I voted Libertarian the first time, for Dole the 2nd. When Clinton won, I was hoping that as a fellow baby-boomer, Clinton might be ok. Looks like we were both wrong.
I voted Libertarian second time, because I really didn't trust Dole, and because I thought that if the Republican Congress could maintain its spine Clinton wouldn't be too bad.
Actually, even in retrospect, I don't think such a belief was unreasonable. During the years 1995-1996, Clinton was really not such a bad President. Nearly all of his claimed accomplishments from that time were previous Republican talking points. Unfortunately, Republicans were so keen to attack Clinton, they attacked him for policies which they themselves had previously initiated.
Imagine what would have happened if Republicans had run campaign ads which listed many of Clinton's claimed accomplishments and politely reminded voters that they were the product not of the Democratic Congress of 1993-1994, but the Republican Congress of 1995-1996; voters should thus vote Clinton for President but Republican for Congress. If Republicans had done that, I would think they could have made major electoral gains in both the House and Senate. But instead they decided to self-destruct.
The self-destruction then continued after the election with the whole impeachment debacle. The Democrats were so effective at painting the impeachment effort as trying to "undo" the election that Republicans were afraid to speak up. What the Republicans should have done would have been to inform the voters that they'd much rather go into the 2000 election with a lame-duck President (Clinton) than an incumbent who'd be eligible for election in both 2000 and 2004 (Gore), but that what mattered wasn't who they'd rather have as President, but rather what the Constitution and law required. Had the Republicans sought to make such point, I don't see any way the Democrats could have rebutted it.
But all that's ancient history by now. What matters is that while I was too young, liberal, and naïve to recognize it at the time, from 1981-1988 this country had a great man as President.