Why was Bill Clinton so unpopular at this point in his first term?

[Gravitycollapse]

I was a small child at the time and have not studied up much on the intricacies of his first term.

According to 538, Clinton's approval was 39.7% at the point in his term, while Trump is at 38.7.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

[JI7]

1. i was going to say Somalia but i think that was a little later

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

2. Would not have guessed that.

[Freddie]

3. There was a pretty serious recession at the time

And like Obama in 2009, people expected him to cure it instantly when he took office.

[former9thward]

10. No recession.

The 1990-91 recession lasted only 6 months and ended almost two years before Clinton took office.

https://www.thebalance.com/the-history-of-recessions-in-the-united-states-3306011

[Buckeyeblue]

4. A couple of reasons

I think he took a big hit with the way the David Koresh situation ended playing out. A lot of children died and the feds aggressive actions to apprehend Koresh were blamed.

Also, NAFTA was signed early on. Working people were against NAFTA which is one of the reasons Ross Perot was so popular.

And he was Bill Clinton--he has had his ups and downs. People don't like him but they do like him. If that makes sense.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

29. NAFTA was signed in 1994

[Buckeye_Democrat]

5. Congress wasn't passing much of his legislation, the deaths at Waco and

... having a couple attorney general nominees (before Janet Reno) withdrawn for hiring illegal immigrants probably didn't help matters.

[Gravitycollapse]

6. Thanks (to all) this is very enlightening.

[JHB]

7. Recession (or just coming out of one), plus the start of....

...the now-familiar pattern of conservatives stoking a perpetual air of outrage and scandalmongering to hobble any attempt to walk back anything they pushed through during the Reagan/Bush years.

And a mainstream media that was eager to prove it didn't have "liberal bias". One newsmagazine had a weekly "Clinton suck-up watch" to chastise reporters who were deemed insufficiently critical of the Clinton administration.

On edit: plus Waco and some of the other factors mentioned by other posters. All of those amplified by what I mention above: conservative foam-stoking and a media eager for such stoking.

[Cosmocat]

9. It was the start of modern conservative fuck wittery

Nm

[oberliner]

8. Economic recession, high unemployment

Things hadn't turned around yet on those fronts.

[former9thward]

12. There was no recession.

The 1990-91 recession was only 6 months long and ended almost two years before Clinton took office.

https://www.thebalance.com/the-history-of-recessions-in-the-united-states-3306011

[Freddie]

17. Technically yes but

If memory serves (I had 2 toddlers at the time) things still weren't that great. The main reason Bush the Elder lost in 92 was the perception of him being out of touch (didn't know the price of milk or how a grocery scanner worked) and not acknowledging the severity of the recession that happened under his watch.

[former9thward]

26. If you go to Snopes you will find the grocery scanner incident never happened.

Urban legend.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscanner.asp

The main reason he lost was Ross Perot.

[oberliner]

22. Yes, there was

Excerpts from news conference in June 1993 with Thomas Foley, Democrat and Speaker of the House, and Newt Gingrich, House Republican whip:

"Back in December 1991 the economy was sagging and threatening to get much worse. The number of people working fell an astonishing 250,000 in one month. Now, 18 months later, the economy's still stagnating."

[former9thward]

25. Please show where any economist says that.

I offered my proof. Politicians say anything.

[oberliner]

31. Your link identifies the recession

My claim, supported by the NY Times article, is that things had not yet turned around on that front (i.e. the effects of the recession were still being felt, even 16 months later).

The unemployment rate in early 1993 was 7 percent.

As the unemployment rate when down at the economy began to improve in the latter part of the year, BC's approval ratings started to get higher.

My assertion is that those economic realities were the primary mover in his approval numbers.

Do you have another theory as to why his numbers went down in early 1993 and then went up later in the year and into 1994?

[Cosmocat]

11. He won election with only 43% of the vote

Republicans had gotten the knives out on HW Bush because he commuted the only true sin of being responsible enough to sign of on tax increases that effected the rich, and Ross Perot ran as an independent and drew a really big percentage of votes.

So, he was basically starting at about 43 % approval.

But, as the poster above noted, the drone of AM hate radio had been established in the mid to late 80s and was really starting to take, in addition to the politicization of evangelicals via the "moral/silent majority" ... the cancer that matasticized to what we see today was just beginning to bloom.

[roamer65]

32. Bingo.

[BumRushDaShow]

13. First WTC bombing happened - truck bombing in WTC 1 garage Feb. 26, 1993

linked to the "Blind Sheikh " Omar Abdel-Rahman (who just died this past February). This happened during that early period in Clinton's term and appeared to be a test run for what eventually happened in 2001.







(as a sidenote, the above NY Daily News articles mentions a Bosnia airlift which refers to this - http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/22/world/clinton-says-us-is-planning-airlift-to-eastern-bosnia.html)

Add to that the Waco siege (and the birth of the use of the term "jack-booted thugs" to describe the ATF agents).

Note too Clinton came out of his first election with a plurality of votes due to Ross Perot - (rounded) BC=43%, GB=37%, RP=19%.

[karynnj]

14. A very rocky start

It took a long time for him to understand that Congress was not similar to the Arkansas legislature. This was magnified by the Republicans having held the Presidency for 12 years and he was not impressed by Carter people. He appointed a long time Arkansas friend as CoS, rather than someone who better understood DC.

Combined, this meant that he had to build what was an almost new executive branch. He had trouble vetting nominees. He had a series of AG candidates who had to withdraw because they handled wages paid to nannies wrong. He had a huge amount of trouble getting people confirmed as ambassadors.

He attempted to deal with gays in the military immediately and ended with a compromise that angered many and pleased few.

He also ignored Democratic Senators' advice to just put everything out on Whitewater, rather than fighting, to get rid of that debilitating issue.

[AngryAmish]

15. Just a bunch of little stuff.

Remember he won just a plurality of the vote. Ross Perot was in the race. He ran on populism and jobs, then promoted NAFTA. He fired the White House travel staff and put in his own people from Arkansas (including a cousin iirc). Waco was a disaster, one which launched Alex Jones.

[yardwork]

16. The infotainment media hammered the Clintons relentlessly.

He was criticized for getting a haircut on AF1, I recall. The media said "it would sink his presidency."

It was the beginning of the blatant hypocrisy and double standard in the way Democratic officials are treated vs. Republicans.

Fox News. AM hate radio.

[jberryhill]

28. Fox News did not exist in 1993

[yardwork]

33. I realize that. /thank you. Note that I said it was the beginning.

[BumRushDaShow]

20. SPAM

[TrishaJ]

19. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was very

controversial at the time; Clinton moved to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military as soon as he took office. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was the compromise. Former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia led the charge against it.

[ehrnst]

21. An actual right-wing, concerted effort to smear him and HRC

And Hillary - who as a feminist, unapologetic scholar and activist, was a very handy target.

She was told to serve some cookies or he wouldn't get re-elected, like what happened in Arkansas.

Yes, Bill screwed up some things, but not like other presidents that were more popular - like Reagan.
................................................................................................................
Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire who has offered up hundreds of millions to conservative causes and organizations over the years, bankrolled the American Spectator magazine, a hotbed of anti-Clinton hate pieces—including the widely-read Troopergate story, an exposé alleging that Arkansas state troopers had facilitated extramarital affairs for Clinton while he was governor. Scaife also funded the Arkansas Project, a mismanaged and ultimately unsuccessful crusade to dig up dirt on Bill and Hillary.


Patrick Matrisciana led multiple organizations that charged then-governor Clinton with involvement in a drug-smuggling, arms-trafficking, and money-laundering operation run out of a tiny west Arkansas airport and later accused President Clinton with the cover-up of White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide

A Reagan-loving Southern Baptist preacher, Jerry Falwell was the founder of the Moral Majority, a political organization for religious conservatives. He used his platform to promote the wildest of the Clinton conspiracies—among them, that Hillary had been in an extramarital affair and Bill had ordered the murders of countless people. This one-time defender of segregation funded the thoroughly debunked documentary, The Clinton Chronicles, which featured the testimony of fired state employee and avowed Clinton hater, Larry Nichols, who claimed Clinton used his governor’s office to run drugs and bed women. Falwell defended selling the videotapes via half-hour infomercials on his "Old Time Gospel Hour" for a donation of $40 plus $3 shipping and handling, and said “the national media should have been doing [it] and has been hypocritically quiet.”

Emmett Tyrrell Jr founded the conservative monthly review, The American Spectator, while at Indiana University in 1967. Along with overseeing the magazine during the Troopergate scoop, Tyrell fought for the publication of allegations that Clinton was involved with “drug trafficking, arms shipments, and the importation of unreported currency,” and overrode the protestations of other American Spectator editors. Among the conservative author’s offerings appear titles like Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton (which laid out the impeachment of the president before it actually happened); and Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-was-right-your-interactive-guide-to-the-vast-right-wing-conspiracy

[Madam45for2923]

23. Politicians at the time always came from upper class and the Clintons were seen as W-trash

because their beginnings were very humble.

This explains why politicians surrounding the Clintons treated them with a very stiff upper-lip.


Nothing Hillary did was ever right. She was constantly criticized since she had worked at a real job before, unlike most 1st ladies before who worked more at charity and that kind of upperclass "work" for well to do ladies.

How dare Hillary be an equal in smarts to her husband. An equal in her marriage.

How dare Hillary try to get healthcare for everyone.

The word for the Clintons was "inappropriate". That was when I started hating that word from then on!

[jberryhill]

27. Yep

The Clintons were from the wrong side of the railroad track.

[hatrack]

24. Waco, WTC, Whining . . .

The hate machine was getting really cranked up right around then.

[no_hypocrisy]

30. Harry and Louise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_and_Louise

"Harry and Louise" was a $14 to $20 million year-long television advertising campaign funded by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA)—a predecessor of the current America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)—a health insurance industry lobby group, that ran intermittently from September 8, 1993 to September 1994 in opposition to President Bill Clinton's proposed health care plan in 1993–1994 and Congressional health care reform proposals in 1994. Fourteen television ads and radio and print advertising depicted a fictional suburban forty something middle-class married couple, portrayed by actors Harry Johnson and Louise Caire Clark, despairing over bureaucratic and other aspects of health care reform plans and urged viewers to contact their representatives in Congress. The commercials were ordered by HIAA president Bill Gradison and HIAA executive vice president Chip Kahn, and created by California public relations consultants Ben Goddard and Rick Claussen of Goddard Claussen.

(Sound familiar?)