![]() ![]() She read 43 biographies of first ladies to get ready to move from Little Rock to the White House. She stayed with him when almost everybody was watching. She stayed with him when almost nobody was watching. As the first female partner of Arkansas’ most important law firm, she made more money than he did as the state’s most powerful person. She took off thick glasses and put in new contacts and started wearing makeup. She gave up the maiden name she had decided to keep at age 9 so that her husband would have a better chance to be the governor of Arkansas. The year 1994 is a prequel to the election of 2016-and might even decide it. Here we are, though, Clinton and Bush running in a new-rules race, forced to war with Trump and the others while attempting to tamp down the past in the tense, coarse, fast, partisan present. In 1994, the notion of Trump, not yet a reality TV-strengthened celebrity, as the most important, most powerful person in the world would have been dismissed as a publicity stunt. House of Representatives, stoking the kind of anti-establishment fire that’s threatening the current presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush while fueling the candidacies of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump-who were then, respectively, a surgeon in Baltimore, an ambitious executive at AT&T and a New York City businessman trying to climb his way back from almost a billion dollars in debt. The far-seeing already were imagining hand-held miracle phones.Ĭhanges in 1994 cracked old orders like the 40-year Democratic majority in the U.S. It was a year, too, in which the new contours of our collective media mayhem began to become clear, with seminal moments in 24-7 news entertainment, reality television and the advent of the commercial Internet, and talk radio rumbling on behalf of Republicans. Bush’s son started to feel quite complicated for two aspirants who sought to stand on their own. It was a year when being Bill Clinton’s wife or George H.W. It was a year when political opponents learned how to take them on-and win. It was a year that changed them, and their lives, forever. “If you want to see where modern Hillary starts,” Republican strategist Joe Brettell tells me, “that’s it-1994.”įor both Clinton and Bush, 1994 was a year that looked bad then-but looks worse now. “I don’t know what’s right anymore,” she confided that year to an adviser. Many people I talked to, from politicians to analysts to operatives, say the same thing.Īnd Clinton’s failure in her zealous efforts at health care reform, hitched to her role in the debilitating Whitewater hassle, made her conservatives’ top target. “Had Jeb won in ’94, he would’ve been the nominee in 2000,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist tells me. ![]() ![]() Bush would get to be a governor, and Jeb Bush would have to wait, upending the family’s expectations and radically scrambling the brothers’ trajectories and presidential prospects. to concede, then stayed up into the wee hours, smoking his first cigarette in years and drinking Scotch.īush lost more than just the election in Florida that night, because his older brother won one in Texas.
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