Originality is not safe. Trying to duplicate past successes is boring, but it offers the greatest chances for repeating. That explains why when one genre of television show is successful, like Survivor, the show is duplicated or permutations along the same theme appear. The same can be said of politics.
On the national level, Bill Clinton was the Democrat's latest and biggest success. In 1991, fresh off the victory of the Gulf War, the first President George Bush's approval rating was astronomical. Many of the Democratic heavy-weights, like then Senator Al Gore, declined to run. They did not want to squander an opportunity to be the party's nominee in a futile effort. This left the field open for relative unknowns, like an obscure former Governor of a small southern state, Bill Clinton.
Random factors seemed to fall in Clinton's favor. Although the recession had ended by early 1992, unemployment rates still had not responded and the economy appeared sluggish. This, accompanied by what some considered a diffident attitude by President Bush, who seemed preoccupied with foreign policy rather than domestic discontent, provided Clinton an opening. Moreover, maverick third-party candidate Ross Perot garnered 19% of the popular vote and may have very well tipped the outcome in the 1992 in Clinton's favor. Nonetheless, give credit where credit is deserved, Clinton took the political gamble and won.
Clinton was the recipient of a few political advantages that have helped Democratic presidential hopefuls. First, he was from the South. No Democrat from a state north of the Mason-Dixon line has been elected President since 1960, when John Kennedy won. Not only have Democrats from the north, or northwest not won, they have been clobbered. Just ask George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. Jimmy Carter from Georgia defeated President Gerald Ford in 1976 and Tennessee's Al Gore won a popular national majority in 2000. If Gore had just managed to win his home state, he would have won in the Electoral College and be president today. It is clear, if the Democrats want to win, they would best look toward a candidate from the South.
Second, Clinton effectively nurtured an image as a moderate. He was a member of the Democratic Leadership Council that had tried to wrest the Democratic Party from its more Liberal elements that up until that point had doomed Democrats to losses in three sequential presidential elections. Jimmy Carter too had run as a fiscally conservative moderate. Whatever, one's evaluation of how they governed, Clinton and Carter did not run as traditional Liberals.
