This was a no brainer. Bob Dole just wasn't presidential material. He never saw a tax increase that he couldn't live with, and he was too bitter and had too much of an inferiority complex. I am suprised it was as close as it was.

I voted for the superior candidate for the job (Clinton) but it wasn't right watching a slicker, younger, more savy Bubba trash and destroy a classy old dinosaur like Dole. . .Bob was a good soldier for the repubs and took his beating like a man, but it still bothered me how it seemed that the repubs knew that the election was a lost cause and threw Dole to the wolves. . .I didn't vote for the guy but I hate seeing old-timers getting slaughtered after a lifetime of work. . .bothers me in politics as well as business. . .

Nothing election. Clinton ran on the economy and Dole on nostalgia. Dole's nomination showed that with the Soviet Union gone the Republicans did not have a strong unifying vision that had any appeal to the country at large.

1996 gave us a fairly uninteresting Presidential election race. Bill Clinton gained the advantage in early 1996 and never looked back. If you want to examine the dynamics of 1996, you have to start back in 1994 to get the full picture. That year's midterm election brought the Republicans to power in the Congress for the first time in 40 years. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich devised a national strategy against the Democrats which included a 10 point plan which addressed tax reform, welfare reform, a balanced budget, and increases in defense spending. Clinton at the time was mired in scandal and the aftermath of his wife's massive attempt at nationalizing health care. His problem was that he didn't have a mandate to be a left-wing President. Clinton won in 1992 with only 43% of the vote and he won on a centrist platform. The public sentiment was that they got a raw deal from Clinton and the result was that nearly 60 Democrats were voted out of Congress. Gingrich made Bill Clinton move to the center. Ironically enough, and maybe because of the Speaker's political ineptness, he helped to secure the Presidents re-election. Clinton negotiated with the Republicans on key issues like welfare reform and the balance budget but he refused to cut back on spending. The Republicans decided to shut down the national government in late 1995 in reaction to the budget impasse. The perfect storm for Bill Clinton, millions of federal workers went without their paychecks going into the Christmas holiday that year and the President was waiting to feel their pain. Clinton portrayed the Republicans as school-lunch cutting right-wing extremists while the President portrayed himself as a pragmatic centrist. Indeed, during the 1996 State of the Union Address, Clinton claimed that the Era of Big Government was over. To make things worse for the Republicans, they were at the time having a very fractuous presidential primary contest. Pat Buchanan ended up winning the New Hampshire primary that year, making it an ideological battle. The party ended up coalesceing around the candidacy of Senator Bob Dole, a mainstream Republican who had been running for President since 1980. By the time he secured the nomination in the Spring of 1996, he was dead broke from the primaries. Clinton however began advertising early and he managed to gain the advantage by portraying Dole and the Republicans as extremists, Dole couldn't respond in turn. At that point, he lost the election. The President had all the benefits of incumbency going for him and a huge campaign fund in front of him. Clinton lead by about 15 points going into Labor Day. However, Dole managed to close that gap a little by invoking some of Clinton's ethical indiscretions during the campaign, plus Dole did a solid job during the debates. Unfortunately, what was killing Dole was not his performance as a candidate, which was on the whole lackluster but competent, but it was Gingrich and the right-wing Congress. Gingrich didn't help the situation by not moving to the center along with Dole. At the end, Clinton won out, but with only 49% of the vote to Dole's 41%. Dole ended up doing better than the polls suggested; the Republicans ended up keeping Congress, suggesting that the voters wanted Clinton to maintain centrist policies. Even more telling was that the President didn't get a plurality of votes. The presence of Ross Perot on the ballot caused this, but it showed that Clinton was never solidly accepted by the American people. They still harbored doubts about his fitness for office; there were a lot of ethical concerns, remember Whitewater, the mail office scandal, campaign finance scandals etc, etc...? These scandals created a lot of bad press for the President and it caused him to lose credibility. Considering that the economy was rapidly improving in 1996, it should have been a sweep for Clinton and the Democrats, but these concerns kept his margin of victory down. Clinton would go on to produce a fairly unproductive second term dominated by a sex scandal that nearly brought down his presidency. Clinton's biggest accomplishments as President came right before his re-election with the passage of welfare reform, the balanced budget and the Freedom to Farm Act, all of which gave extra confidence to investors going into the late 1990's. In the final analysis, the solid economy helped to re-elect Clinton and it saved him from being convicted in his impeachment. But it didn't help the Republicans that Dole simply failed to connect with the American people; he was simply too old at 73 years and out of touch.