Part of Clinton's reason for remaining in the race is based on a revised history of the 1992 California primary. Read what actually happened here.
In May 1992, I passed on a message to Bill Clinton's national campaign chairman, Los Angeles attorney Mickey Kantor, who later held two Cabinet posts in the Clinton Administration. The message? That Jerry Brown, the former California governor who emerged as Clinton's most persistent opponent, would run no TV ads in the California primary and would pull back from the sharp attacks he'd been leveling on the frontrunner.
The primary was not "in the middle of June," as Hillary said in the first part of her gross misstatement about it. It was on the first Tuesday in June, as it had been for decades to that point, on June 2nd. Clinton was way ahead in the race. There was no suspense about him getting the nomination. And Brown's decision not to run TV ads in California -- he had plenty of money for that -- and to refrain from the harsh attacks that had marked his campaign to that point made it very clear that the fight was over.
Brown had made plenty of trouble for Clinton, coming out of the pack to end up as the rather distant runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination. Running against political corruption, the former two-term governor of California won several big primary and caucus victories over Clinton. Accepting no contribution over $100, in this pre-Internet campaign Brown used an earlier form of interactive technology and funded his run with an 800 number, mentioning the number so often that then NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, a family friend, tried to cut him off during a TV appearance.
Brown's surge against Clinton halted after a fake drug scandal broke on ABC. There was nothing actually there -- one key source who appeared on Nightline later admitted that the Brown fundraiser he dramatically said he'd attended where drug-taking took place was a big Eagles concert in the 1970s where some fans smoked marijuana -- but the information provided to the network was packaged cleverly enough to produce a lot of short-term smoke. As it were. Funny how such things happen not infrequently around Bill and Hill's campaigns.
Comments