1 gen 1992 anni - Clinton elected

Descrizione:

The culture wars contributed to a new, divisive partisanship in national politics. Rarely in the twentieth century had the two major parties so adamantly refused to work together. Also rare was the vitriolic rhetoric that politicians used to describe their opponents. The fractious partisanship was filtered through — or, many would argue, created by — the new twenty-four-hour cable news television networks, such as Fox News and CNN. Many commentators on these channels, finding that aggressive partisanship earned high ratings, gradually became less journalists than entertainers and sometimes provocateurs.

Partisan rancor defined the presidency of William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton. The youthful governor of Arkansas — only forty-six in 1992 — was an energetic policy wonk. In running for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he pitched himself as a “New Democrat” who would bring Reagan Democrats and middle-class voters back to the party. Opponents painted Clinton as an embodiment of the permissive social values of the 1960s: namely, that he dodged the Vietnam-era draft, smoked marijuana, and cheated on his wife. The charges were damaging, but the charismatic Clinton nonetheless secured the presidential nomination, and the Democrats mounted an aggressive campaign against the incumbent president George H. W. Bush. Clinton’s domestic agenda was the centerpiece of the campaign, promising a tax cut for the middle class, universal health insurance, and a reduction of the huge Republican budget deficit — an audacious combination of traditional social-welfare liberalism and fiscal conservatism. Despite these efforts, Clinton received only 43.7 percent of the vote. It was enough to win, however, because millions of Republicans cast their ballots for independent businessman Ross Perot, who won more votes (19.0 percent) than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (Map 30.3). Among all post–World War II presidents, only Richard Nixon (in 1969) entered the White House with as small a share of the national vote as Clinton.


The first national election after the end of the Cold War focused on the economy, which had fallen into a recession in 1991. The first-ever all-southern Democratic ticket of Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee) won support across the country but won the election with only 43.7 percent of the popular vote. The Republican candidate, President George H. W. Bush, ran strongly in his home state of Texas and the South, an emerging Republican stronghold. Independent candidate H. Ross Perot, a wealthy technology entrepreneur, polled an impressive 19.0 percent of the popular vote by capitalizing on voter dissatisfaction with the huge federal deficits of the Reagan-Bush administrations.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: