Washington, DC
Unlike most of the folks on the Bush/Quayle ’92 re-elect campaign — who’d never worked a campaign outside of the RNC — I knew this race was over by pure instinct weeks ago. Ross Perot was hurting us badly — regardless of what the post-election analysis said (that Perot drew equally from Bush and Clinton, which was BS).
James Carville and Paul Begala beat our brains in just like they did in the Lautenberg-Dawkins ’88 NJ Senate race. They were better, faster and more ruthless than our slow-moving Bush bureaucracy.
On election night at ‘victory headquarters’ at the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, I watched a few key states fall, and left the suite early to walk back to my Georgetown apartment at 3100 N Street NW.
I put on the Grateful Dead’s 1992 RFK show I failed to get into several months earlier and fell asleep on the floor.