October 6, 1976: President Ford's Eastern European Debate Gaffe

October 6, 1976, 50 years ago: A Presidential debate is held. It includes a mistake that may have cost one of the candidates the election.

The 4 debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 were considered an overwhelming success. But in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had a big lead over Barry Goldwater, and thus no need to risk anything through a debate. He won in a landslide. In 1968, Richard Nixon had a big lead over Hubert Humphrey, and also saw no reason to risk it, even though Humphrey nearly caught him, and Nixon's win was a squeaker. In 1972, Nixon had a big lead over George McGovern, and didn't risk it, and won in a landslide.

But in 1976, President Gerald Ford was running as a Republican Party nominee who had been elected neither President nor Vice President. Running for a term in his own right, he badly trailed the Democratic Party nominee, former Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, due to the lingering feeling over the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign, Ford's pardon of Nixon, the economic recession that Nixon left Ford and Ford was still struggling to end, and a general feeling of listlessness in the country. Ford needed something, and so he challenged Carter to a series of debates. Carter, wanting to prove himself against the incumbent, accepted.

On September 23, the 1st of 3 debates was held. Since this was the year of America's Bicentennial, celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, many major events had been held in Philadelphia that year. So it made sense to hold one of the debates there. It was held at what was, and remains, America's oldest continuously operating entertainment venue, the Walnut Street Theatre.

This debate, focusing on domestic policy, is remembered not for what was said, but for what couldn't be said. An hour and 21 minutes in, almost to the point where the closing arguments would have to be given, Carter was answering a question, and the sound cut out. And Ford and Carter just stood at their podiums, not saying a word, for 27 minutes, until the sound was fixed, and they were able to complete the debate.

Most observers thought the debate was inconclusive. But, in a way, that helped both men: Ford needed a good result to help his comeback, and Carter needed to appear "Presidential" alongside the incumbent.

*

The 2nd Presidential debate was held on October 6, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, focusing on foreign policy. Max Frankel, foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times, asked Ford about the Helsinki Accords, negotiated the previous year. Conservatives alleged that the Accords conceded too much to the Soviet Union.

Ford pointed out that Pope Paul VI had endorsed the Accords, the implication being that the head of the Roman Catholic Church had anti-Communist credentials that could not be questioned. Ford suggested that the rest of the leaders of the NATO countries had endorsed the Accords. He made it sound like opposing the Accords was tantamount to disagreeing with all of these men who, presumably, knew what they were doing.

Had Ford stopped there, it would have been a great answer. Long accused of being dumb -- and, as a graduate of the University of Michigan and Yale University School of Law, he most certainly was not -- he had given a very thoughtful answer, which should have shored up his support among conservatives in general, Catholics, and people of Eastern European descent.

He did not stop there. He followed this with these words, making a downward slash with his hand to make his point: "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration."

This statement was meant to suggest that it hadn't happened yet, and that he wouldn't let it happen. But most people knew that it had already happened, long before he took office, even before he was first elected to public office, to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948.

Everybody watching was shocked. The whole point of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets' organizational response to NATO, was to dominate Eastern Europe. As Winston Churchill put it in his 1946 speech that put a phrase into the world's lexicon, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent." With this statement, Ford seemed to be suggesting that the Warsaw Pact did not involve Soviet-influenced military enforcement of Communist law, and sometimes direct Soviet military enforcement.

Frankel threw Ford a potential lifeline. "Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there?"

Ford answered: "I don't believe that the Yugoslavs consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union."

He was right about the Yugoslavs, whose dictator Josip Broz Tito had famously resisted Joseph Stalin, and was still in power (he died in 1980), so the Soviets considered interference to be not worth the effort. He was right about the Romanians, whom the Soviets saw as being properly allied, so they knew that interference wasn't necessary. But the Poles? That was too far.

Ford had badly blundered, and, given the chance to redeem himself, he had deepened the hole he had dug for himself. It made him look like he had no idea of what was going on. It infuriated key voters in places filled with Europeans whose families had fled Soviet brutality.

With only a few seconds' worth of notice, Carter came up with the perfect response: "I'd like to see Mr. Ford convince Polish-Americans, and Czech-Americans, and Hungarian-Americans that those countries don't live under the supervision and control of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain."

Carter had figured out the right countries to mention, in addition to Poland: It had been only 8 years since the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, and 20 years since they had crushed the Hungarian Revolution. This would have been like, from 2008 onward, properly responding to a candidate saying that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an accident.

Ford's chief pollster, Bob Teeter, later said, "The controversy used up valuable campaign days when there were all too few left, when a steady climb had to be sustained." In other words, the Republicans had to spend time dealing with this gaffe when they would rather have spent time on issues that favored them and put the Democrats on the defensive.

*

On October 15, for the 1st time, the major-party nominees for Vice President had a televised debate. It was held at the Alley Theatre in Houston. The Democratic nominee, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, was calm. The Republican nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, was less so, and may have been another factor that cost Ford the election.

Mondale thought it appropriate to mention the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon from office. It was appropriate not only because Ford had pardoned Nixon, but because, on June 17, 1972, the night that the burglars broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, Senator Dole was doing double duty as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Let the record show that Dole was not then, nor has since, been seriously accused of any involvement in the various crimes that have fallen under the umbrella term "Watergate."

Dole, himself a wounded veteran of World War II,  responded by saying, "It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it's not a very good issue, any more than the war in Vietnam would be, or World War II, or World War I, or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century. I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit."

Dole was usually smart enough to be a very savvy political operator, gathering or "whipping" votes to pass, or block, legislation as needed. But doing that, behind the scenes, is one thing: Being the spokesperson for your own thoughts and ideas is another.

This answer was completely stupid, and not just because his math was way off. Detroit's population had peaked in 1950, at 1.8 million, and was still about 1.5 million in the 1970 Census. By 1976, though, "white flight" had reduced it to about 1.3 million. It dropped under 1 million in 1994, and it kept declining, all the way to 631,000 by 2022. No major U.S. city has had so sharp a decline. (In 2024, the city was believed to have gained about 2,000 residents, its first gain in any calendar year since 1957. In 2025, it was believed to have gotten back to 650,000.)

In World War I, about 117,000 U.S. military personnel died; in World War II, about 405,000; in the Korean War, about 37,000; and in the Vietnam War, about 59,000; for an estimated total of 626,000. Dole had inflated the figure by 2 1/2 times.

Regarding which Party had "started" or was behind the wars: The Vietnam War started under Dole's idol, fellow Kansan Dwight D. Eisenhower; and the others, once Democratic Presidents got America involved, Republicans in Congress wholeheartedly supported the war efforts. Indeed, with World War I, Republicans wanted it more than Democrats; and in World War II, Republicans didn't want to get involved at first, because, being greedy, pro-private property, and thus anti-Communist, they supported the fascist Axis against the Soviet Union.

Mondale and Dole would each later receive his Party's nomination for President -- and each would lose badly. In neither case was it because he did badly in that election's debates. But, looking back, Dole admitted that his remark had hurt the Ford campaign.

*

On October 22, Ford and Carter had their 3rd and final debate, at Phi Beta Kappa Hall on the campus of the College of William and Mary, in the colonial, and thus Bicentennial-connected, city of Williamsburg, Virginia. This debate was notable partly because it didn't have a gaffe, by either candidate; but also because Carter was asked about an earlier gaffe, an interview he had given to journalist Robert Scheer for Playboy magazine.

Scheer asked Carter, a Southern Baptist and a Sunday school teacher at his church in Plains, Georgia, "Do you feel you've reassured people with this interview, people who are uneasy about your religious beliefs, who wonder if you're going to make a rigid, unbending President?"

Carter cited Matthew 5:28:

I'm not speaking for other people, but it gives me a sense of peace and equanimity and assurance. I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery."

I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do, and I have done it, and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust, but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.

Scheer called it a "sensible statement," reflecting Carter's Baptist tradition: "He was saying, look, I'm not going to be some fanatic... I'm not this perfect guy." But the media and the era's comedians began to treat Carter as a leering sex fiend -- when the whole point was that he wasn't: Yes, he had these feelings; but, no, he didn't act on them.

For the record, no one was accusing Ford of acting on such feelings. There was a Special Prosecutor appointed to look at an issue with Ford's taxes. With retroactive irony, that Prosecutor, Charles Ruff, later served as one of President Bill Clinton's lawyers during the 1998-99 Monica Lewinsky scandal.

At one point, trying to tie Ford to Watergate, which he had not been involved in, but reminding people that Nixon's taxes had also been investigated, Carter said in his speeches, "I don't know what the facts are about Mr. Ford and his income tax. He does." The implication was, What was Ford hiding? Ruff closed his investigation a few days before the election, and said he had found no wrongdoing on Ford's part.

In that 3rd debate, Carter admitted that he'd made a mistake in granting the Playboy interview in the first place. The admission did what the interview was supposed to do: It humanized him. But the interview had halted the surge he got after the gaffes of Ford and Dole. Polls began to show the race had become a virtual tie.

On November 2, Carter won in a very close vote. Had either Ford or Dole not blown it in their debates, Ford could well have won.

Of course, given everything that happened from 1977 to 1980, maybe Ford was better off having lost, anyway. What I called "a general feeling of listlessness in the country" that had beset Ford's entire Presidency also beset Carter's. In a 1979 speech, he called it "a crisis of confidence." The next day, his speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg called it "a malaise," and that became a label that Carter could never shake, just as Ford could never shake his debate gaffe.

November 16, 1995: The Gingrich Tantrum

November 16, 1995, 30 years ago: President Bill Clinton's victory in the federal government shutdown is sealed when the New York Daily News prints a front-page cartoon, showing the Speaker of the House, and the leader of the Republican Party's move to make drastic cuts in the federal budget, as a "cry baby."

After the failure of his health care initiative in 1994, Clinton saw his Democratic Party battered in the midterm elections, with the Republicans taking both houses of Congress. Bob Dole, from Russell, Kansas, regained the office of Senate Majority Leader that he had held in 1985 and 1986, having been the Minority Leader from 1987 to 1994.

And Gingrich, a Pennsylvania native who moved to the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, Georgia to teach at a college, and was first elected to Congress in 1978 and used fiery rhetoric to get into the Republican Party's leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1989, became the Speaker of the House.

Dole was considered mean, a reputation he got in his 1976 Vice Presidential debate with Walter Mondale, and deepened in his 1988 Presidential run. But, politically speaking, he was still a center-right candidate, willing to compromise for the greater good of the country. Gingrich was not: He was frequently called a "firebrand" and a "bombthrower."

Like most politicians, especially Republicans, he wanted to balance the federal budget. But his plan severely cut social services -- and also seriously cut taxes, especially on the wealthy. This didn't work when Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980s, and actually created the harsh economic conditions that led to Clinton's election in 1992. As we have since seen, it didn't work in 2001, and it didn't work in 2017. It would not have worked in 1995.

Every year, the federal budget takes effect on October 1. To put it another way: "Fiscal Year 1996" ran from October 1, 1995 to September 30, 1996. If no deal between Congress and the President is in place by October 1, they can pass a "continuing resolution," or "CR": For the length of the resolution, the proportions of the previous fiscal year continue.

But Clinton and the Republicans controlling Congress couldn't reach a deal by September 30. So they passed a CR that ran until November 13. But the Republicans refused to pass a new budget or a new CR by November 14. So, at 12:00 Midnight on November 13, the federal government shut down, because it was not legally permitted to spend any more money. People were still working for it, but without pay.

And the Republicans went before the media and said it was Clinton's fault. Except Clinton also went before the media, and pointed out that he was still willing to make a deal, and the Republicans weren't. Finally, he called Dole and Gingrich into the Oval Office. So often willing to compromise on things, seemingly desperate to get re-elected, not wanting to be a one-term President like 3 of the last 4 (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush), but angering many in his own party, Clinton stiffened his spine, and told them, "I don't care if I go down to 5 percent in the polls. If you want that budget signed into law, you're going to have to get somebody else behind this desk."

For once, Clinton held his ground. And polls showed that more people supported his stance than the Republicans' stance. Once the Daily News printed that front page, and blow-ups of it were displayed on the floor of the very House of which Gingrich was Speaker, their approval rating plummeted. It has never again reached its 1995 height.

Clinton had invited Dole and Gingrich to go with him to the funeral of the assassinated Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin -- certainly, a gesture of respect, if not reconciliation. But the article accompanying the cartoon alleged that, on the flight back, Gingrich wanted to talk about the budget impasse, Clinton didn't, and Clinton made Gingrich get off Air Force One at the back entrance, and Gingrich got upset about these developments.

Was it true? Only Clinton and Gingrich know for sure. The problem was, given Gingrich's own actions over the 17 years he'd served in Congress to that point, the story was completely believable. He had lived by the persona of a guy who tapped into people's emotions, and now, politically, he was dying by them. His tantrums had worked pretty well when he was in the opposition to House Democrats like his predecessors as Speaker, Jim Wright of Texas and Tom Foley of Washington State. They did not work when he had a position of power, and they certainly didn't work against a political talent like Clinton.

That front page became the Daily News' 2nd-best-known ever, trailing only the October 30, 1975 front page concerning another budget mess, that of New York City, when President Ford refused to use federal money to bail the City out. The News' front page read, "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." That headline probably cost Ford the State of New York in the 1976 election, and thus the election itself. Having brought down a President, now, 20 years later, the News was bringing down a Speaker.

Finally, on November 19, the Republicans caved. And when the general election campaign got underway, the Democrats aired commercials showing Dole and Gingrich together so many times, it began to look like Gingrich was Dole's running mate, instead of his actual choice, Jack Kemp, former pro quarterback and Congressman from New York.

Once the Democrats had their convention, Clinton and his running mate, Vice President Al Gore, solidified their lead, and Dole and Kemp never really challenged them. Dole didn't run a bad campaign, but once Clinton won the battle over the budget, Dole never had a chance.

What no one yet knew was that the government shutdown, at the same time that it was securing Clinton's win, was also setting the stage for the biggest crisis of his Presidency: Among the volunteers working in the White House during the government shutdown was a young woman named Monica Lewinsky.

But the public's backlash against the Republicans' effort to impeach Clinton led to the Democrats gaining seats in the 1998 Congressional elections. Gingrich's marital infidelities had been at least as notorious as Clinton's, and the Republicans didn't care. But now, they cared: To the conservative movement, everything is acceptable except losing, and Gingrich was forced to step down, not just from the Speakership but from Congress.

November 8, 1994: The Gingrich Revolution

November 8, 1994, 30 years ago: Election Day is a repudiation of the Democratic Party, in particular of President Bill Clinton, his now-withdrawn health care reform plan, and his Assault Weapons Ban. The Republican Party gains 52 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving them control of that body for the 1st time in 40 years, and making Newt Gingrich of Georgia the Speaker. It also gains 9 seats in the U.S. Senate, giving them control of that body for the 1st time in 8 years, returning Bob Dole of Kansas to the office of Senate Majority Leader.

In New York State, Mario Cuomo is defeated for a 4th term as Governor by Peekskill Mayor George Pataki. In Texas, George W. Bush, son of the most recent Republican President, is elected Governor, defeating the State's 1st female Governor, Ann Richards. Bush's brother, John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, narrowly loses to Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida. I suspect that, had it not been for the Savings & Loan Scandal, another brother, Neil Bush, would have run for Governor of Colorado.

In addition, Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado switched parties to become Republicans. Shelby had previously called himself "the most conservative member of the Senate"; and Campbell, then the only Native American in either house of Congress (still alive as of November 8, 2022, he is a member of the Cheyenne tribe), was more of a Western libertarian than a traditional conservative, but favored gun rights. So neither switch was a big surprise, although they didn't exactly show courage by jumping ship after the election.

Gingrich knew that it wasn't enough to be against Clinton, or against Democrats in general: You had to give the voters something to vote for. He had a 10-point "Contract With America," which includes some reforms of Congress itself, including some items that Democrats were willing to work with them to pass, if with some minor adjustments. But some were drastic, and opposed by most Americans.

The backlash that hit him even before he could take office as Speaker led to him, with Christmas coming up, to being compared with two of the villains of pop-culture Christmas: Time compared him to Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, while Newsweek compared him to the title character of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

As promised, all 10 items passed the House in the 1st 100 days of Republican control. And 9 of them passed the Senate. But some of these, including a radical reform of the nation's welfare laws, and a significant tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, were vetoed by Clinton.

The 1 item that passed the Senate, but not by enough, was an Amendment to the Constitution requiring that the federal budget be balanced. On its face, this seemed like a good idea. The devil was in the details: Because Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had run the federal budget deficit so high in their 12 consecutive years in the White House, balancing the budget would have required significant spending cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, educational spending, and environmental spending. The Republicans were fine with all of that. But they weren't willing to cut spending on new military projects, and Clinton and the Democrats called them out on that.

In the end, requiring a 2/3rds "supermajority" of both houses on Congress -- 290 votes in the House, and 67 in the Senate, instead of a simple majority of 218 and 51, respectively -- the Amendment fell 1 vote short in the Senate.

One Republican voted against it: Mark Hatfield of Oregon. As a former Governor of a State whose budget was already constitutionally required to be balanced -- a lot easier, since States have far lesser, and lesser-ranging, expenses than the country at large, but by no means easy -- Hatfield understood that the Amendment would have been dangerous. It would have cast millions of people into poverty, made things worse for those already poor, and might even have killed people.

And so, the battle was on: Gingrich would lead a Congressional campaign for 1996 on a revised Contract with America, while Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas would be the Republican nominee for President, supporting it; and Clinton would run for re-election, calling the Republican proposal "the Contract On America," and making the increasingly unpopular Gingrich "Dole's running mate," no matter who Dole ultimately selected to be his Vice Presidential nominee. Gingrich's successes in early 1995 led Time magazine to name him its Man of the Year.

(Dole chose Jack Kemp, former pro quarterback, an 18-year Congressman where he became one of the champions of tax-cutters, an unsuccessful Presidential candidate in 1988, and President Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.)

In the end, Clinton was re-elected solidly over Dole, but the Democrats were unable to take back either house of Congress. Over the course of his 2nd term, even as the Republicans tried to impeach Clinton over things that were none of their, or the American people's, concern, failing to get conviction and removal, they were forced to work with him. In 1997, the federal budget was balanced. Clinton, Gingrich, Dole, and Dole's successor as Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, could all legitimately claim some credit for that.

But the Republicans' effort to remove Clinton from office angered many Americans, and, incredibly unusual for a party in its 6th straight year of holding the White House, the Democrats actually gained seats in the 1998 Congressional election. Gingrich resigned later that week, pressured into it not because of his own personal and legal failings, in each case worse than Clinton's, but because he had failed as a leader. The conservative movement will accept anything except failure.

The evangelical takeover of the Republican Party became complete with the election of George W. Bush, son of the former President, in 2000. Like Richard Nixon before him, Gingrich bided his time, mended some fences, supported Republican candidates wherever he could, and built a new constituency. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President, and Gingrich ran for the Republican nomination to beat him for re-election in 2012. He won some Primaries, but his personal scandals came back to haunt him, and he lost too many Primaries to continue.

At the age of 81, he is now seen as an elder statesman in the Party, but, as long as Donald Trump is its emotional leader, the last true "ideas man" in the Republican Party has no place in directing its course.

November 5, 1996: President Bill Clinton Is Re-Elected

November 5, 1996, 25 years ago: President Bill Clinton is re-elected, winning 379 Electoral Votes to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's 159. Clinton wins 49.2 percent of the popular vote, while Dole wins 40.7, and Reform Party candidate Ross Perot wins 8.4 percent but no Electoral Votes.

After the failure of his health care initiative in 1994, Clinton saw his Democratic Party battered in the midterm elections, with the Republicans taking both houses of Congress. Dole, from Russell, Kansas -- always mentioning his hometown, not just his State -- had first been elected to Congress in 1960, and to the U.S. Senate in 1968. He was nominated for Vice President under Gerald Ford in 1976. He ran for President in 1980, but didn't get far. He became Senate Majority Leader after the election of 1984, but the Democrats regained the Senate in 1986, making him the Minority Leader.

He ran for President again in 1988, and finished 2nd in delegates to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was elected. In 1992, Clinton beat Bush to become President-elect. The next morning, mere hours after Clinton clinched victory in a 3-man race in which Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote (but no Electoral Votes), Dole pointed out, "57 percent of Americans did not vote for Bill Clinton, and I intend to represent that majority on the floor of the U.S. Senate. If Bill Clinton has a mandate, then so do I."

Clinton was now 1-0 in Presidential elections. Dole was 0-2, 0-3 if you count 1976. Clinton got just under 45 million votes for President. Dole got 2.3 million votes in the 1988 Republican Primaries. Dole himself had just been re-elected to the Senate in 1992, with 244,000 votes. And he then represented a caucus of 43 Senators. He was in no position to claim any majority, especially against a man who had just gotten almost 45 million votes. The 57 percent of American voters who chose someone other than Clinton? As far as I know, not one of them voted for Bob Dole for President, not even as a write-in candidate.

But the '94 election restored Dole to the post of Majority Leader. And Newt Gingrich, a Pennsylvania native who moved to Georgia to teach at a college, and was first elected to Congress in 1978 and used fiery rhetoric to get into the Republican Party's leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1989, became the Speaker of the House.

Dole was considered mean, a reputation he got in his 1976 Vice Presidential debate with Walter Mondale, and deepened in his 1988 Presidential run. But, politically speaking, he was still a center-right candidate, willing to compromise for the greater good of the country. Gingrich was not: He was frequently called a "firebrand" and a "bombthrower."

Like most politicians, especially Republicans, he wanted to balance the federal budget. But his plan severely cut social services -- and also seriously cut taxes, especially on the wealthy. This didn't work when Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980s, and actually created the conditions that led to Clinton's election in 1992. As we have since seen, it didn't work in 2001, and it didn't work in 2017. It would not have worked in 1995.

Every year, the federal budget takes effect on October 1. That is, "Fiscal Year 1996" ran from October 1, 1995 to September 30, 1996. If no deal between Congress and the President is in place by October 1, they can pass a "continuing resolution": For the length of the resolution, the proportions of the previous fiscal year continue.

But Clinton and the Republicans controlling Congress couldn't reach a deal by September 30. So they passed a continuing resolution that ran until November 13. But the Republicans refused to pass a new one by November 14. So, at midnight on November 13, the government shut down.

And the Republicans went before the media and said it was Clinton's fault. Except Clinton also went before the media, and pointed out that he was still willing to make a deal, and the Republicans weren't. Finally, he called Dole and Gingrich into the Oval Office. So often willing to compromise on things, seemingly desperate to get re-elected, but angering many in his own party, Clinton told them, "I don't care if I go down to 5 percent in the polls. If you want that budget signed into law, you're going to have to get somebody else behind this desk."

For once, Clinton held his ground. And polls showed that more people supported his stance than the Republicans' stance. Their approval rating plummeted. Finally, on November 19, they caved. And when the general election campaign got underway, the Democrats aired commercials showing Dole and Gingrich together so many times, it began to look like Gingrich was Dole's running mate.

At the Republican Convention, in San Diego, Dole chose a real running mate: Jack Kemp, former pro quarterback, former Congressman from Buffalo, New York, a 1988 Presidential candidate like Dole, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bush. Kemp had long been the darling of the conservative tax-cut movement, and boosted Dole in the polls.

But once the Democrats had their convention, in Chicago, Clinton and his running mate, Vice President Al Gore, solidified their lead, and Dole and Kemp never really challenged them. Near the end of the campaign, Dole tried to make a big deal about Clinton's "scandals," but nobody could pin anything on him. And Clinton seemed to be handling his role as Commander-in-Chief well. And, just as in 1992, the issue of "the economy, stupid" helped him: This time, he was in charge, and it was doing well.

Dole didn't run a bad campaign, but once Clinton won the battle over the budget, Dole never had a chance.

What no one yet knew was that the government shutdown, at the same time that it was securing Clinton's win, was also setting the stage for the biggest crisis of his Presidency: Among the volunteers working in the White House during the government shutdown was a young woman named Monica Lewinsky.