Le blog de Thierry MANDON

1984: Reagan weathered a March 1981 assassination attempt by a crazed gunman and a deep recession in the first two years of his term. But by the time of his re-election campaign, the economy was recovering and most voters appeared satisfied with Reagan’s mix of diplomacy and tough talk in dealing with the Soviets. He was unopposed for the 1984 Republican nomination.

All the primary and caucus action therefore was on the Democratic side. The campaign produced a tough fight at the top, in which front-runner Walter F. Mondale — Carter’s vice president and a former senator from Minnesota — had to battle to stave off the upstart campaign of Colorado Sen. Gary Hart. The Democratic contest also was notable for the emergence of veteran civil rights activist Jesse Jackson as the first African-American to seriously compete for a major party’s nomination.

Mondale became the latest front-runner victim of the expectations game in the Iowa caucuses Feb. 20. Though he won by a 32-point margin over runner-up Hart — who began the campaign as a longshot — his 49 percent plurality in the crowded field was widely portrayed as subpar. Hart, McGovern’s campaign manager in 1972, gained media attention as he portrayed himself as a candidate of new ideas and Mondale as representative of a tired liberal party establishment. Riding the momentum, Hart defeated Mondale by 37 percent to 30 percent in the New Hampshire primary Feb. 28 and established himself as a serious contender.

Mondale soon unleashed the most memorable quote of the nominating campaign. “When I hear your new ideas, I’m reminded of that ad, ‘Where’s the beef?’” Mondale chided Hart in a March 11 debate. The zinger referred to a then-popular TV ad for Wendy’s in which elderly actress Clara Peller playing a crabby customer used that phrase to loudly complain about the alleged lack of meat served by the hamburger chain’s competitors. Yet Mondale had trouble putting Hart away. In primaries held two days after that debate, Mondale won in Alabama and Georgia while Hart finished first in Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The two staged a battle over more than three months, culminating on June 5: Though Hart won California by about 4 points, Mondale’s wins in New Jersey and West Virginia were enough to keep him ahead going into the convention, where added support from party officials enabled him to take the nomination.

Jackson, meanwhile, made his mark by winning primaries in the District of Columbia on May 1 and Louisiana on May 5, and by taking 20 percent of the vote or more in states with large black populations, including Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina in the South and Illinois, New York, Maryland and New Jersey in the urban North.

The prolonged nominating campaign cost Mondale financial resources, and Reagan later exploited the often dour and uncharismatic image that Mondale presented in the primaries. But Mondale would have faced difficult odds in any case against Reagan, who was at the height of his popularity and had the benefit of a greatly improved mood among the nation’s voters: Running on the theme that it was “morning” again in America, Reagan swept to a 49-state electoral landslide and defeated Mondale in the popular vote by 18 points — despite Mondale’s effort to shake up the race by picking New York Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro as his vice presidential candidate, making her the first and still the only woman to run on a major party’s national ticket.

The front-loading of the presidential nominating process became a permanent feature with the 1988 campaign. South Dakota, which normally held its primary in June, wedged in on Feb. 23, just a week after New Hampshire. But the much bigger development came two weeks later, when an unprecedented 16 states crowded in on March 8 — a phenomenon that produced the label of “Super Tuesday.”

Though a desire for a slice of the primary publicity pie was one reason for the rush to the front of the calendar, a strategic imperative on the Democratic side also drove a number of Southern states — which held most of the Super Tuesday contests — to join together on that single day. A number of moderate and conservative Democrats, heavily concentrated in that region, contended that Walter F. Mondale’s electoral debacle in 1984 was largely the result of his image as an old-school liberal who was beholden to organized labor and other Democratic-allied interest groups, and they developed the Super Tuesday concept to try to give the South a greater voice in the process and steer the party toward the center.

The plan failed. Two candidates thought to have some centrist appeal had been forced out of the running early: Gary Hart, by then a former senator, because of allegations of an extramarital affair, and Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. , following allegations that he had plagiarized part of a campaign speech. Tennessee’s Al Gore, then a 39-year-old first-term senator, sought to position himself as the candidate of the South, but failed to catch on sufficiently with voters. And the Southern states on Super Tuesday provided a variety of outcomes that enabled liberal Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis to maintain the front-runner status he had gained in the New Hampshire primary Feb. 16 with a 36 percent to 20 percent win over Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who had won the Feb. 8 caucuses in Iowa with an unconvincing 31 percent to 27 percent for Illinois Sen. Paul Simon and 22 percent for Dukakis.

Rather than provide a more conservative alternative, Super Tuesday left the most liberal contender — Jesse Jackson — as the more enduring competitor to Dukakis in his ultimately successful drive to clinch the nomination long before the convention. Jackson’s strong support among black voters who made up a substantial share of the Democratic primary base in most Southern states enabled him to finish first in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia. Gore did dominate his home state of Tennessee and also led the field in Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oklahoma, but it was far from the sweeping regional victory he needed to sustain his campaign.

Dukakis, meanwhile, scored a couple of Southern victories himself, in Florida and Texas, easily outran Jackson in Maryland and dominated Massachusetts and Rhode Island on his New England home turf.

After a “favorite son” victory for Simon in Illinois, Dukakis swept the remaining 14 primaries, with his only loss to Jackson coming May 3 in the District of Columbia contest. But a Massachusetts issue that Gore raised obliquely during his unsuccessful campaign for the New York primary April 19 would later blow up into a damaging problem for Dukakis — and the most controversial element of the 1988 campaign. Gore criticized a prison furlough program in Massachusetts under which some inmates had committed crimes while on leave, but did not single out any individual incidents. The policy was later personified by the campaign of Vice President Geoge Bush, who early on had claimed the Republican nomination to succeed Reagan; led by consultant Lee Atwater — who had inspired a mix of grudging respect and loathing for his negative campaign tactics — the Bush camp sought rhetorically to tie Dukakis to Willie Horton, a Massachusetts inmate who had fled while on a furlough and raped a woman after beating and stabbing her fiance.

Democrats accused Republicans of trying to stoke racial fears, especially after an independent group with close ties to the Republican Party ran the since-famous “Willie Horton” ad — which included a glowering mug shot of the felon, who is black. But the issue blunted Dukakis’ efforts to escape the “liberal” label and run on his competence as a governor whose tenure coincided with a state economic comeback that had been touted as the “Massachusetts Miracle.” Bush won the general election easily: Though his 53 percent to 46 percent win over Dukakis was short of a popular vote landslide, Bush won the electoral votes of 40 states.

There had been a moment of uncertainty about Bush’s prospects at the beginning of the Republican nominating campaign. Though the heir apparent after eight years as Reagan’s vice president, Bush drew several competitors. Chief among them was Bob Dole of Kansas, the longtime Senate Republican leader and the 1976 vice presidential nominee on Ford’s ticket. Bush expected serious competition from Dole in Iowa, a farm state with similarities to his home base. But when the caucus results came in, Bush had only 19 percent, trailing not only Dole (the winner with 37 percent) but also the upstart campaign of religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (25 percent).

With the New Hampshire primary just eight days away, Bush had little time to regain his footing, but he did, in a campaign sprint that featured a preview of Atwater’s hard-hitting tactics. While Bush worked to shed his patrician image with events that included a brief stint driving an 18-wheeler truck, his campaign ran an intensive flight of TV ads in which Dole was portrayed as amenable to tax increases. Bush’s win, by 38 percent to 28 percent, was hardly dominating for the presumed front-runner, but Dole set back his own campaign on primary night. Interviewed simultaneously with Bush on a TV news show, Dole was asked if he had anything to say to the winner; he replied, “Tell him to stop lying about my record.” The incident made some view him as a sore loser, and revived a reputation for “meanness” with which he had long been burdened.

After easily outrunning Dole, Robertson and others in the South Carolina primary March 5, Bush quickly became the first big beneficiary of primary front-loading. He swept all 16 primaries three days later on Super Tuesday, effectively clinching the Republican nomination.

President George Bush’s job approval ratings soared in early 1991, as a broad international coalition led by U.S. troops ended Iraq’s occupation of neighboring Kuwait and forced Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein into terms of surrender that including destruction of his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He also was expected to enjoy political benefits from the collapse of the Soviet Union and other eastern European communist regimes, which ended more than four decades of Cold War.

But his political timing proved awful. By the end of the year, and on the eve of his campaign for re-election, Bush’s approval ratings had tanked. One reason was his attempt to downplay the effects of a serious recession — a strategy that angered many voters and gave him a hard-to-shake image of being out of touch with the realities of everyday Americans.

And although Bush ultimately won the renomination with relative ease, he had to quell a rebellion within the ranks of conservative Republicans. The federal deficit had been stubbornly high since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who emphasized tax cuts, and concerns over the long-term impact heightened pressure to reduce the red ink. Though Bush demanded that the Democratic-controlled Congress work to rein in spending, he ultimately agreed to a budget deal that included tax increases. Many conservatives who had long been skeptical of Bush cried betrayal, especially in light of the sweeping pledge he made in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican convention when he had declared: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”

The dissent on the right provided fuel for a campaign by Pat Buchanan, longtime conservative commentator and former aide to President Richard M. Nixon. Buchanan challenged Bush for the GOP nomination on both the economy and on a perception that Bush gave only lip service to key social issues of concern to conservatives.

Bush had no opposition in the Iowa caucuses, but Buchanan staged a full-blown campaign in New Hampshire — a state that had been hit hard by the recession — and held the president to a mediocre victory of 53 percent to 37 percent. Buchanan never seriously threatened Bush’s front-runner status, and the contest for the nomination was effectively over with the year’s much smaller “Super Tuesday” as Bush swept the eight primaries held that day, predominantly in the South. Buchanan nonetheless received significant vote shares in most of the contests, topping 25 percent as late as the California primary on June 2. He was enough of a factor to receive a prime-time speaking slot at that summer’s convention, something the Bush campaign came to regret after Buchanan made a strongly ideological and controversial speech in which he declared that the nation was embroiled in a “culture war.”

Bush went on to lose the general election to Democrat Bill Clinton, whose outsized personality enabled him to survive persistent questions about his personal life that likely would have crippled the campaigns of most other candidates. Few, if any, presidential candidates have better converted a second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary into a springboard to the nomination.

The Democratic campaign turned into a free-for-all after three-term New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, widely viewed as a potential front-runner, decided not to enter the race. Clinton, already the veteran governor of Arkansas at age 46, was little known nationally, but soon drew media attention that made him a top-tier contender in a field that also included former Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, Sens. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Tom Harkin of Iowa and former Gov. Jerry Brown of California, who had staged a late-starting bid for the 1976 nomination.

With the other candidates ceding to Harkin’s favorite-son status in Iowa, the New Hampshire primary was the first big showdown — and the place where Clinton’s campaign almost sank before it really began due to allegations by an Arkansas woman named Gennifer Flowers, who said she had a 12-year affair with the candidate. Clinton denied the claim, backed by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton , and the two made a sympathetic appearance in an interview with the CBS News show “60 Minutes” just before the primary. Clinton lost the primary but won the expectations game. His camp succeeded at spinning Tsongas’ 33 percent finish for first place as mediocre, given that his home town of Lowell, Mass., is just a few miles from the New Hampshire border, while Clinton’s second-place showing at 25 percent was spun as a measure of his resilience: Clinton himself claimed the title of “The Comeback Kid” in a primary night statement that had all the trappings of a victory speech.

Clinton had to fight a while longer for the nomination. Brown narrowly edged him in the Colorado primary March 3. Tsongas — who had been out of politics since 1984, when health problems compelled him to decline a Senate re-election bid — hung in for a while with a campaign that focused strongly on his reputation as a “fiscal hawk” who would seek to reduce the federal deficit. He won primaries in Maryland on March 3 and in Massachusetts and Rhode Island on March 10, while accusing Clinton of making fiscally irresponsible promises to curry votes. As a campaign gimmick, Tsongas brandished a stuffed toy he called “Pander Bear.” But Clinton won a series of victories and soon gained unstoppable momentum.

With the public in a surly mood toward the federal government and expressing dissatisfaction with both major parties, the on-off-and-on-again independent campaign of billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot lent an air of unpredictability to the general election campaign. Condemning business as usual in Washington and emphasizing the dangers of deficit spending and his opposition to free-trade deals that he called job killers, Perot announced his candidacy during a February 1992 appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” briefly soared past Bush and Clinton in national polls, quit the race in July and then re-entered to stay in early October. But his appeal was undercut by his quirky behavior, which included his accusation during a “60 Minutes” appearance that Republican dirty tricksters had sought to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. Though his 19 percent share of the popular vote was one of the strongest ever for a third-party candidate he did not come close to winning the electoral votes of any state.

Clinton, who chose Al Gore as his running mate, presented a dynamic image in his bid to become the first “baby boomer” elected president, while Bush — a World War II veteran with a long record of public service — often appeared peeved that voters were thinking about replacing him with an upstart. It did Bush no good when a camera caught him looking at his wristwatch during a debate with Clinton and Perot. Clinton won by 43 percent to 37 percent, carrying 32 states and the District of Columbia.

Clinton’s political timing going into his re-election campaign year — in which he was unopposed for the Democratic nomination — was as good as Bush’s had been poor.

It was nearly impossible to find anyone who viewed Clinton as a sure thing for re-election even in the year before the 1996 contest. His first two years in office were tumultuous. His first act in office, an effort to lift the ban on gays in the military, was hugely controversial. His deficit reduction package, which include tax increases, passed the Democratic-controlled House by one vote. Key proposals ended in gridlock — including an overhaul of the nation’s health care system (a plan engineering by first lady Hillary Clinton), an anti-crime bill that contained gun control provisions and an economic stimulus program. Even a big victory, Clinton’s push to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, came with a political price, as it angered much of organized labor and many Democratic activists. The election cycle culminated with the Republican takeover of both chambers of Congress (ending 40 consecutive years of Democratic control in the House).

Led by an aggressive cadre of hard-line conservatives that included new House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Republicans in 1995 quickly achieved House passage of many proposals embodied in the GOP’s 1994 campaign platform, the “Contract with America.” Clinton initially was on the defensive as Republicans deemed him “irrelevant.” But the turning point in Clinton’s hopes for re-election came at the end of the year: His resistance to Republican demands that he sign spending bills embodying their conservative priorities and including cuts in programs popular among Democrats spurred a showdown that included brief shutdowns of much of the federal government. Clinton got the better of the clash in public opinion and enjoyed a timely improvement in his approval ratings in early 1996, pre-empting any thoughts of a challenge to his renomination.

The general election matchup between Clinton and veteran lawmaker Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., was quickly set. The dues that Dole had long paid in national Republican politics earned him front-runner status for the 1996 race, and he survived some early bumps, utilizing his strength within the national and state GOP organization to blow through the increasingly front-loaded primary schedule.

Despite the dibs he hoped to have on the nomination, Dole faced doubters entering the campaign. He turned 73 that July, which would have topped Reagan’s mark as the oldest first-elected president by four years. The acerbic manner Dole had occasionally displayed during his political career was thought by some to contrast poorly with the sunniness usually displayed by the much-younger Clinton. A number of conservatives viewed him as an establishment Republican who was too flexible on fiscal issues and not enough of a crusader on their social issues agenda.

The Republican field included political veterans such as Sens. Phil Gramm of Texas and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana as well as Lamar Alexander , a former Tennessee governor and U.S. education secretary under Bush. But two political outsiders generated the strongest opposition to Dole: longtime political commentator Pat Buchanan, making a second try, and wealthy publisher Steve Forbes. Buchanan again gained much of his support from cultural conservative activists; Forbes’ approach was to cast himself as the strongest economic conservative in a campaign in which he emphasized proposals to overhaul the nation’s tax system.

The Feb. 12 Iowa caucuses were a harbinger of the troubles Dole would face in the campaign’s opening weeks. He edged Buchanan by just 26 percent to 23 percent, with Alexander’s 18 percent netting him third place. Dole’s front-runner status was even more shaken on Feb. 20 in New Hampshire, where Buchanan edged him by 27 percent to 26 percent, with Alexander close behind at 23 percent.

Then came Forbes’ turn to briefly emerge as a serious challenger, as he finished first on Feb. 24 in Delaware and on Feb. 27 in Arizona, with Dole running second in both states. Dole’s only February primary wins came in low-profile Feb. 27 events in North Dakota and South Dakota.

But the primary-crammed month of March produced a decisive change in momentum that brought the competition to a sudden end. The turning point came on March 5 in conservative South Carolina, where Dole bested Buchanan by 45 percent to 29 percent. The campaign, which up until then, had been dominated by “retail” politics, turned into a rolling version of a national primary in which only Dole had the resources, name ID and party organizational backing to break from the pack. He swept the eight primaries held March 5, most by solid margins, crushed Forbes by 55 percent to 30 percent two days later in New York, then ran the table again on the mostly Southern card of nine primaries on March 12. By the time he swept the four Midwestern states (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin) that voted on March 19, Dole had the nomination pretty much wrapped up.

That left Republicans in California with little to do but affirm the other states’ judgment, even though the nation’s most-populous state had for the first time stepped into the primary front-loading frenzy, moving its contest from its traditional early June date at the end of the nominating process to March 26.

Dole’s success in locking up the nomination early enabled him to save financial resources and prevented an additional battering over the final weeks of the primary campaign. He resigned from the Senate in June to concentrate on his general election campaign. But the Democrats targeted him early for their own negative advertising campaign. The campaign staged by the Clinton camp and the Democratic National Committee sought to link Dole to Gingrich, whose aggressive pursuit of a conservative agenda had made him controversial. The November outcome was short of a popular vote blowout: Clinton won by 49 percent to 41 percent, with Perot, this time running as the nominee of the Reform Party that he had founded, slipping to 8 percent. But Clinton easily won the Electoral College by carrying 31 states and Washington.

The front-loading of the primary and caucus calendar accelerated in 2000. The Iowa caucuses were held on Jan. 24, followed by the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 1. Republicans held February primaries in six other states: Delaware on Feb. 8; South Carolina on Feb. 19; Arizona and Michigan on Feb. 22 and Virginia and Washington on Feb. 29.

Democrats tried to restrain the rush to the front by setting March 7 as the first date on which all states other than Iowa and New Hampshire could hold official delegate-selection events. But 11 states responded by crowding their primaries for both the Democrats and Republicans onto March 7, a regionally diverse grouping that included populous California, New York and Ohio, with their large blocs of delegates. Six Southern states joined up on March 14 to try to replicate the Super Tuesday of 1988 — but even this early date put those states in the position of just affirming the candidate choices that had already been set by the earlier-voting states.

Once again, the front-loaded schedule worked greatly to the benefit of the front-running candidates: Al Gore, the two-term vice president under Bill Clinton, on the Democratic side, and second-term Texas Republican Gov. George W. Bush , a son of former President George Bush. Both candidates faced some early bumps but broke away from their competition by winning big on those multi-state primary days.

Both candidates had significant assets entering the race. Running as the virtual incumbent, Gore enjoyed the upside of the Clinton administration’s two terms: The economy was strong, and though Clinton had deployed troops to intervene in the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the nation generally felt at peace in the post-Cold War world.

Bush, after spending most of his adult life in business ventures, had a meteoric political rise, upsetting Texas Democratic Gov. Ann Richards in a hard-fought 1994 race and then winning re-election in a landslide in 1998. He reached out to centrist voters by calling himself a “compassionate conservative” and the equally alliterative if more awkward “reformer with results.” Overall though, he crafted a more ideologically conservative image than his father had and showed a better common touch. Bush quickly galvanized support from many Republicans across the nation who were determined to recapture the White House; he also tapped the large network of connections built by his father to raise unprecedented amounts of campaign money.

But both candidates had serious flaws, too. Gore’s desire to associate with the popular parts of Clinton’s legacy was tempered by concerns about being linked to the scandals that had plagued the president — most prominently Clinton’s extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky that led to his 1998 impeachment by the Republican-controlled House on charges of lying to a grand jury (and his subsequent acquittal by the GOP-run Senate). Gore had his own image problems, as he was widely portrayed as a stiff and somewhat pompous personality. Bush, meanwhile, was cast as not too bright and lacking in national political experience, especially in international affairs.

These doubts about the front-runners stoked the campaigns of challengers who ran as political outsiders: former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, Gore’s only opponent in the Democratic primaries, and Arizona Sen. John McCain , a Republican with something of a maverick image who blew past other contenders to turn the GOP campaign into a one-on-one showdown.

McCain’s hopes for winning the nomination were based on three major factors: the former Navy pilot’s renown as a heroic prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict; his willingness, even with his overall strongly conservative voting record, to take outspoken positions apart from Republican orthodoxy (including his long-running effort to overhaul the campaign finance system); and his calls for cutting what he called wasteful pork-barrel federal spending.

That last position led McCain to take a risky strategic gamble by skipping the Iowa caucuses, largely because he had denounced federal subsidies, popular in the state, for the production of corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel. But the caucuses nonetheless punctured the air of inevitability that Bush had sought to build around his campaign for the nomination: He received a modest 41 percent to second-time candidate Forbes’ 30 percent. McCain, meanwhile, was enjoying a boomlet in the press as he scoured New Hampshire on a campaign bus he labeled the “Straight Talk Express.”

McCain then stunned Bush and many political pundits by defeating the putative front-runner by 49 percent to 30 percent in New Hampshire — a state where he benefited greatly from the fact that independent voters were allowed to participate in the Republican primary. The upset produced an intense, though brief, fight for political survival between the two candidates. Bush regained his footing somewhat by winning a week later in Delaware, with 51 percent to McCain’s 25 percent. But the focus of the campaign shifted to the Feb. 19 contest in South Carolina, where momentum would take a decisive turn.

Again distancing himself from his father’s approach by voicing more assertively conservative views on social issues such as abortion, Bush — a self-described born-again Christian — built support with South Carolina’s significant constituency of religious conservatives. The Bush camp, orchestrated by longtime Bush consultant Karl Rove, ran a hard-hitting campaign questioning McCain’s conservative credentials. McCain accused the Bush campaign of being behind dirty tricks, including rumors circulated in the state that McCain had an illegitimate child by an African-American woman and was mentally instable because of traumas suffered as a POW. But Bush prevailed by 53 percent to 42 percent in the primary known as the gateway to the South.

McCain would have one more heyday on Feb. 22, defeating Bush by 51 percent to 43 percent in Michigan, again with the help of independents voting in the Republican primary, and his expected home-state landslide in Arizona, where he took 60 percent. But Bush won the Feb. 29 contests in Virginia and Washington — which in turn set up his decisive near-sweep of the crowded March 7 primary schedule, in which his huge advantage in financial resources really kicked in.

Bush won seven of the 11 contests held that day, including those held in the biggest states. Though McCain carried the four New England states voting that day, it was clear that Bush had unstoppable momentum — a sense confirmed the next week when he dominated the six Southern state primaries.

The competition for the Democratic nomination was short-lived. Though Bradley ran a competitive New Hampshire primary campaign, he failed to win any contests and was forced out of the race by early March.

Bradley sought support as a more liberal alternative to Gore, playing off the Clinton administration’s stated effort to move the Democratic Party closer to the political center — a strategy seen in the welfare overhaul compromise between Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress in 1996. Bradley’s calls for overhauling the campaign finance system echoed a series of fundraising scandals, mostly related to the Democrats’ 1996 re-election campaign, that had tarnished both Clinton and Gore. Bradley also sought to draw support from some environmentalists who were dismayed with Gore, who had been one of the first major American figures to draw attention to global climate change but did not emphasize the issue during his presidential bid.

Bradley, a Princeton University graduate and Rhodes scholar, also was acknowledged as highly intelligent, and enjoyed some celebrity as a former basketball star at Princeton and for the NBA’s New York Knicks. But Bradley’s dry style as a candidate failed to light sparks with many Democratic activists, and Democrats’ still-strong job approval ratings for Clinton, even as many disapproved of his personal behavior, carried over to Gore. The vice president trounced Bradley by 63 percent to 35 percent in Iowa, though Bradley was born and raised in neighboring Missouri. The nominating campaign briefly took on some life after Bradley held Gore to a 50 percent to 46 percent win in New Hampshire. But the Republicans’ decisions to move several primaries up into February while the Democrats did not allowed the GOP to dominate attention, and Bradley’s effort to make a case against Gore in the run-up to March 7 was overshadowed by the vitriolic battles between Bush and McCain. Bradley left the race shortly after Gore swept the 11 contests on March 7, most by overwhelming margins.

Bush and Gore would go down to the wire in one of the closest and most controversial presidential elections in American history. Although Gore narrowly won the national popular vote, Bush claimed the decisive Electoral College victory by a razor-thin margin. The result hung on an extremely close contest in Florida, where more than a month of recounts, court fights and protests ended with a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively clinched the state and the presidential election for Bush.

There wasn’t even a hint of a challenge to George W. Bush for the 2004 Republican nomination, as he sought a second term as president. His assertive declaration of a “war on terror” following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and his provision of military support to the successful efforts to oust the Taliban regime that had harbored the radical al Qaeda groups in Afghanistan, had enabled Bush to break the job approval record his father had set following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Though Bush’s subsequent decision to commit a large U.S. force to Iraq in March 2003 to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein met with less universal acclaim — and was growing increasingly unpopular among Democrats and independents as the 2004 campaign got under way — the president remained highly popular among Republicans, ensuring he would draw no GOP primary opposition.

The Democratic contest to pick Bush’s challenger had an unusual trajectory. Four-term Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry — seen as harboring presidential ambitions since his days in the early 1970s as a decorated Navy veteran of Vietnam turned war protestor — established himself as the early front-runner for the nomination. He would be overtaken for a time by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose fiery denunciations of the war in Iraq and innovative use of the Internet as a political organizing tool enabled him to quickly build a support base. But Dean was to stumble badly as the campaign went on.

Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was opposed from the start by many Democrats, who argued that the administration rushed to war without sufficient evidence for its claims that the Iraqi regime had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. The dissent grew louder as the armed resistance to the U.S. presence in Iraq grew and the Iraqis proved incapable of forming a workable government that would allow a reduced American role.

Dean, who had denounced Bush’s push toward war even before the invasion, quickly drew backing from some anti-war activists who were angered by support from Democratic candidates for the 2002 resolution that authorized Bush to use military force against Iraq. This group included Kerry, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards , Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt. Though there were other longshot candidates who spoke out against the war, including civil rights activist Al Sharpton and Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich , Dean used the Web to build an instant constituency. Using a strategy developed by longtime Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, Dean stunned the political community by raising millions of campaign dollars over the Internet. He also drove momentum for his campaign by organizing local rallies using Web sites such as Meetup.com.

By the fall of 2003, Dean emerged at the top of the polls. Kerry, whose early campaign was slowed by his recovery from prostate cancer surgery, was struggling to engage campaign audiences; in a problem similar to that endured by Al Gore in the 2000 campaign, Kerry was often characterized as stiff, a stereotype abetted by his image as a Boston patrician (which ultimately gave Republicans fodder to brand him as an “Eastern elitist”). Meanwhile, the youthful and attractive Edwards was developing into a potential force, with his signature issues of fighting poverty and income inequality. The September 2003 entry of retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO forces in the Balkan conflict of the late 1990s, added a wild card. He seemed to combine some of the key assets of other leading candidates, competing with Edwards’ handsome appearance, Kerry’s military credentials and Dean’s stance against the Iraq war.

Other candidates who had been expected to be in the top tier found themselves struggling for attention. Gephardt, the longtime Democratic leader in the U.S. House, had hoped his career-long alliance with organized labor would enable him to sweep key endorsements from that Democratic-allied constituency, but unions ended up splitting their support. Gephardt’s unprepossessing demeanor also kept him from catching fire, as was the case in his brief bid for the 1988 Democratic nomination. Lieberman, meanwhile, enjoyed no bounce from his candidacy for vice president on the narrowly defeated 2000 ticket headed by Gore. His emergence as the most vocal congressional Democratic supporter of Bush’s Iraq policy turned off Democratic voters in droves.

Dean’s fall would be as dramatic as his rapid rise. His leap into the top tier brought more media scrutiny, and with it came more public exposure of Dean’s raging populist campaign style, in which he often appeared angry. Democratic strategists talked aloud about whether Dean would wear well as a general election candidate against Bush and his amiable persona, and opponents warned voters seeking Bush’s ouster that Dean was unelectable. Kerry, meanwhile, finally found a campaign rhythm, impressing Iowa audiences with his knowledge, experience and criticisms of Bush’s handling of the Iraq war.

The changing dynamics were certified when Iowans held their caucuses on Jan. 19. Kerry finished first with 38 percent, and it was Edwards who finished second with 32 percent — not Dean, who had 18 percent. Gephardt, of neighboring Missouri, finished fourth with 11 percent, a devastating outcome that quickly forced him to leave the race.

Then, at a caucus night rally, Dean sought to show himself unbowed by the setback and ended up committing a gaffe that imploded his campaign. After shouting out the names of upcoming primary and caucus states where he intended to carry on his campaign, Dean swung his fist and uttered a strange, high-pitched shout that became memorialized as the “Dean Scream.” Though it was later reported that his actions were aimed at firing up the crowd of volunteers, his appearance as captured by television cameras made him look out of control.

The New Hampshire primary Jan. 27 had been previewed as a key showdown between Kerry, from the state neighboring to the south, and Dean, from the neighboring state to the west. But Kerry won easily, by 38 percent to 26 percent for Dean, as Clark in his campaign debut edged Edwards for third, both with 12 percent. Lieberman’s fifth-place finish with 9 percent underscored the weakness of his campaign and he was out of the race within days.

Dean hung in for three more weeks, as the Democrats, following the front-loading lead of the Republicans in 2000, staged nine primaries in February. He made a last stand in Wisconsin’s primary Feb. 17, but finished third and soon announced his withdrawal.

By that time, Kerry had re-established himself as the front-runner, with Edwards and Arkansas native Clark competing to emerge as both the chief challenger and the candidate of the South. Kerry was able to effectively blunt that strategy, though. While Feb. 3 brought Edwards an expected win in his birth state of South Carolina (by 45 percent to 30 percent over Kerry) and Clark narrowly edged Edwards in Oklahoma (with Kerry a close third), Kerry scored primary victories the same day in Arizona, Delaware and Missouri.

Kerry then effectively put the race away on the record early date of Feb. 10 by winning primaries in two states in the upper South. He took 41 percent in Tennessee to defeat Edwards by a bit more than 15 points, with Clark close behind in third, and took just more than 51 percent to trounce Edwards by 25 points in Virginia, with Clark well out of the running.

The next week brought the Wisconsin primary. Edwards did much better than Dean there, but the outcome nonetheless put an end to his serious hopes of gaining the nomination. Edwards ran a vigorous campaign and made a strong impression on audiences, and his advocates said he might have won there if he had more time between his emergence as a serious candidate in Iowa and the primary in Wisconsin. But Kerry held on to win with 40 percent and a five-point margin over Edwards.

The slew of nine primaries held March 2 — including those in California, Georgia, New York and Ohio — put the icing on the cake for Kerry, who swept them all, most by landslide margins. Edwards ultimately would re-emerge as Kerry’s vice presidential running mate.

While his quick clinching of the nomination spared Kerry a long and bruising intraparty campaign, it left months for the Bush campaign, again headed by Rove, and other Republican operatives to attack him and try to craft an image of the Democratic contender as an extreme liberal, a snob, and a vacillator.

Kerry unintentionally handed them a huge gift during an appearance in West Virginia. In response to a Bush campaign ad run in that state that criticized Kerry for voting against an $87 billion supplemental appropriation sought by Bush for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kerry said, “I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” There was a rational explanation for what Kerry had meant: He had voted for a Democratic version of the bill that would have provided the $87 billion, but offset it by reducing tax cuts pushed into law by Bush during his first term that Democrats portrayed as a sop to the wealthy. He then voted against a Republican version, which was passed and enacted into law, that provided the $87 billion without any tax or budget offsets. But the awkward phrasing of Kerry’s comment fed a Republican effort to portray him as a flip-flopper.

The five-week hiatus between the Democratic and Republican conventions also proved damaging to Kerry. He made two huge tactical mistakes: going on vacation rather than continuing to take the fight to Bush, and failing to respond quickly and effectively to ads run by the ad hoc group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, in which Vietnam veterans opposed to Kerry raised doubts about his heroism during the war and alleged that he had betrayed the troops remaining in Vietnam when he returned home and became an anti-war activist.

The general election nonetheless turned out to be close. The still-rankling controversy over Bush’s 2000 defeat of Gore and the high degree of partisanship with which the Bush administration had pursued its first-term agenda enabled Kerry to count on a big and solid Democratic voting base, and the war in Iraq — which was proving to be longer, more expensive and deadlier than Bush had predicted — had become a growing political liability. Bush did win a clear popular victory this time with a 2-point margin over Kerry, but still needed a narrow win in one big state — this time Ohio — to ensure his electoral vote triumph.