Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

On the night of November 8, 1994, in the small kitchen on the second floor of the White House, Hillary Clinton stared at a television screen. The 47-year-old first lady, sitting with her husband and daughter, absorbed the news that Republicans all over the country were scoring jolting, overwhelming wins and a takeover of Congress. The rattled, disconsolate Clinton wondered how much she was to blame.

Down in Miami, in a suite in the Crowne Plaza, Jeb Bush stared at a computer screen. Surrounded by his wife, his children, staffers and several reporters, the 41-year-old Republican candidate for governor of Florida had been running for office for 18 months and had been thinking about it for a lot longer than that. He watched the results roll in, showing the state’s closest such race in more than a century. But he knew.


“I’m going down,” Bush said.

He called his opponent around 11:30 p.m. to concede, then stayed up into the wee hours, smoking his first cigarette in years and drinking Scotch.

Bush lost more than just the election in Florida that night, because his older brother won one in Texas. George W. Bush would get to be a governor, and Jeb Bush would have to wait, upending the family’s expectations and radically scrambling the brothers’ trajectories and presidential prospects.

“Had Jeb won in ’94, he would’ve been the nominee in 2000,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist tells me. Many people I talked to, from politicians to analysts to operatives, say the same thing.

And Clinton’s failure in her zealous efforts at health care reform, hitched to her role in the debilitating Whitewater hassle, made her conservatives’ top target. “I don’t know what’s right anymore,” she confided that year to an adviser. “I don’t even trust my own judgment.”

“If you want to see where modern Hillary starts,” Republican strategist Joe Brettell tells me, “that’s it—1994.”

For both Clinton and Bush, 1994 was a year that looked bad then—but looks worse now. It was a year that changed them, and their lives, forever. It was a year when political opponents learned how to take them on—and win. It was a year when being Bill Clinton’s wife or George H.W. Bush’s son started to feel quite complicated for two aspirants who sought to stand on their own. It was a year, too, in which the new contours of our collective media mayhem began to become clear, with seminal moments in 24-7 news entertainment, reality television and the advent of the commercial Internet, and talk radio rumbling on behalf of Republicans. The far-seeing already were imagining hand-held miracle phones.

Changes in 1994 cracked old orders like the 40-year Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, stoking the kind of anti-establishment fire that’s threatening the current presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush while fueling the candidacies of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump—who were then, respectively, a surgeon in Baltimore, an ambitious executive at AT&T and a New York City businessman trying to climb his way back from almost a billion dollars in debt. In 1994, the notion of Trump, not yet a reality TV-strengthened celebrity, as the most important, most powerful person in the world would have been dismissed as a publicity stunt.

Here we are, though, Clinton and Bush running in a new-rules race, forced to war with Trump and the others while attempting to tamp down the past in the tense, coarse, fast, partisan present.

The year 1994 is a prequel to the election of 2016—and might even decide it.

***

She gave up the maiden name she had decided to keep at age 9 so that her husband would have a better chance to be the governor of Arkansas. She took off thick glasses and put in new contacts and started wearing makeup. As the first female partner of Arkansas’ most important law firm, she made more money than he did as the state’s most powerful person. She stayed with him when almost nobody was watching. She stayed with him when almost everybody was watching. She read 43 biographies of first ladies to get ready to move from Little Rock to the White House.

The Year in Hillary | From the rise of the Whitewater scandal to the collapse of healthcare reform, the events of 1994 hardened First Lady Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Republican political opponents and with the press—a tension that was on vivid display during her April “pink press conference.” | AP; Getty Images; Corbis | AP; Getty Images

As president, Bill Clinton, in large part because she had been so successful heading education reform in Arkansas, put her in charge of massive health care reform all over America.

Early on, she was happy—happier, thought some who knew her well, than she had ever been. This was important policy, and she had an important role. It’s what she wanted. “She made sure from the beginning,” Haley Barbour, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, tells me, “that it was viewed as her baby.” She could be a head-down workhorse, buried in briefings and books, and she possessed a self-assurance some believed bordered on righteousness.

By the first week of January 1994, though, her pursuit had all but halted. The Clintons were forced to confront a crisis. Reporters in the right-wing American Spectator magazine, the Washington Times and the Los Angeles Times had reignited talk of Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities, as well as the couple’s potential financial improprieties dating back to a 1970s Northwest Arkansas land development deal on which they lost money. The New York Times and the Washington Post clamored for more transparency from the White House. For the Clintons, this was a critical juncture, politically fraught.

In the West Wing, there were long meetings of advisers and lawyers. On January 4, Hillary Clinton stormed into one of them. She argued against the disclosure of documents. She argued against the initiation of any special investigation. Then her tone shifted, from indignant to shaken. “I’m feeling very lonely right now,” she said, through tears, according to the account in adviser George Stephanopoulos’ book, All Too Human.

It was a year that changed them—a year when being Bill Clinton’s wife or George H.W. Bush’s son started to feel quite complicated.

She had her allies, but ultimately the White House, including her husband, opted for unprecedented transparency. Her instincts, though, this “bunker mentality,” as a senior White House staffer put it to David Broder and Haynes Johnson for their book, The System, made the press only more suspicious, and provided fodder for Republicans to portray her as a secretive operator. All of it made it difficult for her, and everybody else, to focus on health care reform.

In late January, before the president went on CNN’s Larry King Live, five days before the State of the Union, aides briefed him on substantive issues, but also on “tabloid” issues that he might be asked about—the rich brothers named Menendez who had killed their parents, the woman named Bobbitt who had cut off her husband’s penis, and the burgeoning, pre-Winter Olympics fixation on who had surreptitiously whacked the knee of a figure skater named Nancy Kerrigan.

In Texas, finishing up her memoir, slated for publication in September, Barbara Bush wrote, “Hillary Rodham Clinton is certainly very much a part of her husband’s decision-making process. She seems much the stronger of the two. Does it make him seem weaker? I am afraid that when problems or controversy occur, and they will, the finger will be pointed at Hillary.”

In Northern California, as Apple in Cupertino developed something called eWorld, which the company said would bring “electronic information within reach of millions of people across the globe,” MTV readied for five months of filming in a flat in San Francisco. The third season of the reality TV series titled The Real World was scheduled to start airing in June. From some 25,000 people who wanted to trade their right to privacy for the chance to be on TV, producers had handpicked seven with disparate backgrounds and views, attempting to gin up the sorts of arguments that would make for a good show.

One member of the cast: a 22-year-old, gay, HIV-positive Cuban-American from Miami named Pedro Zamora.

He didn’t have health insurance.



***

When Jeb Bush told his father he was going to run for governor of Florida, his father said, “Go for it.”

When George W. Bush told his mother he was going to run for governor of Texas, his mother said, “You can’t win.”

The younger brother had announced he was running in February 1993; the older brother hadn’t said the same until November.

It figured.

“The general view was that Jeb was … the gifted child, the son of George H.W. Bush who would carry his legacy forward,” Tom Fiedler, the longtime Miami Herald reporter, now dean of the college of communications at Boston University, tells me. It wasn’t just public speculation. “Within the Bush family,” University of Texas political scientist Bruce Buchanan says, “Jeb was the anointed one, not George. Everybody thought that. Including Jeb.”

Despite being six-and-a-half years younger than George W., Jeb had become a husband earlier, a father earlier, a reliable businessman earlier. People often saw him as the smarter of the two, even if his brother was plenty smart, too; certainly, though, Jeb was the more serious one, the more focused one, the planner. The harder worker.

In addition to his career in commercial real estate in Miami, Jeb had headed up his county’s Republican Party and had been the state’s secretary of commerce in Tallahassee. And he had committed himself to his father’s campaigns, building steadily toward one of his own.

“I am running for governor not because I am George and Barbara Bush’s son. I am running because I am George P. and Noelle and Jeb’s father,” he said …

… only to have his older brother parrot over in Texas: “I am not running for governor because I am George Bush’s son. I am running because I am Jenna and Barbara’s father.”

“Outright robbery,” Jeb Bush called it, according to the Boston Globe.

He plodded ahead.

His platform was severely conservative. More prisons, longer sentences. Public money for vouchers for parents to send their children to private schools. No special treatment—not for gay people, because “I don’t believe we need to create another category of victims,” he said, and not for black people, for whom he said he would do “probably nothing.”

“He was running just this unvarnished, right-wing campaign, pro-life and anti-just about everything else,” Democrat Dan Gelber, former minority leader of the Florida House of Representatives, remembers.

“He was really a conservative firebrand,” Matt Corrigan, author of the book Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida, says.

Pitted against his presumptive, post-primary opponent, Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles—a Florida political institution, looking now like a vulnerable incumbent—Bush’s poll numbers climbed.

From Marco Rubio enjoying Miami nightlife to Bernie Sanders (you guessed it) railing against societal ills, here’s what other 2016 contenders were doing in 1994. Ben Carson: Pediatric neurosurgery director at Johns Hopkins Hospital, age 43. He had already separated conjoined twins.

Chris Christie: Republican on the Board of Chosen Freeholders in Morris County, N.J., a wealthy exurb he had recently moved to, age 32.

Ted Cruz: Harvard Law student, age 24. Cruz was notorious for the sparring reputation he holds now, but also acted, having played Reverend Parris in a campus performance of The Crucible.

Carly Fiorina: AT&T senior vice president, age 40. Fiorina was the first female officer in the company’s network systems division.

Mike Huckabee: Arkansas lieutenant governor, age 39. Two years later, he would replace a Democratic governor.

PHOTOS: AP; Getty Images; photos provided by candidates. All are pictured in the 1990s.

“It proves that hard work pays off,” he said.

As February inched toward March, in Washington and elsewhere, support for the Clinton health care plan moved in the opposite direction. Headlines hinted at the possibility of a tide of Democratic defeats in November’s elections. “Impeach Hillary,” read buttons, bumper stickers and T-shirts at conservative rallies.

Her plan was “far from perfect,” Michael Kinsley wrote in the New Republic. “But the forthcoming argument over it is not just a test of his presidency. It is a test of our capacity as a democracy to have an honest and sophisticated debate over an important public issue.”

Hillary Clinton traveled to Norway for a long weekend at the Winter Olympics, where she caught flak from European reporters for not talking to them. They were reminded that she was hardly talking to American reporters, either.

That same week, the Associated Press reported that Donald Trump was on the cusp of “financial resurrection,” having whittled $975 million of personal debt in 1991 down to $115 million; Newsweek noted that 600,000 subscribers to America Online were frustrated by slow service due to “a traffic jam on the Information Highway”; and the Economist mentioned the fast-approaching future of some 500 television channels.

“Critics predict an information glut,” the British periodical said. “Others are less afraid of submersion than seduction.”



***

“There is now a news machine operating in our society that requires constant feeding,” George Mitchell, a Democratic senator from Maine and ardent advocate of the Clinton health care plan, told the authors of The System. It was March. “Increasingly,” Mitchell continued, “the standard of what is news in our society has become what is controversial. The absence of controversy means it has no newsworthy content. That’s created a situation where people stoke controversy.”

By the middle of the month, since Whitewater had returned and then widened, the tally of stories about it stood at 209—just in the Washington Post.

“Hillary to the Pillory!” read the headline of one article, written by Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media columnist. “Kind Words Come to an End As Media Zero In on First Lady.”

“It’s a disgrace the degree to which something that wasn’t anything had the tremendous demonizing effect that it had,” Harris Wofford, the former Democratic senator from Pennsylvania and a proponent of national health care, says now.

Clinton pushed back.

“It’s not even a scandal,” she told Newsweek. “A failed land transaction.”

“So,” asked the magazine’s Eleanor Clift, “if there was nothing wrong, why were you so resistant to making records public? My theory is that you have a thing about privacy.”

Clinton concurred: “A big thing.”

Clift’s magazine in March also told its readers about users of “bulletin boards,” available through the Prodigy Internet service, who were posting 100,000 “messages” a day in what were described as digital, subject-specific “salons,” letting people talk mostly or even entirely with those of like mind.

In early April, James Carville, the Clinton campaign guru, attempted to impress upon a gathering of reporters in Washington the perils of a new, emerging “media food chain,” in which the “mainstream American press” was increasingly feasting on chum emanating from tabloids and talk radio.

For Barbour, the RNC chairman who later became governor of Mississippi, this was a long time coming, “the first time Republicans could really get around ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Associated Press,” he tells me. “This was a big deal for Republicans.”

Not quite two weeks after the Carville confab, Rush Limbaugh, on his show, the most popular of its type, cut to the nub.

He told his 20 million listeners, called Dittoheads, “Whitewater is health care.”

Three days after that, with her approval ratings sagging, her health care efforts listing and the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill looking more and more precarious, Hillary Clinton acquiesced to a White House news conference, subsequently known as the “pink press conference,” on account of the color of the sweater she wore.

Thirty-four reporters asked her questions and follow-up questions for 68 minutes.

She reiterated her desire for “a zone of privacy.” She acknowledged, though, that she had been “rezoned.”

“I’m certainly going to try to be more sensitive to what you all need,” she said, a truce that would prove to be temporary at best.

Down in Florida, Jeb Bush denounced any kind of increased governmental involvement in health care coming out of Washington, Tallahassee or anywhere else. He likened it to welfare, railing against a “creeping collectivism,” warning against the “deadening hand of centralized bureaucracy.” This, he said, was what was “leading us to decline.”

He welcomed his parents for several days of $500-a-plate fundraisers, helping him pad his sizable financial advantage over his handful of opponents in the approaching primary. An article in the St. Petersburg Times pointed out that Bush also was getting almost a third of his campaign donations from places that weren’t Florida. “I did it because of his family,” said a woman from Pennsylvania. Because of his mother, said a woman from California. Because of his father, said a man from Hawaii.

Bush’s tart response: “So?” He was working 16-hour days, he said. “Do I get credit for working hard?”



***

In June 1994, Hillary Clinton told graduating students of the arts at a high school in Washington to “always bring your horn” but to “know your role in the ensemble.” Jeb Bush told reporters in Florida, “The Department of Education should have 50 people in it, not 2,100.” Donald Trump promised to make the small city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, a national tourism destination by building a $350 million amusement park. “It’s going to be so world class,” he said, according to the Hartford Courant. The San Francisco Chronicle estimated that there were 30 million users of the Internet; the New York Times and AOL teamed up to start a service to let readers access articles on their computers; the first episodes of the much-anticipated new season of The Real World ran on MTV; and O.J. Simpson rode around Los Angeles-area freeways for an hour and a half in a white Ford Bronco while a police detective called him on his cellphone and 95 million people watched on ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN.

When his friend’s SUV finally pulled up to Simpson’s Brentwood mansion, police officers tried to talk to the football star turned commercial pitchman turned big-screen celebrity turned accused killer of his ex-wife and her paramour. With the news helicopters hovering above, they had trouble hearing him. That was June 17.

From Marco Rubio enjoying Miami nightlife to Bernie Sanders (you guessed it) railing against societal ills, here’s what other 2016 contenders were doing in 1994. John Kasich: U.S. representative, age 42. Republicans were accusing the moderate Ohioan of being too compromising on health policy.

Martin O’Malley: Baltimore City Council, age 31. While campaigning for the seat at night, he had worked full-time at a law firm.

Marco Rubio: University of Miami law student, age 23. He has admitted to throwing himself into the nightclub scene.

Rand Paul: Ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Ky., age 31. The son of Rep. Ron Paul would soon found an eye clinic for the poor.

Bernie Sanders: At-large U.S. representative, age 53. The Vermonter was the only independent in the House.

Donald Trump: Trump Organization chairman, age 48. One of Trump’s earliest admirers—Richard Nixon, who in 1981 told Trump he should run for office—died in 1994.

PHOTOS: AP; Getty Images; photos provided by candidates. All are pictured in the 1990s.



On June 20, Clinton’s best friend visited her in the White House. They discussed over lunch the best way to collect her memories of her time as first lady—especially about her efforts on health care.

“What for?” asked the friend, Diane Blair, whose notes and papers are now archived in the library at the University of Arkansas.

“Revenge,” Clinton said.

“Universal Coverage at Risk, Administration Concedes,” read the headline in the Washington Post on June 21.

In the New York Times, on June 26, in an article headlined “From Right, a Rain of Anti-Clinton Salvos,” a Princeton historian said partisan sniping was not new. What was new, though, he said, was “the high-tech overlay.” The megaphone of talk radio and the emergence of 24-7 news entertainment on CNN, even with the launches of Fox News and MSNBC still two years away.

What was new was the megaphone of talk radio and the emergence of 24-7 news entertainment on CNN.

That week, the New York Times Magazine wondered: “Does all this news, and ‘news,’ create a new kind of irresponsibility, destructive of decent values? Or does it instead reflect the traditionally raucous behavior of the press in a democracy, now refracted by many more media lenses?”

On the last day of June, NBC, ABC and CBS led their nightly newscasts with O.J.

“Explain the future,” David Rensin, a contributing editor for Playboy magazine, said to Bill Gates in the issue on newsstands.

“The way we find information and make decisions will be changed,” Gates said. He talked about “something you can carry in your pocket.”

“In your pocket?” Rensin said incredulously.

Meanwhile, ratings for The Real World soared, the series’ best season yet, and a big reason was the interest in Zamora, the gay, HIV-positive 22-year-old from Miami with no health insurance. “I’d like to say I’m not afraid, but that’s not so,” he told the Miami Herald. “I don’t fear death itself, because death is something very natural. What I fear is the process of illness, the preamble for which we’re not prepared.”



***

“A Republican Who Sees Himself as a Revolutionary on the Verge of Victory.” That was the headline of an article in the New York Times on July 24.

It was about Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich hoped, the Times reported, to use the faltering Clinton health care plan “as a springboard to win Republican control of the House.”

In Portland, Oregon, the first lady launched a last-gasp effort to sell the American populace on the plan with five concurrent bus tours, “Reform Riders” on the “Health Security Express,” leaving in late July from the Pacific Northwest as well as Boston, New Orleans, Dallas and Independence, Missouri, all headed for Washington.

The next day in Seattle, because “local and national radio hosts had been inciting protesters all week,” she would write in her memoir, Living History, she gave a speech wearing a bulletproof vest. In a loud, roiling crowd of about 4,500, people hissed and jeered.

“Go home, Hillary!” they chanted.

“Whitewater! Whitewater! Whitewater!”

“Heil Hillary,” said a sign stamped with swastikas.

“There’s an old saying that I always like,” she said in her drowned-out speech. “‘If you don’t have the facts on your side, yell.’ And there’s a lot of yelling going on in America.” After she finished, people jostled toward her limousine, she would write, mostly men in their 20s and 30s. “I’ll never forget the look in their eyes and their twisted mouths.”

Many people, though, were paying limited attention to it, or even to the Whitewater hearings, which continued on Capitol Hill. “It’s no O.J.,” a man from Richmond, Virginia, told the New York Times.

Clinton sat down for interviews with health care reporters. To debrief? To vent?

She talked about “the amount of hatred … being injected into our political process.” And those “encouraging it,” she said, “should think long and hard about the consequences of such encouragement.”

A story ran in New York magazine in mid-August about Donald Trump’s “near-death experience.” “I’m hotter now than I ever was before,” crowed Trump, who in the 1994 election cycle gave about $40,000 to Democratic groups, causes and candidates, but also $1,600 and $1,000, respectively, to Senators Al D’Amato of New York and Phil Gramm of Texas, Republican enemies of Clinton and her health care reform.

Congress adjourned in late August, without doing anything about health care, not even with any of the watered-down options from other legislators. The first lady’s efforts were all but over. “Democrats Glum About Prospects As Elections Near,” read the headline in the New York Times on September 4.

Conservative activist and writer Bill Kristol had written a memo to GOP leaders the previous December arguing that any successful Clinton-led health care reform would be “a serious political threat to the Republican Party” because it would paint the Democratic Party as “the generous protector of middle-class interests.” It would “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims.” He urged, therefore, “an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy.” Now, on the cusp of a tantalizing realization of this aim, he fine-pointed the next step: “I think we can continue to wrap the Clinton plan around the necks of Democratic candidates.”

Barbara Bush’s memoir arrived in stores. She was asked by a reporter from the Washington Post if she still thought the first lady was the stronger of the two Clintons.

“No,” the matriarch said.

Her son down in Florida, meanwhile, surged toward victory in the Republican primary on September 8.

National health care? “The less you do for yourself, the more you ask someone else to do, the greater the chance of the kind of behavior that’s going to lead to greater government demand,” he said.

Welfare? “If people are mentally and physically able to work, they should be able to do so within a two-year period. They should be able to get their life together and find a husband, find a job, find other alternatives in terms of private charity, or a combination of all three,” he said.

And compromise? Compromise? “I’m not going to change my positions. Absolutely not,” Bush said. “If that means gridlock, that’s fine with me.”

He said his favorite TV show was American Gladiators. “It reminds me of what I do for a living,” he explained to a reporter from the Miami Herald. “It’s got a real-unreal feel to it, like politics.”

Mere miles from Jeb Bush’s home, at Miami’s Mercy Hospital, Pedro Zamora was bedridden, stricken with complications from AIDS—dying—as the previously filmed Real World season in which he was the star unspooled in weekly episodes on millions of screens all over the country. “‘The Real World’ Now a Real Hit,” said the headline in the Chicago Tribune on September 19. Because Zamora was uninsured, MTV was paying for his medical expenses, while also asking viewers to mail donations to a fund.

The Year in Jeb | Running for governor of Florida as a card-carrying conservative, Jeb Bush received a two-part surprise in 1994: an unexpected election loss, and an underdog win for his older brother George in the Texas gubernatorial race, complicating Jeb’s reputation as the more ambitious brother. | AP; Getty Images

Up in Washington the last week of September, Bill Clinton called Zamora from the White House, thanking him for raising awareness about HIV/AIDS, and Newt Gingrich staged a TV-ready scene in the sun on the steps of the Capitol, announcing his Contract with America, calling for a lot of what Jeb Bush was calling for in Florida. Fewer taxes. More prisons. Less welfare. Gingrich said it was “impossible to maintain American civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing each other, 17-year-olds dying of AIDS.” He excoriated the mainstream press, labeling it the “Praetorian Guard of the Left.” Republicans, he declared, “truly believe … that our rights come from God and not from the government.”



***

“OK, you little wieners, line up,” George W. Bush would say to his little brothers, according to a Time magazine story that would appear a few years after 1994, before pretending to use his air rifle to shoot them dead.

Marvin. Neil.

Jeb.

By 1986, though, the order had been altered: Jeb Bush had taken the place of George W. Bush. That year, the two brothers traveled to Houston with some friends and their family members to meet up with their father, at the time the vice president, to go to an Astros baseball game. The seating assignments, as Richard Ben Cramer would write in his book What It Takes, had put the second son in his father’s suite and the first son in different seats, not far away—still very nice, but not his father’s suite. “I guess the box got a little crowded!” the first son fumed.

So now here, in 1994, was the second son, John Ellis Bush, entering October emboldened. Polls suggested he was a month from being elected, a month away from leading his powerful family into a new generation, the heir apparent.

He promised he would tame government “by clubbing it into submission.” He called himself “a gladiator for fundamental change.”

John Ellis, when are you going to stop having momma and daddy come down … to raise another million dollars? When are you going to stand on your own?”

In Texas, George W. Bush was getting some fundraising help from his parents in a race that was too close to call with incumbent Ann Richards, who once had joked that his father was “born with a silver foot in his mouth” and now had taken to referring to her opponent as “Shrub.” Was he going to stay in Jeb’s shadow, remain the less successful brother?

In Florida, Jeb Bush had their parents return to help him raise more money, too. At a breakfast in Tampa, the former president looked at his son and said to the crowd, “No one likes not to finish what they started out to do, but the finish is sitting here.” The red and white signs and shirts said only “Jeb,” not “Bush,” with an exclamation point, just as they do now—Jeb!—and his opponent, Chiles, a former U.S. senator who had come home in 1990 to run for governor, a wily, experienced competitor who had never lost an election, belittled Bush for wanting it both ways, a scion who sought to be seen as self-made.

“John Ellis,” Chiles goaded, “when are you going to stop having momma and daddy come down … to raise another million dollars? When are you going to stand on your own?”

Something started to shift.

“Mid-October seems to be where we lost our big momentum,” Cory Tilley, Bush’s spokesman for that year’s campaign, tells me.

During jury selection for the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Lance Ito, the judge, chastised the news media for “prurient sensationalism and outright fabrication.”

The National Enquirer had 20 people on the story. Media spots in the courtroom were scarce. The Enquirer shared a seat with National Public Radio and the Washington Post, which New York’s Newsday called a “stunning commentary on the changing order in the media.” Court TV shared a seat with ESPN.

One poll showed 90 percent of people thought the Simpson story had received too much attention. Another poll showed the case had made people more skeptical of everybody involved, the police, the attorneys, the media—but with exhaustive coverage of the hearings, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN registered ratings spikes.

And Bush crisscrossed Florida, campaigning. On October 21, he held a 5-point lead over Chiles. By the end of October, they were tied.

Chiles ran an ad on TV questioning Bush’s business credentials and ethics, a charge that was exaggerated; then Bush ran an ad accusing Chiles of being slow to execute death-row convicts, which also was exaggerated; people affiliated with the Chiles campaign, in turn, called senior citizens in South Florida and told them Bush was going to end Social Security and Medicare, which was false. In their final debate, Chiles said to Bush, who was more than 20 years younger: “The old He-Coon walks just before the light of day.” Bush, the Texas-born New England prep school grad, looked befuddled—but the comment, a reference to a pack’s wisest, toughest raccoon, cemented Chiles’ old Florida Cracker cred.

The Monday before the election, Bush started early in the morning at a rally in Jacksonville and then flew around Florida in a leather-seated Learjet, making stops in Orlando, Tampa, Fort Myers, West Palm Beach and finally Miami. “There’s never in the history of this state been a more clear choice for governor,” he said. He wore a baseball hat he had received from some children in Orlando. It read: “EXPECT TO WIN.”

The next night, in the suite at the Omni with his wife and kids, he called his older brother in Texas to congratulate him, then turned back to stare at his computer, watching his future come into focus.

“Momma, baby, come over here,” he said to his wife. “I need you.”

Three days later, miles from the Crowne Plaza, at 4:40 in the morning, Pedro Zamora died.

The White House issued a statement.

“Hillary and I,” Bill Clinton said, “are deeply saddened by the news of the death of Pedro Zamora. In his short life, Pedro educated and enlightened our nation. He taught all of us that AIDS is a disease with a human face.”

MTV had a Real World marathon set for the weekend—the third season, all 20 episodes, watched by as many as 2 million people, younger and more liberal than Limbaugh’s Dittoheads.



***

A triumphant Newt Gingrich began to prepare to take over as speaker of the House as the Contract with America propelled the GOP into control of the chamber for the first time in 40 years. All told, the GOP picked up 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate.

“Deflated and disappointed” because of the results of the election and the “Republican Revolution,” according to Living History, the first lady packed for a trip to Asia.

She sent a note to her friend Diane Blair in Arkansas. “We’re off to the Far East,” she said. “Far away from the news here.”

Dick Morris, a campaign consultant and the political adviser in whom Clinton confided, conducted and studied several surveys to gauge public opinion about the first lady. Distilled: The more power she was perceived to have, Morris told the president, the less power her husband was perceived to have.

“Hillary’s reaction was immediate,” Morris wrote in his book, Rewriting History. “She withdrew from all White House strategy meetings. She just stopped coming. … She was less involved in decision making than she had been at any point since the early two-career couple days of the late 1970s.”

In 1995, she would write later in a syndicated column, she wandered the halls of a museum in Washington, trying to blend anonymously into art.

“You sure look like Hillary Clinton,” a woman told her.

“So I’m told,” she said to the woman.



***

Jeb Bush went to Austin, Texas, to watch his older brother take his oath of office. Jeb was, his brother would say later, “looking happy and proud, but also something else, maybe a little sad, too.” That was 1995.

The next year, Jeb told Lucy Morgan, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, about how, in childhood, he had once caught his older brother finger-painting with something other than his fingers. Morgan saw both of them at the Republican National Convention, in San Diego, and asked the brother if he had a comeback—maybe a similarly embarrassing anecdote.

“I’d better not,” the older brother said. “I’m elected, and he’s not.”

Two years later, at the Republican Governors Association meeting in New Orleans, the younger brother was a governor, too, finally, and the older brother was being talked about as the potential next president.

“Look,” said George W. Bush, “I didn’t grow up wanting to be president of the United States.”

“I did,” said Jeb Bush. The more serious one, the more focused one, the planner. The harder worker.

Two years after that, after George W. Bush had been elected president, two weeks before another inauguration, this one in Washington, Jeb Bush sat with reporters in Tallahassee. “I have never been interested in being president,” he lied.



***

It’s now just a year until the next presidential election, November 8, 2016, exactly 22 years after November 8, 1994.

When the New York Times runs a headline like “Re-Re-Re-Reintroducing Hillary Clinton,” it’s hard not to think of 1994, at the end of which half the people in this country said they didn’t like her, an opinion that didn’t improve much until her worst, most public humiliation as a spouse, which allowed her to win a seat in the United States Senate, which paved the way for her first run for president, at which point people re-decided that they didn’t like her.

When Clinton answers a question about her favorite flavor of ice cream by saying, “I like nearly everything,” and when she answers a question about how she takes her coffee by saying, “sometimes black, sometimes with cream or milk,” and when she tells Black Lives Matter activists, “I don’t believe you change hearts,” it’s hard not to think about 1994. If she entered that year as a true believer, or anything close to it, she didn’t leave it that way. Instead, she would say, she became a subscriber to “the school of small steps.”

It’s hard not to think of 1994 when she attempts to explain her emails on a personal server while she was secretary of state . It’s hard not to think of her wearing that pink sweater.

And it’s hard not to think of 1994 when she attempts to explain her emails on a personal server while she was secretary of state: “I have a big thing about privacy.”

It’s hard not to think of her wearing that pink sweater.

Whitewater was health care?

Servergate is Whitewater.

“Look, I always thought Whitewater was a defining moment for Hillary,” Gingrich tells me. “This stuff is all just going to devour her. There’s just too much of it.”

Same with Jeb Bush. When the self-proclaimed “joyful tortoise” talks today about his 16-hour days, it’s hard not to think of 1994. “Work is a virtue,” he said back then, and he’s been saying as much ever since, heralding his aversion to vacation.

When he gets bullied as a moderate by hard-line opponents in a primary, it’s hard not to think of 1994, since one of the lessons he took from that loss was that he had to change the style and tone of his language.

And when he grapples with the reality of the legacy of his family—“I am my own man,” but “yes, I am a Bush”—it’s hard not to hear the folksy ghost of Lawton Chiles.

“John Ellis … ”

Stripping him of his chosen acronym. Of his exclamation point. Knowing voters would fill in the rest.

“Bush to Bush is one thing,” Grover Norquist says when we talk. “Bush to Bush to Bush is another.”

“If Jeb was running only with the Bush baggage from his father,” Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak tells me, “he would be a stunningly strong candidate.” But he isn’t. And he’s not. His brother was first across the finish line in 1994; Jeb’s been behind ever since.

AP Photos

They share key traits, Clinton and Bush. They struggle with their surnames, his by birth, hers by choice. Their greatest assets are also their greatest liabilities. They would rather read books than shake hands. They work, work, work, believing just rewards await those who do.

They have squabbled at each over Twitter, two transformative decades removed from the TV screen in the kitchen at the White House and the computer screen in the suite at the Crowne Plaza in Miami, the media-bombarded electorate following along, and egging on, using devices they pull from their pockets.

And both are competing against Carson and Fiorina and Trump, of course, whose success this past summer would not have been possible without the success of The Real World, which prompted the networks to try to combat the splintering of mass audiences by coming up with reality TV shows of their own, which led to the wildly popular Survivor, which gave its creator a new thought. “The original idea of The Apprentice,” Mark Burnett would say, “came to me while I was in the Amazon jungle making Survivor … watching a bunch of ants devour a carcass.” Which, he said, made him think of Trump. Whose starring role in The Apprentice completed his comeback from his early 1990s debt, enabling him to morph from regional mogul to global brand.

Trump now is something better than a business tycoon. He is a person who plays one on TV.

“Just to state the obvious,” Jeb Bush’s namesake son said in a tweet the first week of September. “Can’t wait for this summer reality TV show to be over.”

But all that was to come.

Toward the end of 1994, O.J. Simpson jury selection dragged on, the Netscape Navigator Internet browser was released, and the magazine Information Today predicted something called a “screen telephone.” In Miami, at a memorial service for Pedro Zamora, people showed up with dueling signs reading “God Loves Pedro” and “God Hates Fags.”

Trump threatened to sue the New York Post for a story he didn’t like, calling one of the reporters a “jerk” and a “loser,” and fibbed when he told USA Today that Prince Charles and Princess Diana each had purchased $50,000 memberships to his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. Why, a Buckingham Palace spokesman was asked, would he say that even though it wasn’t true? “Good publicity, perhaps,” the spokesman said. “He said the princess was buying an apartment in his building in New York, and that wasn’t true, either.”

Bush, still thinking about the campaign, said to a reporter from the Miami Herald, “Six days a week, early morning until late night …”

Clinton said to students at The George Washington University, “Sometimes I read about myself, and I say, ‘Ooh, I don’t like her at all.’”

Three days before New Year’s, she wrote a note to Diane Blair: “May 1995 be a year when the good guys win.”