BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback

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We start in this episode the look at late August and all of September as the two major figures in the race battle it out for the only time all alone. 

Starting with this episode we will feature rallies of both President Bush and Governor Bill Clinton. This episode will look back at President Bush as he starts out in Connecticut and then heads to Florida. You will get to hear the President on the stump from a rally recorded and shared on Facebook by a person filming with a camcorder. This is as grass roots as you can get. 

Plus you will hear from the local and national news outlets as they report it all live on the campaign trail. 

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It is time to kick off the fall campaign. In this first month of campaigning we get the only time the two principles in the race faced each other head to head. Ross Perot would rejoin the fray in October. So, in the next few episodes we let you watch the 1992 campaign unfold between President George H. W. Bush and Governor Bill Clinton, in the only time period in which they had the stage to themselves. 

Bill Clinton will start out with a commanding lead over Bush but it is a lead that continues to shrink with every passing day. Having brought James Baker back in to manage the campaign you will see George Bush become more focused and with it the Presidents poll number begin to rise. That will be true all the way through the rest of the campaign until we have a neck and neck race at the end of October of 1992.

In this episode we will listen in on where the race stood at the start and hear two rallies  very early on as Bush addresses a crowd in Oxford, Mississippi, and Bill Clinton talks to a meeting of the AFL-CIO. 

As we kick off the beginning of the most exciting election in my lifetime. 

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In this special edition we honor two very different but very special people, Stuart Spencer and Bob Ueker. 

Stuart Spencer was an advisor to Ronald Reagan going back to his earliest days in politics. He helped guide Reagan to the California Governor’s Mansion and then on to the White House. In the time between, he also ended up working with President Gerald Ford to fend off a challenge from Reagan in 1976, and helped Ford almost win reelection only losing by a point to former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Spencer would go on to be a major advisor to Reagan throughout the rest of Reagan’s career and he established political consulting as a viable profession. He passed away in January at age 97. 

Bob Ueker, was known far and wide as Mr. Baseball. He was the broadcaster for decades for the Milwaukee Brewers and the star of TV commercials for Miller Lite Beer and the TV show "Mr. Belvedere". Bob Ueker was famous for his ability to make people laugh and was a regular guest on "The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson", we try to share some of that with you in this episode . Bob Ueker passed away in January he was 90 years old. 

This is an episode honoring two very different people but both of whom were great at what they did. 

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The tension is in the air on the final night of the Republican National Convention in 1992. The speech is do or die for President George H.W. Bush. It occurs just a week after he has brought back in his top advisor James Baker. He needs to show focus and the will to win. 

He does what he had to do and comes out of the Convention having shrunk the Clinton lead but still behind. 

We will head out from here into a tough fall campaign. A campaign that would produce some of the most exciting moments of any election in our nation's history. 

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In this episode we take you through the events of three of the days of the Republican National Convention as George Bush prepares to take the stage and address the nation. 

He is greeted by hecklers at a Houston event who snuck in as reporters from an AIDS activist group. But the President and the crowd handle it fairly well. Despite all the issues that seemed to have beset the campaign and the convention, the message and the record George Bush had to run on was finally taking hold and the giant lead Bill Clinton had was starting to shrink. 

This is also the end of an era of long speeches by former Presidents at least on the Republican side of the aisle. In this episode, we hear the last prime time address given by former President Gerald Ford as he compares the scenario the party faces in 1992 to the last successful Democrat to argue it was time for change, Jimmy Carter, during the election he lost by a whisker in 1976. 

Plus, this election actually produced a very unlikely star, the much maligned Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle. It is often forgotten that starting with this convention speech, Dan Quayle actually did an outstanding job campaigning for re-election through out all of the 1992 campaign. In fact, I have often wondered how it would have gone had he been head to head with Bill Clinton given how well he did do in 1992. That story has often been obscured by the election loss of the Bush/Quayle ticket later in the year. You will get to hear both the Quayle video and his convention speech in this episode. 

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This is a speech delivered just barely in Primetime that slipped into the 11pm hour. Arguably the single biggest mistake ever made by schedulers in the history of prime time political conventions. 

It is from day 1 of the 1992 Republican National Convention. It was a convention that had a lot of political battles in it between the conservative wing and the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Our nominee was in serious trouble , ands many members of Congress stayed away rather than allow themselves to be pictured in attendence. You could say it was one of those situations where if it could go wrong it did in 1992. 

However, this speech was the single best speech I have ever heard. I remember being mesmerized by it and by the man who made it. This was the last prime time address given by former President Ronald Reagan. It is everything you would ever want in a speech by the greatest leader of the era. Optimistic, visionary, and inspiring, it had everything a young person, like me who had just turned 21 the day before, could ever want to be inspired by. 

That was the magic of Ronald Reagan, if you are too young to remember it, or if you have forgotten that night, here is your chance to relive it again, as it occured in Houston, Texas. As Peter Jennings said when it was over "It is easy to see how Ronald Reagan held such sway over the American people for so long" 

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In this episode we tune in to the first days of the 1992 Republican National Convention. We will go first to the morning session and hear from a list of Republican candidates for Congress as they try to "Bounce the House" after the Democrats get themselves in gulfed in a house banking scandal where several of the members bounced hundreds of the thousands of dollars in checks on the House bank. 

We will hear from former Congressman Tommy Hartnett who challenged my State's long time Senator Ernest Hollings in 1992. It was the first race where I was selected to chair the campaign at my little college in Greenwood S.C. While I never met Mr. Hartnett, I had a lot of fun, and enjoyed listening to him and Ernest Hollings battle it out with thick Charleston, South Carolina accents. This is the first of a couple of episodes that will feature this 1992 Senate Race. 

Then we will hear from former candidate Pat Buchanan as he electrifies the convention with a tough , conservative speech about the culture wars in America. It was , often, very accurate in substance, but it gave a much meaner look to conservatism than the man who would walk on to the podium just after him and out of prime time. That speech will be what our next episode will cover; the man who put a smiling face on American Conservatism, Ronald Reagan. 

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This special Edition of our podcast , is a look back at two of our favorite motion pictures, "Casablanca" , and "Havana", just in time for "Casablanca" to be making its reappearance on the Silver Screen over the next week at theaters all across the nation. 

The Flashback Theater Series will be featuring the picture at various theaters around the country (At Stone Theaters at the Market Commons, for those here in the Myrtle Beach S.C. area) on February 9, 12, and Valentine's Day February 14th. We cannot urge you enough to go see it on the big screen if you have never done so, or if you want to see it again. There is nothing like it. 

In this episode , we have looked all over to find source material that could tell the unlikely story of this movie, made in utter chaos, with actors who did not believe in the story, and did not want to be making the movie, writer's actually rewriting and creating the story as they went along, day by day, during the production, and creating this movie that did not even have a settled end, when it was finished. But somehow out of that chaos came a cinematic masterpiece that has left only one question to debate....Is it the greatest movie ever made? or is it just one of the greatest movies ever made? No one even dares say its not great. 

It is also a movie that has been imitated several times but no one as of yet has ever been able to replicate its magic, though one movie came the closest even if it failed at the box office, and we will take sometime to look at that movie too, "Havana", directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Elena Olin, Robert Redford and Raul Julia. 

We share them both with you , just as Casablanca is about to return to the big screen, on this Valentine's Week and also because they , along with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, served as the inspiration of our own Host's new novel that will be out near the end of 2025 or at the start of 2026. 

We hope you enjoy our special edition and if you want to learn about Flashback Cinema check it out at https://www.flashbackcinema.net/ and please also drop by www.RandalWallace.com too to keep up with all the news from us here at the podcast too. 

Questions or comments at  , [email protected] ,  https://twitter.com/randal_wallace   , and http://www.randalwallace.com/
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It is just days before the Republican National Convention and the campaign of George H. W. Bush is losing, badly. It appears unfocused and seems to be reacting to events instead of controlling them or leading them. The worsening economy has the argument for change being made by Bill Clinton stronger with each passing day. Finally, Ross Perot decided to withdraw and did so on the last night of the 1992 Democratic National Convention delivering for Governor Clinton an enormously huge audience to listen to his acceptance speech. 

One of the problems is that George Bush is without two of his most trusted political advisors. Lee Atwater, the native South Carolinian, who had helped guide Bush to the Presidency had died of brain cancer, and James Baker, his former campaign manager, had moved on to the job of Secretary of State. Bush needed them badly and he finally went to James Baker and asked him to take over the campaign for that final stretch. 

James Baker was, as James Carville once said of him, "the Joe Montana of American Politics" (Montana is a widely heralded Super Bowl MVP Quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers) Baker arrived in Washington D.C. when his friend George Bush had moved from Texas in the early 1970s.  He got a job working for President Gerald Ford in 1975. He then moved over and almost pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in political history moving Ford from 33% points down to only losing by one in 1976 to Jimmy Carter. He took Bush from an asterisk in the polls to almost wrestling away the 1980 nomination from Ronald Reagan, he then helped guide the Reagan Presidency in its first term, was Secretary of State to Bush as they soft landed the Cold War, and now Bush was calling him back in to pull off yet another miracle and get him re-elected to the Presidency. 

As you will see, it almost worked, if not for the Sinister forces of a Special Prosecutor. Here is the story of James Baker stepping back in to take over the 1992 campaign of George H. W. Bush, on the eve of the 1992 Republican National Convention. 

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In our second episode in our final installment in our special series, Farewells and Welcomebacks, we follow Donald Trump during the rest of his historic first day back in office. 

We will hear from the Vice President and President as they address supporters in the Capitol Welcome Center. Then we will head over to the Capitol One Center , that I had to watch from the Mission Bar since I couldn’t get in, and we will hear from the president’s envoy to the Middle East, then the President will deliver his third address of the day, sign a historic number of executive orders, and then head out to the White House where he will pardon everyone convicted over roles in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. 

Then we end our special series with a look back at the historic week that watched us bid farewell to Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden and welcome back to our new President Donald J. Trump. Plus we share a few of our own thoughts about it all too. 

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