Was President Clinton’s defeat of Bob Dole inevitable? Absolutely. It’s the one thing that at least some Dole aides and nearly everyone advising the president agreed on by the end of the presidential campaign. Indeed, both now figure a Clinton win had been inevitable for months. The president’s men give Clinton a large chunk of the credit for this. He’d cleverly moved to the right, ambushed congressional Republicans in last winter’s budget battle, embraced conservative social values, and emerged as a poised ceremonial leader in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. “That essentially did it for us,” a Clinton adviser says. “Nothing much changed from early spring on.” For most of the campaign, Dole aides thought a Clinton win was anything but inevitable. But some of them have come around. “The bottom line is, in retrospect, this was not a winnable race,” John Buckley, communications director of the Dole campaign, told the Washington Post.

We all should have known this from the start. In a period of peace and prosperity — such as now — an incumbent president is all but certain to be reelected. It’s that simple. The president doesn’t have to have been responsible for creating either peace or prosperity. Those merely have to exist on his watch. Is this unfair? Not really. If voters ousted a president who was identified with good times and didn’t seem bent on triggering bad times, that would hardly be a victory for stability or continuity. But the point is, the verdict of a majority of voters is based on what they’ve experienced. Something more than a scandal is required to trump their experience: No president in the 20th century failed to win reelection because of a scandal. So forget about Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Indogate, etc.