“You make Clinton sound like an immensely popular shoo-in, the people’s natural choice because of his great skills and likability.”
That’s about right. He won in 1992 with 370 electoral votes to 168 and wiped the floor with Bush.
Yeah, 43% of the vote, with the full force of the media behind him.
I wouldn’t say Clinton was immensely popular — Perot really helped him out - but he was a highly skilled politician.
Bush was not a great politician. He wasn’t really in touch with ordinary people and didn’t know how to talk to them or how to deal with tough questions and sticky situations. Maybe he wasn’t dishonest enough.
I wouldn’t say that Bush threw the election to Clinton, but he was a very poor campaigner. Lee Atwater, Bush’s Carville, had died the year before and Bush was left with clueless WASPs and DC apparatchiks running his campaign.