everyone advising the president agreed on by the end of the presidential campaign...
...Bill Bennett...
...This was an incumbent president seeking reelection with a united party at a time of prosperity at home when there was no calamity abroad comparable to the hostage crisis and when the nation was relatively tranquil at home," he says...
...The Lichtman formula is based on thirteen keys...
...Clinton didn't have much else...
...Richard Nixon was reelected with 61 percent in 1972...
...Those merely have to exist on his watch...
...Lamar Alexander...
...He's capable, but hardly the charismatic figure needed...
...And his challenger was not charismatic or a national hero...
...Okay, Ronald Reagan might have beaten Clinton, but he wasn't available...
...This is precisely what congressional Democrats failed to do in 1994, which explains why they lost the House and Senate despite peace and prosperity...
...He was the incumbent...
...Lichtman said his confidence was slightly shaken when the McDougals, Clinton's business associates, were convicted last summer...
...The economy didn't fall into a recession during election year...
...Long-term economic growth was better than the average growth for the previous two presidential terms...
...No one ever has...
...Or if the public had come to believe Clinton was way, way out of whack with them on matters of policy and ideology, Dole might have had a shot...
...Nor was there an issue that might have catapulted Dole or another Republican challenger over Clinton...
...When five or fewer are negative, the incumbent party wins...
...But the point is, the verdict of a majority of voters is based on what they've experienced...
...In the network exit poll on Election Day, a majority said the national economy is in good shape...
...Not really...
...It's that simple...
...Harry Truman won narrowly in 1948, proving that peace and prosperity matter more than personal popularity and charisma (Truman had neither) when an incumbent seeks reelection...
...They care about Clinton's character...
...Allan J. Lichtman of American University has developed a formula, based partly on peace and prosperity, for predicting whether an incumbent party wins reelection to the White House...
...Indeed, both now figure a Clinton win had been inevitable for months...
...That happens in bad economic times...
...He'd managed no foreign-policy success...
...But neither it nor other social issues would have made up the 8-point deficit by which Dole lost...
...Absent a recession and a national catastrophe (the Iran hostage crisis), Jimmy Carter would have triumphed over Ronald Reagan in 1980...
...So forget about Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Indo-gate, etc...
...So the eight positive keys controlled: Clinton faced no primary contest...
...More often than not, Clinton doesn't appear presidential...
...Business confidence is also up...
...He had no foreign-policy catastrophe...
...Had White House aides or the Clintons been indicted, that would have been major...
...Absent Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson wouldn't have dropped out in 1968...
...The bottom line is, in retrospect, this was not a winnable race," John Buckley, communications director of the Dole campaign, told the Washington Post...
...And while the Clinton scandals were small, they were numerous...
...For most of the campaign, Dole aides thought a Clinton win was anything but inevitable...
...His administration has been schizophrenic...
...Prof...
...For the first time in five years, more Americans felt the country was headed in the right direction than felt the opposite...
...They just care more about peace and prosperity...
...We all should have known this from the start...
...There was no sustained social unrest...
...Would a better-run campaign than Dole's have had a chance...
...That essentially did it for us," a Clinton adviser says...
...The list of presidents who've won reelection without both peace and prosperity has no names on it...
...He'd have split the GOP and might have turned out to be poor campaigner...
...Clinton had achieved no major policy changes...
...After a dark period, real people became hopeful...
...On top of peace and prosperity, Clinton presided over a period when national optimism broke out...
...After succeeding John Kennedy, Johnson got 61 percent in his bid for a full presidential term in 1964...
...There was serious third-party competition...
...We now know his weaknesses as a national candidate...
...Earlier emphasis on character might also have been smart, but most people knew about Clinton already...
...If voters ousted a president who was identified with good times and didn't seem bent on triggering bad times, that would hardly be a victory for stability or continuity...
...No one believed him...
...All this meant there was nothing Dole could do to win the election...
...Lichtman has critics on this one, but I agree that for whatever reasons the Clinton scandals didn't reach "major" proportions...
...Incumbent presidents just don't lose historically under those conditions...
...In truth, this was the best campaign Dole was capable of mustering...
...I don't think so...
...Is this unfair...
...In a period of peace and prosperity—such as now—an incumbent president is all but certain to be reelected...
...Dwight Eisenhower won with 56 percent in 1956...
...Reagan got 59 percent of the vote in 1984...
...But Dole couldn't produce anything like that...
...Reluctant candidates never make good candidates...
...Colin Powell...
...And if Dole couldn't beat Clinton, who could...
...Had Dole pounded the issue of partial-birth abortion, that would have helped among Catholic voters, who rejected Dole massively...
...Dole's answer was to declare himself the most optimistic man in America...
...But look at the roster of those who ran for a second term when both prevailed...
...If Ross Perot hadn't run, Clinton undoubtedly would have topped 50 percent...
...There's an argument that since Clinton got less than 50 percent of the vote, he was beatable...
...Clinton was lucky, for sure...
...Nothing was more important than this because nothing poisons an administration like a recession...
...Dole could have done better in touting his tax cuts, but there's no history of proposed tax reductions transforming a race in time of prosperity...
...Nothing much changed from early spring on...
...A large number of Americans believed their personal financial situation had improved since 1992...
...But some of them have come around...
...Absent the Korean War, Harry Truman probably would have run again in 1952...
...Come on...
...Clinton had exactly five negatives: His party, shellacked in 1994, lacked a mandate...
...He's widely distrusted...
...Richard Cheney...
...Fine-tuning his campaign wasn't enough...
...His personal life is not admirable...
...The outcome was out of his hands...
...His debate performances, while hardly masterful, were far better than anything he'd done in the primaries...
...He'd cleverly moved to the right, ambushed congressional Republicans in last winter's budget battle, embraced conservative social values, and emerged as a poised ceremonial leader in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing...
...He concluded a year ago that Clinton's reelection was inevitable and indeed wrote that in his book, The Keys to the White House...
...Conservatives were surprised by this—I was—because they aren't especially optimistic at the moment...
...When nothing did, the inevitability of Clinton's reelection was restored...
...True, if an earth-shattering event, some calamity for America, had occurred, Clinton would have been vulnerable...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 10
