After more than three decades of shrinking voter involvement in presidential elections, something happened in 1992. Whether Americans were so fed up with politics as usual or so concerned about signs of an economy and a society in decay that they took matters into their own hands, they dramatically broke the downward spiral of presidential voting and set the nation on a new course.
In one of the most unusual and electric campaigns for the White House in history, an unprecedentedly popular Republican president saw his political fortunes plunge almost overnight; a Democratic front-runner was nearly destroyed by scandal, only to recover; and a billionaire independent not once but twice tossed a monkey wrench into all calculations. Traditional stump campaigning took a backseat to television talk shows and politics-by-tabloid as the candidates sought and found new means to reach an electorate that for the first time in years seemed willing and even eager to be solicited, and to listen.
In Mad as Hell, veteran reporters and political analysts Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover turn their more than thirty years experience on the campaign trail and in the campaign back rooms to telling the definitive story of how the excesses of George Bush's 1988 campaign came back to haunt him in 1992, and how Bill Clinton and his brash team of political strategists capitalized on Bush's failures and missteps to deny him reelection. At the same time, they examine the Ross Perot phenomenon from its unique birth in one television studio to its effective demise nine months later in another, in a year in which voters yearned for change - and for a new leader to provide it.
From the challenge of Pat Buchanan and the media feeding frenzy against Clinton in New Hampshire to the dramatic "town meeting" debate in Richmond in which Bush unwittingly demonstrated that he "just didn't get it" about the depth of Americans' domestic concerns, the authors provide an inside account of how and why the voters ended Republican rule after twelve years of the Reagan Revolution, tuning the country over to a Democrat for only the second time in the last seven presidential elections.
Explored are the essential ingredients of Bush's defeat and Clinton's victory: Bush's fateful "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge; the 1991 Democratic Senate victory in Pennsylvania that sounded the warning; Clinton's remarkable survivability; a Democratic convention that worked and a Republican convention that didn't; a Democratic bus tour that introduced a new generation of leadership and Republican whistle-stops that laid bare the vulnerabilities of the old; the thirst for a new face and a new voice to enfranchise the alienated, and how it may have changed American politics for years to come.