My life

By the time I got to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, it was 8 p.m. I really wanted to be there for Tom Harkin, who was in a tight race for reelection. Tom had strongly supported me in the Senate, and after the ’92

primary he and his wife, Ruth, a lawyer who was serving with the administration, had become close friends of mine.

The last stop of the night was Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Democratic congressman Tim Johnson had a real chance to unseat incumbent Republican Larry Pressler. Both Johnson and his chief supporter, Senator Tom Daschle, had been very good to me. As Senate minority leader, Daschle had been invaluable to the White House during the budget fights and the shutdown; when he asked me to come to South Dakota, I couldn’t say no.

It was nearly midnight when I got up in the Sioux Falls Arena and Convention Center to speak “at the last rally of the last campaign I will ever run.” Because it was my final speech, I gave them the whole load on the record, the budget fight, and what I wanted to do for the next four years. Since I was in a rural state like Arkansas, I told them a joke. I said the Republicans’ budget reminded me of the story of a politician who wanted to ask a farmer to vote for him but was reluctant to come into his yard because a barking dog was there. The politician asked the farmer, “Does your dog bite?” “No,” the farmer replied. When the politician walked through the yard toward the farmer, the dog bit him. “I thought you said your dog didn’t bite!” he shouted. The farmer replied, “Son, that ain’t my dog.” The budget was their dog.

The election went as Mark Penn predicted: there was a record low turnout, and I won 49 to 41 percent. The electoral vote was 379 to 159, as I lost three states I had carried in 1992, Montana, Colorado, and Georgia, and won two new ones, Arizona and Florida, for a net gain of nine electoral votes. Underneath the aggregate numbers, subtle differences in the state totals between 1992 and 1996 revealed the extent to which cultural factors influenced the election in some states, while more traditional economic and social matters dominated in others. All competitive elections are determined by such shifts, and in 1996 they told me a lot about what mattered to different groups of Americans. For example, in Pennsylvania, a state with many NRA members and pro-life voters, my winning percentage was the same as it had been in 1992, thanks to a bigger margin in Philadelphia and a strong vote in Pittsburgh, while my vote went down in the rest of the state because of guns and my veto of the partialbirth abortion bill. In Missouri, the same factors cut my victory margin almost in half, from 10 to 6

percent. I still got a majority in Arkansas, but my victory margin was slightly smaller than in 1992; in Tennessee, the margin was cut from 4.5 to 2.5 percent.

In Kentucky, tobacco and guns cut our margin from 3 to 1 percent. For the same reasons, though I was ahead in North Carolina all the way to the end, I lost by 3 percent. In Colorado, I went from a 4 percent victory in 1992 to a 1.5 percent loss because the ’92 Perot voters in the West were more likely to vote Republican in ’96 and because the Republicans had gained 100,000 registered voters on the Democrats since 1992, partly as a result of the large number of Christian Right organizations that had located their headquarters in the state. In Montana, I lost this time around largely because, as in Colorado, the lower vote for Perot meant more votes for Senator Dole than for me.