“Bring it 20 years later,” Grandmaison said. “I decided that Clinton ought to do the same thing. I checked with the Boston TV stations and learned that they were going to go live at 8 p.m.
“My recommendation to the campaign -- I contacted them and harassed them with my suggestion – was that Clinton come down and claim the same thing at five minutes past eight, so the stations would go live and he would get the lead (story) at that point in time.”
Grandmaison recalled that longtime operative Paul Begala, “a phenomenal political strategist, is the one who coined the phrase, ‘the Comeback Kid.’ And the rest is history.”
The final result, for the record, showed Tsongas beat Clinton, 33 percent to 25 percent.
While Clinton was declaring victory on the Democratic side on Feb. 18, 1992, drama was also playing out on the Republican side, and Carney was in the middle of it.
He remembered it as the “terrible night.” President George H.W. Bush “lost” the New Hampshire primary by beating insurgent Patrick J. Buchanan. But Bush did not win by a large enough margin to instill public confidence in a sitting president.
The final tally showed Bush with 53 percent and Buchanan at 37 percent. But more damaging were the exit polls, some of which showed Bush barely leading Buchanan and others showing Buchanan slightly ahead.
“It looked close during the day and the reporters started to say that it was a great defeat for the president, when in actuality on election day, when the votes were counted, Bush had won.”
But the damage had been done.
“It was like, a big story, a big upset,” Carney said. “The national reporters were all writing their stories and what a setback this was for Bush.”Although Bush finished 16 percentage points ahead of Buchanan, “There’s no question that we got our ass handed to us,” Carney said. “But we didn’t lose. Buchanan didn’t beat us. But that was how the story was spun.
