History Rhyming

The Trump election demands constant evaluation. It will be analyzed for decades. What does this mean for the democracy? How could what appears to be a snit among a small segment of voters do something like this? And how could someone like Hillary Clinton, who was ready to assume the position (in all of "assume's" meanings,) be denied.

Curiously, the only reason Clinton has any national prominence at all is just one of those voters' snits. When her husband was running for president against the incumbent Bush, he had little national support. Indeed, success against an incumbent president was rare to impossible. Many thought that any candidate was a sacrifice and little more. Clinton had a tough primary and the "bimbo eruptions" prevented him from attaining any serious gravitas. But campaign was unsettled; there was a segment of the population that was furious the Washington establishment and at government spending. As a traditional Southern Democrat, Clinton could not take advantage of that.

But Perot could.

At the Republican National Convention in 1988, Bush had pledged to the delegates that he would resist any tax increases, giving his famous “read my lips” pledge. But in 1990, in an attempt to cope with a soaring budget deficit, Bush reneged on that pledge, earning him the enmity of his conservative supporters and the distrust of many voters who had backed him in 1988. Pat Buchanan led an insurgent campaign against Bush, capturing nearly 37 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. Despite the challenge, Bush went on to win the Republican nomination, though his candidacy was wounded. But an incumbent had been aggressively opposed.

Dissatisfaction among the voters with the two candidates--and with politics and politicians in general--was obvious when Ross Perot--with no political experience--entered the race. Polls in May and June showed Perot leading both Clinton and Bush, but in July,  Perot unexpectedly dropped from the race. For whatever reason he reentered it, having been put on the ballot by petition in every state.

Perot spent $65 million of his own money in a light, almost diffident, campaign.  But he was strangely popular. He was not a politician; he was not a government guy. And that seemed to work in his favor. With his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (supported by both Bush and Clinton), his focus on eliminating the country’s budget deficit and national debt, and his nontraditional campaign where he focused on 30-minute infomercial-style advertisements and appeared on the stump to deliver speeches only rarely, he saw his support increase as election day neared.

His support was not enough to win. But is was enough to steal votes from Bush to allow Clinton to win. Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote to Bush’s 37.4 percent and Perot’s 18.9 percent—the highest percentage of any third-party candidate in a U.S. presidential election in 80 years. But there is no way those who voted for Perot would have voted for Clinton had Perot not been in the race. One might be able to argue that non-voters came out to vote for Perot and that Perot was a coincidental non-factor but that is hard to believe.

Essentially Hillary Clinton was vaulted into national power and prominence by an angry anti-politician backlash that allowed her husband to win an election no one expected him to win and he would never have won had Perot not been in the race. And years later, she was defeated by the exact same anti-political backlash that made the unlikely Trump the president.

Irony. And the Circle of Life. Or something.