"Some of us owe Bob Dole an apology. Here we've been holding the Kansan responsible for losing to President Clinton. But we now know the election was lost even before Mr. Dole had entered the first Republican primary.
This is what the Senate and media probes have taught us about fund raising in the 1996 campaign. We now know why Mr. Clinton was willing to risk breaking campaign laws in order to raise and spend so much money. He was paying for an unprecedented barrage of early TV attack ads that doomed Mr. Dole even before a single vote was cast.
Don't take my word for this. The proof comes from Mr. Clinton himself as revealed by the latest batch of videotapes. "The fact that we've been able to finance this long-running constant television campaign," he told well-heeled donors at a May 21, 1996, White House lunch, "has been central to the position I now enjoy in the polls." To the extent those ads were financed with illegal money, Mr. Clinton stole the election.
Mr. Clinton's words confirm the case already laid out by his own campaign Rasputin, Dick Morris, both in his candid book and in his Senate deposition. "In my opinion, the key to Clinton's victory was his early television advertising," writes Mr. Morris in "Behind the Oval Office." "There has never been anything even remotely like it in the history of presidential elections."
I'm going to bed for awhile (I work graveyard shift). This afternoon I will close out The Lopsided Poopdeck at this url and move to 
MagazineArt.org has thousands of scanned magazine covers from the 19th and early 20th Century. I'm utterly besotted by the covers of the pop-science mags published by Hugo Gernsback, who founded the first science fiction ("scientifiction") magazine in 1928 and for whom the Hugo award is named.
