The Moment Clinton Won
So, we had Clinton in June of 1992– about to put the final death knell in the Democratic Party. (We could argue that he did that anyway, but never mind…). Third place. 9 electoral votes. Negatives up the yahoo.
How did Clinton get himself out of this morass?
He appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show, with a loud tie, sunglasses, playing a saxophone.
Today, everyone appears on these shows — Bob Dole spurred the entire process forward in 1996 by basically announcing his presidential run on Letterman. But back then? It just seemed undignified to Pull a Nixon.
Here was a stab for something more gut-level than any policy. See: the cool man generally wins the presidential election… Eisenhower is cooler than Stevenson, Kennedy is cooler than Nixon, Reagan is cooler than Carter and Mondale… the only reason Bush got in was by default: nobody is dorkier than Dukakis!
From there, he kept the momentum going with a well-planned vice-presidential announcement. Youth and vigor! … If Al Gore can be called “vigor”.
Followed up by a well-scripted convention. Which, theoretically, shouldn’t mean anything, except for the biggie:
Ross Perot jumped out of the race and endorsed Clinton.
Damned it all: I think that pretty much clinched the election!
Clinton then filled the post-convention lag with a bus-trip. Carville didn’t like this idea, thinking it was too “Old DNC”, “the boys of the bus” of the long-ago. But, my guess is Carville’s rejection of the idea masks why it worked: connect with the blue-collar.
After that, it was pretty much a case of holding on tight.
On the other side: when did Bush lose?
It probably started when he vomitted on the Japanese prime minister’s lap — perhaps unfairly putting a dent in his perceived strength (foreign policy). It kicked into full gear when Dan Quayle took a brave stand against Murphy Brown — the yen to the yang of Clinton’s Arsenio appearance — the attack which ensured that the Bushes were going to be fighting the culture war even if they didn’t terribly want to… hitting its fevered pitch at his speech at the convention — coming on like an Avenging Angel.
From there it was just a matter of pretending to be Harry Truman, riding a train through the midwest. A lot of presidential candidates compare themselves to Truman, evoking the 1948 comeback upset he pulled over Dewey. George Bush. Hubert Humphrey. Bob Dole. Gerald Ford. A veritable posse of winners. Watch for Bush or Kerry to portray themselves as Truman: it’s a sure-fire sign.
February 12th, 2005 at 11:21 am
Zell Miller’s appearance at the Thursday night Republican National Convention, 2004, was part of an overall presentation designed to send a message…not to the nation, but to a select group of Bush/Cheney insiders. We are in control!
The night focused on Cheney, ex-Halliburton, CEO…and therefore key player in America’s Military Industrialist Complex, which, as you surely recall was behind Iran-Contra and the CIA’s drugs for weapons to fight unauthorized private wars in Central America. Before that, it was Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown and Root that built the Navy base and Army Depot in Corpus Christi with the help, not of Republican leadership, but Democrat LBJ, to supply the Vietnam War. It was in Corpus Christi that LBJ’s Bell Hellicopters were repaired. The old Hueys are now sold to Colombia to help them in the supposed drug eradication program. The Iran-Contra debacle and the testimony of Richard Taus, Cele Castillo, Gary Webb and Catherine Austin Fitts, has shown us hour the Complex…now deeply tied to organized crime in Texas AND Georgia….wants to have it both ways.
Also appearing that night with Cheney and Miller was Corpus Christi, Bishop Rene Gracida, a former Navy flier. Jack Kemp former Secretary of HUD was there, front and center, though not part of the program. Kemp’s Undersecretary at HUD, Catherine Austin Fitts, was locked in a qui tam lawsuit which indicated that during Iran-Contra there was a federally back program of narco-dollar laundering through HUD mortgages. Who were the judges in her case sitting on the evidence from 1996 to 2000…just prior to the last election? Two men…one who worked for Clinton’s chief legal counsel and the other to the William Casey’s CIA office during Iran-Contra.
Zell Miller may have asked that Confederate flag be pulled off the Georgia state capital, but the CIA wasn’t selling drugs in America’s inner city to fund the contras either…was it? In a word: YES!
Oliver North’s army was being trained at a 700,000 acre base on land owned by Houston developer Walter Mischer and Coca-Cola Inc. in Belize. The CEO of Coke is an elder at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta and Zell Miller has a hall named after him at the Georgia Miliatary Institute in the old Georgia Antebellium ccapital. See Brewton’s THE MAFIA, CIA and GEORGE BUSH for the connection that both Taus and Fitts made to both Iran Contra and the S&L scandal. It was through the S&L scandal that the money floated freely.
William H. Carr