February 18, 1992: The New Hampshire Primary is held. President George H.W. Bush wins on the Republican side. On the Democratic side, the winner is former Senator Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts.
But, in each case, you'd never know it from what the media said that night, and thereafter. For once, the old saying, "Nobody remembers who came in second place" was put aside.
George Herbert Walker Bush was running for a 2nd term as President. Things weren't going so well: He had a 91 percent approval rating in April 1991, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. As a result, many of the would-be Democratic Party candidates to defeat chickened out of the chance to do so.
Governor Mario Cuomo of New York began the race as the front-runner, but did not enter. He had a convenient excuse: The deadline for filing for the New Hampshire Primary, the first in the nation, came on the same day as the deadline for getting the State budget passed. He had a plane on the ground in Albany, the State capital, ready to fly him to Concord, also a State capital, so he could properly file the papers to be a candidate. The plane never left the ground, nor did his campaign.
Former President Jimmy Carter was eligible to return to office, but he would have been too easy a target. So would his Vice President, and the Party's 1984 Presidential nominee, Walter Mondale. So would former Governor of Massachusetts, and the Party's 1988 Presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis. None of them ran.
Civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson and former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, both candidates in 1984 and 1988, were damaged goods. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, American politics' leading legacy figure, was even more so as calendar year 1991 wound down. Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the 1988 Vice Presidential nominee, and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, refused to run.
Those who were running didn't seem all that interesting. Former Governor Jerry Brown of California appeared to have had his chance in 1976, and his brand of liberalism, which led to Tonight Show host Johnny Carson nicknaming him "Governor Moonbeam," had long since been passed by.
Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a former Governor who had lost a leg fighting in Vietnam, seemed to have everything going for him -- except money and a First Lady. (He was between marriages.) Governor Doug Wilder of Virginia was the 1st black man elected Governor of a Southern State, but he didn't have much campaign money, either. He ended up being the first candidate who got in to drop out.
Tsongas didn't have much experience, didn't have much hair, had a speech impediment, and his ethnicity and regional origin reminded too many people of Dukakis. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was a "prairie populist" in the mold of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern and Mondale, and had the advantage of a stranglehold on the Iowa Caucus, which also meant that if he didn't do well in the New Hampshire Primary, it wouldn't be so bad. This would also free the other candidates from having to spend any money in Iowa -- but it made New Hampshire so much more important for them.
Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas seemed to excite voters: He was a good-looking guy, a Rhodes scholar, and despite having served 12 years as Governor, he was still young: At 45, he stood to become the 1st person of the Baby Boom generation to become President.
But there were drawbacks. He had not served in the Vietnam War, and while his means of avoiding service was legal, it seemed shifty. He badly mishandled the question of whether he'd ever used marijuana. And he had a reputation as a womanizer: In the month before the Primary, a singer named Gennifer Flowers told the media that she had a 12-year affair with him.
On January 26, CBS followed its broadcast of Super Bowl XXVI with an installment of their "newsmagazine" show 60 Minutes, with Steve Krofft interviewing Clinton and his wife, Hillary, a lawyer who'd worked for women's and children's rights.
Bill admitted, "I have caused pain in my marriage," but did not elaborate. Hillary responded to the question of Bill's infidelities by angrily saying, "You know, I'm not some little woman, sitting here, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette!"
Some people liked that reference to country legend Wynette and her song "Stand By Your Man," but many didn't. The interview seemed to help him, but it hurt her image for the long term: It made her look like an angry woman who is unlikable and stands by a man she clearly doesn't love, to gain power by any means possible.
And Bush had problems, too: The economy had fallen into a recession in mid-1990, and the war didn't pull the country out of it. The economy got worse through 1991, and by the dawn of 1992, things had bottomed out. Many people were angry with Bush for the recession, angry with him for breaking his promise not to raise taxes, and angry with him for (from their perspective) not being conservative enough.
And so many Republicans got behind the insurgent campaign of Patrick J. Buchanan. He had been a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and White House Communications Director for President Ronald Reagan. It should be noted that he was never investigated for any of the crimes committed in those Administrations.
In between serving in the Ford and Reagan Administrations, he had a nationally-syndicated newspaper column, pushing his archconservative views, which struck some people as racist and anti-Semitic. He had also been an original panelist on the NBC weekly political program The McLaughlin Group, hosted by John McLaughlin, who had also been one of Nixon's speechwriters. Since the end of the Reagan Administration, Buchanan had resumed his column, and had co-hosted the politically-themed talk show Crossfire on CNN, in each case being as far to the right as a political pundit could safely be at the time.
When the votes were tallied on February 18, Bush won on the Republican side, but not by as much as he wanted: He got 92,271 votes, for 53.2 percent. Buchanan got 65,106, for 37.5 percent. Scattered other candidates got 3,779, for 2.3 percent.
No one seriously thought that Buchanan was going to take the nomination from Bush. But it now appeared that Bush's Party was not united behind him, and that he was going to have to make some concessions to get the "Buchanan Brigades" to back him in November.
On the Democratic side, Tsongas got 55,663 votes; Clinton, 41,540; Kerrey, 18,504; Harkin, 17,063; Brown, 13,659. Although he'd never entered the race, Cuomo got 6,577 as a write-in candidate. Although he had already dropped out, Wilder got 103. Percentage-wise, that was: Tsongas, 33.2; Clinton, 24.8; Kerrey, 11.1; Harkin, 10.2; Brown, 8.1; Cuomo, 3.9; Wilder, 0.06.
Among the more interesting features was the remaining part of the Democratic vote. It included some Republican crossovers. Bush got 1,433, for 0.86 percent; Buchanan, 1,248, for 0.74 percent. Tom Laughlin, the actor and civil rights activist who was the brains, such as they were, behind the Billy Jack movies, got 3,251 votes, for 1.94 percent. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader got 3,054 votes, for 1.82 percent, foreshadowing the role he would play in the election of 2000.
Former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who nearly won this Primary in 1968, and got 1 percent of the national general-election vote in 1976, apparently hadn't realized he wasn't famous anymore, but was still famous enough in New Hampshire to get 211 people to vote for him in this Democratic Primary. Perennial candidate and wacko conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche got 115 votes.
So not only had Buchanan come out of the New Hampshire Primary looking better than Bush, who actually won it; but Clinton came out of it looking stronger than Tsongas. He had taken some of the worst attacks that any Primary candidate had ever faced, and had finished 2nd behind a candidate with an enormous geographic advantage. He began calling himself "The Comeback Kid."
Both Bill Clinton and Pat Buchanan -- as far apart on the American political spectrum as two people could be at that point -- could both legitimately claim that finishing in second place had made them the "first winner."
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February 18, 1992 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 5 games played in the NBA:
* The New York Knicks beat the Sacramento Kings, 110-97 at Madison Square Garden. Patrick Ewing scored 34 points.
* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Dallas Mavericks, 94-90 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.
* The Detroit Pistons beat the Orlando Magic, 117-95 at The Palace in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills, Michigan.
* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 128-116 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.
* And the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Phoenix Suns, 129-116 at the Portland Memorial Coliseum. Kevin Johnson scored 40 points in defeat for the Suns.
There were 4 games in the NHL:
* The New Jersey Devils beat the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-3 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. Viacheslav Fetisov scored the winning goal with 3: 18 left in overtime.
* The Quebec Nordiques beat the Minnesota North Stars, 4-0 at the Colisée de Québec.
* The Quebec Nordiques beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 7-1 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.
* And the Washington Capitals beat the San Jose Sharks, 4-2 at the Cow Palace outside San Francisco in Daly City, California.
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