November 17, 1993: The North American Free Trade Agreement

President Bill Clinton signs NAFTA into law. Behind him, left to right:

Vice President Al Gore, House Minority Leader Bob Michel,

House Speaker Tom Foley.

November 17, 1993: The North American Free Trade Agreement is ratified by the U.S. House of Representatives. Its ratification by the U.S. Senate was a foregone conclusion, and President Bill Clinton had already indicated that he would sign it. It took effect on January 1, 1994.

NAFTA had been negotiated by his predecessor, George H.W. Bush; Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada; and President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico. But, by the time it became law, Bush and Mulroney were already out of office.

Oddly, both of America's major parties were split on the issue. Some Democrats opposed it because they thought it was anti-union. Some Republicans opposed it because it wasn't protectionist and they thought it affected American sovereignty.

Three living former Presidents lobbied for it: Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both still alive and in active public life, if not active politics, also supported it, but took no action. Carter was a Democrat, the rest were Republicans.

Both parties' House leaders, Tom Foley of Washington and Bob Michel of Illinois, wanted it. So did both parties' Senate leaders, George Mitchell of Maine and Bob Dole of Kansas. This was significant, because Dole was considered the front-runner to be the next Republican nominee for President. Indeed, he was nominated, and so free trade was hardly an issue in the 1996 election.

Not that Ross Perot, the independent candidate from 1992 who got 19 percent of the popular vote, didn't try. He was opposed to it, and used his regular appearances on CNN's Live with Larry King to talk about how bad he thought it would be. With Clinton's permission, Vice President Al Gore challenged to Perot to a debate on the issue, on King's show. The consensus was that this was a huge mistake: Gore was often mocked as "stiff," while Perot would practically be on his home turf.

It was a mismatch -- the other way. Knowing that Perot was famous for bringing charts with graphs on them, Gore brought his own, and explained his cause very well. Perot was caught off-guard, realizing that someone knew this issue better than he did, and got, to use a word Gore would later use on Bush's son, snippy. Public opinion began to turn in favor of the agreement.

NAFTA created millions of jobs, so, like welfare reform, it worked very well while the economy was good. But, also like welfare reform, it worked very poorly when the economy has been bad.

In 2018, the countries involved reached an agreement to replace NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), and ratified it 2 years later, so that it took effect on July 1, 2020, replacing NAFTA. The new law involved only small changes. My guess is, Donald Trump wanted to pander to American workers and claim a law he had nothing to do with, but still listed America first.

*

November 17, 1993 was a Wednesday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. There were 7 games in the NBA that night:

* The New York Knicks lost to the San Antonio Spurs, 95-90 at the Alamodome in San Antonio.

* The New Jersey Nets lost to the Boston Celtics, 105-100 at the Boston Garden.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 92-90 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Washington Bullets beat the Milwaukee Bucks, 117-104 at the USAir Arena (formerly the Capital Centre) in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland. Don McLean of the Bullets led all scorers on the night with 38 points.

* The Charlotte Hornets beat the Sacramento Kings, 130-113 at the Charlotte Coliseum.

* The Utah Jazz beat the Miami Heat, 115-111 at the Miami Arena.

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Orlando Magic, 98-92 at The Palace in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills, Michigan.

And there were 7 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Islanders beat the Ottawa Senators, 8-1 at the Ottawa Civic Center (now TD Place Arena).

* The New Jersey Devils beat the Buffalo Sabres, 4-0 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Edmonton Oilers, 3-1 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Boston Bruins beat their New England neighbors, the Hartford Whalers, 4-2 at the Hartford Civic Center (now the PeoplesBank Arena).

* The Winnipeg Jets beat the Detroit Red Wings, 2-1 at the Winnipeg Arena.

* The Dallas Stars beat the Tampa Bay Lightning, 4-3 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, 4-3 at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim (now the Honda Center).

* And the New York Rangers, the Calgary Flames, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Florida Panthers, the Los Angeles Kings, the Philadelphia Flyers, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Quebec Nordiques, the St. Louis Blues, the San Jose Sharks, the Vancouver Canucks and the Washington Capitals were not scheduled.

November 5, 1996: President Bill Clinton Is Re-Elected

November 5, 1996: President Bill Clinton is re-elected, winning 379 Electoral Votes to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's 159. Clinton wins 49.2 percent of the popular vote, while Dole wins 40.7, and Reform Party candidate Ross Perot wins 8.4 percent but no Electoral Votes.

Clinton went over the necessary 270 Electoral Votes with the States that closed at 9:00 PM, Eastern Time.

After the failure of his health care initiative in 1994, Clinton saw his Democratic Party battered in the midterm elections, with the Republicans taking both houses of Congress. Dole, from Russell, Kansas -- always mentioning his hometown, not just his State -- had first been elected to Congress in 1960, and to the U.S. Senate in 1968. He was nominated for Vice President under Gerald Ford in 1976. He ran for President in 1980, but didn't get far. He became Senate Majority Leader after the election of 1984, but the Democrats regained the Senate in 1986, making him the Minority Leader.

He ran for President again in 1988, and finished 2nd in delegates to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was elected. In 1992, Clinton beat Bush to become President-elect. The next morning, mere hours after Clinton clinched victory in a 3-man race in which Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote (but no Electoral Votes), Dole pointed out, "57 percent of Americans did not vote for Bill Clinton, and I intend to represent that majority on the floor of the U.S. Senate. If Bill Clinton has a mandate, then so do I."

Clinton was now 1-0 in Presidential elections. Dole was 0-2, 0-3 if you count 1976. Clinton got just under 45 million votes for President. Dole got 2.3 million votes in the 1988 Republican Primaries. Dole himself had just been re-elected to the Senate in 1992, with 244,000 votes. And he then represented a caucus of 43 Senators. He was in no position to claim any majority, especially against a man who had just gotten almost 45 million votes. The 57 percent of American voters who chose someone other than Clinton? As far as I know, not one of them voted for Bob Dole for President, not even as a write-in candidate.

But the '94 election restored Dole to the post of Majority Leader. And Newt Gingrich, a Pennsylvania native who moved to Georgia to teach at a college, and was first elected to Congress in 1978 and used fiery rhetoric to get into the Republican Party's leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1989, became the Speaker of the House.

Dole was considered mean, a reputation he got in his 1976 Vice Presidential debate with Walter Mondale, and deepened in his 1988 Presidential run. But, politically speaking, he was still a center-right candidate, willing to compromise for the greater good of the country. Gingrich was not: He was frequently called a "firebrand" and a "bombthrower."

Like most politicians, especially Republicans, he wanted to balance the federal budget. But his plan severely cut social services -- and also seriously cut taxes, especially on the wealthy. This didn't work when Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980s, and actually created the conditions that led to Clinton's election in 1992. As we have since seen, it didn't work in 2001, and it didn't work in 2017. It would not have worked in 1995.

Every year, the federal budget takes effect on October 1. That is, "Fiscal Year 1996" ran from October 1, 1995 to September 30, 1996. If no deal between Congress and the President is in place by October 1, they can pass a "continuing resolution": For the length of the resolution, the proportions of the previous fiscal year continue.

But Clinton and the Republicans controlling Congress couldn't reach a deal by September 30. So they passed a continuing resolution that ran until November 13. But the Republicans refused to pass a new one by November 14. So, at midnight on November 13, the government shut down.

And the Republicans went before the media and said it was Clinton's fault. Except Clinton also went before the media, and pointed out that he was still willing to make a deal, and the Republicans weren't. Finally, he called Dole and Gingrich into the Oval Office. So often willing to compromise on things, seemingly desperate to get re-elected, but angering many in his own party, Clinton told them, "I don't care if I go down to 5 percent in the polls. If you want that budget signed into law, you're going to have to get somebody else behind this desk."

For once, Clinton held his ground. And polls showed that more people supported his stance than the Republicans' stance. Their approval rating plummeted. Finally, on November 19, they caved. And when the general election campaign got underway, the Democrats aired commercials showing Dole and Gingrich together so many times, it began to look like Gingrich was Dole's running mate.

Having been the Republican nominee for Vice President in 1976, and having run for the Republican nomination for President in 1980 and 1988, Dole had practically been running for President in the 1996 election since the day after the 1992 election ended. Politically-themed comedian Mark Russell, who was 10 years younger than Dole, and specialized in rewriting pre-rock-and-roll songs for political issues of the time, wrote for one of his periodic TV specials on PBS:

This old man, Robert Dole

has the White House as his goal.

For 20 years, there in his eye, a glint.

This old man can't take a hint.

And yet, Russell followed this song by saying, "I'm thinking of voting for Bob Dole. I figure it'll be the last chance to have a President who's older than I am!" (UPDATE: He turned out to be right, living to see the Presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, all younger.)

Dole officially announced his candidacy on April 10, 1995. Despite losing the New Hampshire Primary to Pat Buchanan, an archconservative journalist who had previously worked for Presidents, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, he won enough Delegates to secure the nomination on March 19, 1996.

He traveled the country on a plane he named, after his position in the Senate, Leader Ship. Then he rolled the dice, and resigned from the Senate on June 11, to show the American people he was focused only on the election: "I have nowhere to go, except the White House, or home." He changed his plane's name to Citizen Ship.

(Dole was succeeded as Majority Leader by his Majority Whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi. He remains the highest-ranking native of that State in American politics.)

At the Republican Convention, at the San Diego Convention Center, Dole chose a real running mate: Jack Kemp, former pro quarterback, former Congressman from Buffalo, New York, a 1988 Presidential candidate like Dole, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bush. Kemp had long been the darling of the conservative tax-cut movement, and boosted Dole in the polls.

In his acceptance speech, on August 15, Dole said, "Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence in action." This was a blunder: In his acceptance speech, at the United Center in Chicago, Clinton said, "We do not need to build a bridge to the past. We need to build a bridge to the future, all the way to the 21st Century!"

After that, Clinton and his running mate, Vice President Al Gore, solidified their lead, and Dole and Kemp never really got close to them. Near the end of the campaign, Dole tried to make a big deal about Clinton's "scandals," but nobody could pin anything on him. And Clinton seemed to be handling his role as Commander-in-Chief well. And, just as in 1992, the issue of "the economy, stupid" helped him: This time, he was in charge, and it was doing well.

Dole didn't run a bad campaign, but once Clinton won the battle over the budget, Dole never had a chance.

Comedian Mort Sahl, closing in on half of century of joking about politicians of both parties, said, "There were 4 million people in the American colonies, and we had Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Franklin. Now, we have over 200 million, and the top 2 guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!"

What no one yet knew was that the government shutdown, at the same time that it was securing Clinton's win, was also setting the stage for the biggest crisis of his Presidency: Among the volunteers working in the White House during the government shutdown, and was among the young staffers welcoming him back to the White House with a hug the day after the election, was a young woman named Monica Lewinsky.

The Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics was established at the University of Kansas in 2003, on the occasion of Dole's 80th birthday. It performs some of the same functions as a Presidential Library, but it is not the same thing. Dole died in 2021, at the age of 98.

*

November 5, 1996, like all modern U.S. Election Days, was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. But there were 10 games played in the NBA that day:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Los Angeles Lakers, 98-92 at Madison Square Garden. Shaquille O'Neal scored 26 points.

 

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 83-81 at the new CoreStates Center (now the Xfinity Mobile Arena) in Philadelphia.

* The Toronto Raptors beat the Dallas Mavericks, 100-96 at the SkyDome in Toronto. (It's now named the Rogers Centre.) Walt Williams scored 34 for the Raptors.

* The San Antonio Spurs beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 74-68 at the Gund Arena in Cleveland. (It's now named the Rocket Arena.)

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Vancouver Grizzlies, 96-73 at the United Center in Chicago. Michael Jordan led the scoring with 22 points.

* The Los Angeles Clippers beat the Denver Nuggets, 82-78 at the McNichols Arena in Denver.

* The Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Phoenix Suns, 98-95 at the AmericaWest Arena (now the Mortgage Matchup Center) in Phoenix.

* The Portland Trail Blazers beat the Golden State Warriors, 111-93 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

* The Houston Rockets beats the Sacramento Kings, 102-80 at the Arco Arena in Sacramento. (It's now named the Sleep Train Arena.) Hakeem Olajuwon matched his uniform number by scoring 34 points.

* And the Atlanta Hawks beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 117-95 at the KeyArena in Seattle.

Only 1 NHL game was played, and it wasn't in the country holding the election: The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the St. Louis Blues, 6-3 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. 

November 3, 1992: Bill Clinton Is Elected President

November 3, 1992: Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas is elected President of the United States, defeating incumbent President George H.W. Bush and computer billionaire H. Ross Perot, who ran an independent campaign.

The popular vote: Clinton, 44.9 million, Bush 39.1 million, Perot 19.7 million. This was the 1st time that over 100 million people voted in a Presidential election. Clinton won 43.0 percent of the vote, Bush 37.4, Perot 18.9. States: Clinton 32, Bush 18, Perot none. Electoral Votes: Clinton 370, Bush 168, Perot none.

At 10:47 PM, Eastern Time, CBS called Ohio for Clinton. That put him over 270 Electoral Votes giving him the win.

It had once been a longshot that things would reach this point. In April 1991, after winning the Persian Gulf War, Bush had an approval rating of 91 percent. And some of the biggest names in the Democratic Party got scared out of running: Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Senator and former Governor Bob Graham of Florida, Representative Pat Schroeder of Colorado; 1988 candidates like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri, and former Gov. Bruce Babbitt of Arizona; even the 1988 Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas. Certainly, the defeated 1988 Presidential nominee, former Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, wasn't going to try again.

Others had good excuses for not running. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts found his personal life in a mess at that point; Senator Al Gore of Tennessee (a candidate in '88) had to deal with a family emergency at the time his candidacy would have had to start; and Governor Mario Cuomo of New York was facing a budget crisis in his home State, interfering with his ability to file as a candidate, as the deadlines coincided.

That left a comparatively weak field. Senator and former Governor Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a wounded veteran of the Vietnam War, seemed like a great candidate. But he won only the Primary in neighboring South Dakota, and ran out of money. Doug Wilder of Virginia, the 1st black Governor of a Southern State, didn't get anywhere. Senator Tom Harkin won the Caucuses in his home State of Iowa, but since he had them locked up anyway, nobody else ran there, and so that victory, so meaningful to Jimmy Carter in 1976, may have ended up hurting him.

The Governor of California was a Republican, Pete Wilson, who ended up running in 1996. One of the State's former Governors, Jerry Brown ran, but his image as a flake -- his nickname was "Governor Moonbeam" -- hurt him. By the time campaigning in the New Hampshire Primary got serious, there were only 2 candidates with any traction.

And one of them was Paul Tsongas, a former Congressman from a neighboring State, Massachusetts. Anything he got in New Hampshire could be attributed to proximity. And his location and his Greek ancestry, and his "face made for radio" all evoked Dukakis' failed campaign. At least Dukakis didn't have a speech impediment: Tsongas did.

That left Clinton, who'd been elected Governor of Arkansas in 1978, lost in 1980, regained the office in 1982, and was re-elected in 1984, 1986 (then it became a 4-year term) and 1990. He was young (45), and a good-looking guy whose Southern accent seemed charming. He certainly wasn't a "dumb Southerner": He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, with degrees from Georgetown and Yale Law. He seemed like just the guy to break the Republicans' hammerlock on the South, and like just the guy to appeal to young people.

But his youth led to problems. He was the 1st Presidential candidate from the "Baby Boom" generation to be taken this seriously. (Gore tried to be, 4 years earlier, but he didn't get very far, through little fault of his own.) Every President going back to Franklin Roosevelt had some sort of role in World War II. Clinton wasn't even born until after that war. He was the 1st serious candidate where serving in Vietnam, or not, would be a serious issue. And he didn't serve. The way he avoided it was legal, but it was sketchy, and a lot of people who served, or loved someone who served, held that against him.

He was also the 1st Presidential candidate taken this seriously for whom the use of marijuana and other drugs associated with 1960s youth culture were an issue. By his own admission, he handled it badly. But what really threatened to derail him was his lack of marital fidelity. His wife, the former Hillary Rodham, whom he'd met at Yale Law, defended him a joint interview on 60 Minutes, broadcast on CBS after that network broadcast the Super Bowl, so millions were still watching. Her angry defense of him ended up polarizing more people than he did.

But it worked: He finished 2nd to Tsongas in New Hampshire, and the nickname "The Comeback Kid," first used on him when he regained the Governorship 10 years earlier, was revived. The questions about his lovelife, drug use and war avoidance didn't go away, though: It took until June 2, when he won the California Primary, before he clinched the Democratic nomination. (It didn't help that Brown made a big effort to win his home State, but failed.)

But Bush wasn't running away with the race, either. The American economy was in tatters. And a race riot had broken out in Los Angeles on April 29. There was little confidence in him. The conservative wing of the Republican Party had never fully trusted him. When, in June 1990, he saw the recession deepening and the federal budget deficit skyrocketing, he broke his 1988 Republican Convention promise of "Read my lips: No new taxes." Reasonable people realized that he had to do it. But conservatives, as has usually been the case since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, were not interested in being reasonable people.

Pat Buchanan, a journalist who had worked in the Administrations of Richard Nixon (as a speechwriter, with a brief holdover under Gerald Ford) and Ronald Reagan (as White House Director of Communications), had some credibility with the hard right wing, and challenged Bush in the Primaries, gaining 38 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. This pushed Bush to the right for the rest of the campaign: Buchanan "lost the nomination, but won the nominee."

But that pushed moderates, and independents, people who didn't belong to any party, away. So Perot, a Dallas businessman who became a billionaire through early investing in the computer industry, and, years earlier, a household name when he worked to bring prisoners of war back from Vietnam, ran as an independent candidate.

For a while, he was ahead of Clinton in the polls, and not that far behind Bush. People were actually willing to trust a struggling economy, and a quickly-changing "world chessboard," to a completely unqualified, and apparently "nutty" (to use one of Bush's favorite words), businessman, because they no longer trusted the establishments of either major party. Oh yes: Perot also had odd hair.

Sound familiar? Not quite: Unlike Donald Trump, Ross Perot was (as far as we know) faithful to his wife, wasn't obsessed with golf, never acted like he had to be the center of attention, and had never expressed appreciation for foreign dictators. (He did seem to be obsessed with Fidel Castro of Cuba, but in a negative way, which helped feed his paranoia.)

So there it was: Three major candidates for President, and it didn't look like any of them could win -- or should win. Had a more qualified candidate than Buchanan -- say, 1988 Republican candidates Bob Dole or Jack Kemp -- challenged Bush from the right, that candidate might have won the whole thing.

But the night after the California Primary, Clinton stuck around in the Golden State, and appeared as a guest on The Arsenio Hall Show. Hall was the 1st black person to succeed as a late-night talk show host, and had more credibility with young people than did the retiring Johnny Carson, Carson's replacement Jay Leno, or even David Letterman. It is hard to explain to today's kids just how big Arsenio was at that point. After all, he did something neither Carson, nor Leno, nor Letterman ever did: He made a man President. (As much as any man, including the candidate himself, did.)

The show began with Clinton, wearing sunglasses, jamming with The Posse, Arsenio's band, playing "Heartbreak Hotel" by Elvis Presley on the saxophone he'd played since he was a kid. This was considerably hipper than the classical piano playing that Presidents Harry Truman and Nixon had done: This was a President who appreciated rock and roll, which Jimmy Carter and Bush had accepted, but that was about it.

After a careful examination of what Hall called "the smokin' the joint thing," in which Clinton admitted he should've just answered the original question, "Yes," they got serious, talking about job creation and educational opportunities, especially in the inner cities. Hall's Hollywood studio was just a short bus ride from the epicenter of the riot, and Clinton's comments really resonated with his studio audience. Hall brought Hillary on as well, and the appearance helped to humanize her as much as it did him.

At the Democratic Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York, Clinton took Gore, whose family emergency had been resolved, as his Vice Presidential nominee. It was a very inclusive Convention, with Cuomo, Kennedy and Jackson all giving good speeches for Clinton. And then, the morning of the last day of the Convention, Perot dropped out of the race. Suddenly, Clinton had all of the energy, and all of the momentum -- or, as Bush called it in a previous campaign, "The Big Mo."

So the Republican Convention, at the Astrodome in Houston, Bush's adopted hometown, became the nastiest major-party convention ever. (At least, until 2016.) Buchanan gave a speech with the most reluctant of endorsements of Bush, and saying, "There is a religious war going on in our country, for the soul of America." Speaker after speaker ripped the Democrats for favoring civil rights, gay rights, single mothers and public schools -- to the detriment of, respectively, white people, straight people, "traditional families" and religious schools.

It seemed like a Nuremberg rally in 1930s Germany. The Texas-based newspaper columnist Molly Ivins said of Buchanan's speech, and could have said it of others, "It probably sounded better in the original German."

The Republican attacks on Clinton got worse. They even attacked him for a trip he took to the Soviet Union -- in 1969, when he was 23 and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, 5 years before he ran his 1st campaign for public office. And things got more complicated when Perot got back in the race, resulting in the 1st-ever 3-way Presidential debate.

That happened on October 11, which just happened to be the Clintons' 17th wedding anniversary, at Washington University in St. Louis. In the debate, citing his experience, Bush mentioned the '69 Soviet trip. But, remembering how Bush had done similar things to Dukakis 4 years earlier, Clinton was ready, and he ended Bush's campaign, right there:

When Joe McCarthy went around this country, questioning people's patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong. And a Senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.

If Clinton could stand up to Bush, people realized, he could stand up to nations and terrorist groups that would attack America. 

The 2nd Presidential debate, at Robbins Field House, at the University of Richmond in Virginia, deepened Bush's problems. As moderator Carole Simpson of ABC News solicited a question from the audience in the "town hall" format used for this debate, Bush stood up and looked at his watch. By doing this, he made it look like the debate, facing those undecided voters, wasn’t worth his time.

The question that Simpson received, to be fair, was poorly worded. She had to clarify that the questioner, asking, “How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives?” probably meant, “How has the recession affected you?” Perot answered by saying it made him interrupt what he said was a pretty good life to take on the campaign.

Bush fumbled with his answer, saying, "I think the national debt affects everybody. Obviously, it has a lot to do with interest rates," and then asked, "Are you saying that if a person has means, he can't understand hardship?" When Simpson clarified that the question was really about the recession, Bush went off on a tangent about a visit to a black church, seeming to find his bearings, but still not convincing anyone.

In contrast, when it was his turn, Clinton stood up, and said to the questioner, "Tell me again how it's affected you?" She said she knew people who had lost their jobs. He said that, as Governor, when a business in Arkansas went under, chances were he knew the people who ran it. All the Republican mockery of him being "Governor of a small State" -- according to the 1990 Census, Arkansas was home to 2.35 million people -- paid off at that moment. It was another example of a line Clinton had used in other forums: "I feel your pain."

(The 3rd debate, at Michigan State University in East Lansing, was inconclusive: It was Bush's best performance, but the other two were also judged to have done well.)

The Republican campaign continued to get nastier, but it had little effect. The Republicans made slight gains in each house of Congress, but Clinton won solidly in the popular vote, and overwhelmingly in the Electoral Vote, largely because young people, who hadn't really had a candidate to back since the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, finally had someone who seemed to understand their needs.

To this day, many conservatives blame Perot, with his big spending on October half-hour infomercials full of charts, and his overly folksy manner, for throwing the election to Clinton. This is a stupid idea, mainly because exit polls taken on Election Night showed that about half of Perot's voters wouldn't have voted at all, and the other half were pretty much evenly split between Bush and Clinton.

What's more, those very conservatives pushed Bush too far to the right, making him seem as crazy as they were, when he wasn't. Bush himself ran a bad campaign, looking in his speeches like he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet but at that podium; whereas Clinton looked like he was happy to be among the voters at his rallies. And the economy, though slightly better in the 2nd half of 1992 than it was in the 1st half, was still working against an incumbent; 

Perot finished 2nd in 2 States: Utah, ahead of Clinton; and, surprisingly, Maine, ahead of Bush, who had a family home there. It is possible that Perot siphoned off enough conservative (or, at least, non-liberal) votes to throw the following States to Clinton: Georgia, Kentucky, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, possibly New Jersey, and Ohio. That's a shift of 68 Electoral Votes, which would have turned a 370-168 Clinton win into a 302-236 Clinton win. And it could be just as easily argued that Perot siphoned enough votes to swing Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Dakota and Texas to Bush. That's 82 EVs: Clinton could have won 452-86.

Perot ran again in 1996, and in the last days, told his audiences that Clinton would have pending criminal charges against him. This turned out not to be true. Perot didn't do nearly as well, but still did well enough to deny Clinton a majority.

He never ran for office again, and endorsed Bush's son, George W. Bush in 2000. He supported Mitt Romney in 2008 (Romney didn't get the Republican nomination for President) and 2012 (he did, but lost to Barack Obama). He did not endorse anyone in 2016, and died in 2019.

George Herbert Walker Bush told his audience in his concession announcement, "I intend to get fully involved in the grandchild business." He certainly did, and kind of became America's Grandpa. Oddly, his son George W. Bush's Presidency, 2001-09, resembled Nixon's and Reagan's -- right down to the international swagger and the domestic corruption -- much more than his father's. Every mistake he made seemed to be the opposite of a decision his father got right. As Dubya's reputation tumbled, his father's rose. Clinton worked with both George Bushes on disaster relief in the 2000s and 2010s. The elder George Bush died in 2018, and was remembered fondly.

In 1990, Time magazine got creative with its Man of the Year distinction: "Men of the Year: The Two George Bushes." The idea was that Bush, working through Operation Desert Shield, the leadup to the Gulf War, which became Operation Desert Storm, was having success; but, also working through the recession, and having to raise taxes, was struggling, so it was as if 2 different men were President. Clinton ran against the "second George Bush," and won, and Time named him Man of the Year for 1992.

In spite of Clinton's win, the Democrats only broke even in the U.S. Senate, and the Republicans gained 9 seats in the House of Representatives. Following the treatment of Dr. Anita Hill in the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Democrats called 1992 "The Year of the Woman," and among the new Senators elected were Dianne Feinstein (special election) and Barbara Boxer (regularly-scheduled election) in California, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, and Patty Murray of Washington.

Bill Clinton's 2 terms were full of controversy, but, in terms of accomplishments and leaving the country better off when he arrived, he was the most successful President since Lyndon Johnson. He fully supported his wife Hillary's political career, and seemed more hurt than she was when the 2016 election was stolen from her.

The 1992 campaign was a very nasty one, or so it seemed by the standards of the time. This built an odd friendship, to the point where both preferred Bill's wife Hillary for President in 2016 -- though that could also be due to how Donald Trump treated Jeb Bush in that year's campaign.

Clinton's Presidential Library opened on November 18, 2004 in Little Rock, Arkansas. And the city's main airport is named Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency, in Washington, is named the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building. Clinton remains the only President born in Arkansas, or to represent it in politics.

Aside from the "Presidential City" in Rapid City, South Dakota, the only known statue of Bill Clinton is in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, a country he helped liberate.

On Saturday Night Live, he was played by Phil Hartman from 1992 to 1994, Michael McKean in the 1994-95 season, and Darrell Hammond has played him ever since. Dennis Quaid played him in The Special Relationship in 2010 -- not about Bill's relationship with Hillary, or with Monica Lewinsky, but about America's relationship with Britain, with Michael Sheen playing Prime Minister Tony Blair.

*

November 3, 1992 was, like all modern Election Days in U.S. history, a Tuesday. This was also the day that the New York Yankees traded Roberto Kelly to the Cincinnati Reds for Paul O'Neill, a major transaction in the Yankees' 1990s restoration. I have a separate entry for that event.

The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. And there were no NBA games played that day. But there were 5 NHL games:

* The only team from the New York Tri-State Area in action was the New York Islanders, and they lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins, 2-0 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* The Quebec Nordiques and the Hartford Whalers played to a tie, 3-3 at the Hartford Civic Center (now the PeoplesBank Arena).

* The Washington Capitals beat the Chicago Blackhawks, 4-1. This was one of the NHL's early-1990s experiments with neutral-site games. It was played at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, formerly home to the World Hockey Association's Indianapolis Racers. This made it a lot closer to a home game for the Hawks than it was for the Caps, but the Caps won.

* The expansion Tampa Bay Lightning beat the St. Louis Blues, 6-4 at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall in Tampa.

* And the Edmonton Oilers beat the expansion Ottawa Senators, 5-2 at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton.

February 20, 1992: The Ross Perot Campaign

February 20, 1992: Computer billionaire H. Ross Perot is a guest on the CNN talk show Larry King Live, and announces his availability to be a candidate for President of the United States.

This leads to a populist outcry for a man who is beholden to neither the Republicans (whose offerings are the failing incumbent George H.W. Bush and the bigoted, inexperienced Pat Buchanan) nor the Democrats (whose offerings are led by the scandal-ridden Bill Clinton and a bunch of uninspiring guys).

But during the Democratic Convention in July, Perot, who had never actually announced he was running, announced he wasn't running. Then, in September, just in time to qualify for the Presidential Debates, making them the 1st 3-way Presidential debates in general election history, he announced he had gotten on the ballot in all 50 States, and was running.

He nominated James Stockdale, a retired Navy Admiral who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, as his Vice President. During the Vietnam War, Perot had gotten some POWs released, and that's how he first became famous. Perot launched several zingers during the debates. And he launched half-hour "infomercials," where he sat at a desk, held up charts, and used a pointer to demonstrate the points he wanted to make. The media ate all this up.

But Perot's "movement" turned out to be loud, but not especially big. And he turned out to be insane, and, like all businessmen who've never run for office before, to not have a clue as to how government actually works, or should work.

Fortunately, in 1992, Americans weren't stupid enough to elect a man like that to be our President.

He ended up getting 19 percent of the vote, best performance by a 3rd-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912... but won no Electoral Votes, unlike such 3rd-party candidates as Bob LaFollette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968. Why? Because, as his self-chosen theme song pointed out, he was "Crazy."

*

February 20, 1992 was a Thursday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 4 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers, 92-89 at Madison Square Garden.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 110-101 at The Summit in Houston. (It's now the Central Campus of televangelist Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church.)

* The Miami Heat beat the Milwaukee Bucks, 111-109 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.

* And the Seattle SuperSonics beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 105-103 at the Seattle Center Coliseum.

And there were 4 games in the NHL:

* The New York Islanders beat their arch-rivals, the New York Rangers, 6-2 at the Nassau Coliseum.

* The New Jersey Devils and the Chicago Blackhawks played to a tie, 4-4 at the Chicago Stadium.

* The Quebec Nordiques and the Pittsburgh Penguins played to a tie, 4-4 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* And, in an "Original Six" matchup, the Detroit Red Wings beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-2 at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.