My Kind of What If
When I interviewed with Stan Greenberg back in 1999, I felt the need to come clean. Referring to the movie about Bill Clinton’s 1992 electoral triumph in which Stan featured prominently, I told him: “You should know I never saw ‘The War Room.’ And I never will. The wrong guy wins!”
Stan chuckled with after-the-fact magnanimity. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
In today’s New York Observer, Steve Kornacki blogs about how Bill had none of Hillary’s presumption of inevitability:
Think back to the 1992 presidential primaries, when every big name Democrat backed off, convinced that George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf triumph would render him invincible in the fall. That left a decidedly B-list cast of Democratic aspirants: Clinton, Tsongas, Jerry Brown, Bob Kerrey, Tom Harkin and (for a minute) Doug Wilder. The early thinking had Clinton and Kerrey as the front-runner. Tsongas was ignored.
But his message took hold in New Hampshire, whose lead-off primary was even more important than usual, with Iowa – Harkin’s home state – going uncontested. A string of Clinton scandals in January 1992 – Gennifer Flowers and his Vietnam draft maneuvering, basically – sent the Arkansas Governor’s poll numbers plummeting, and Tsongas surged to the lead in New Hampshire. On primary day, Tsongas won by 7 points. Kerrey was essentially flushed from the race. Clinton, though, was saved by the craftiness of his campaign, which sold him to the media as “the comeback kid,” based on his less-awful-than-expected 26 percent showing in New Hampshire.
The race then went south, where polls showed Tsongas faring surprisingly well in Georgia and Florida. The Clinton campaign, though, launched a slick, well-funded stream of negative ads against Tsongas, portraying him as a cold-hearted foe of Social Security, Medicare, and Israel. It was enough to hand Clinton a seemingly decisive series of Super Tuesday victories, which he followed up with wins in Illinois and Michigan the next week – which prompted Tsongas to suspend his campaign.
Then Clinton inexplicably lost the Connecticut primary to Jerry Brown, one of the biggest upsets in the history of presidential primaries. National Democratic leaders, already worried about Clinton’s “character” issues, panicked and began making noise about recruiting a last-minute alternative to Clinton. New York was next on the calendar and Tsongas made it clear that he would re-enter the race if Clinton lost to Brown again. That’s as far as it went, though: Clinton survived New York and the nomination was his.
But what if he’d been tripped up by Brown again? Or what if he’d lost New Hampshire even more decisively – finishing behind Bob Kerrey, say? A change of just a few thousands New Hampshire votes could have derailed Clinton – and made Tsongas the nominee.
It’s a game we old Tsongas staffers play all the time. What if Paul’s long-time friend and fundraiser, Nick Rizzo, hadn’t stolen a million dollars from our shoestring political operation in what was called the biggest campaign fraud in history? By the time Rizzo was convicted, it was too late. We might have won New Hampshire by a lot more than we did.
