Mark Halperin breaks down how Bill Clinton handled major scandals during his 1992 campaign and why his approach still stands out today. He explains what it takes to survive political crises and why tone, confidence, and strategy matter as much as the facts:

MARK HALPERIN, HOST: I’ve been covering campaigns for a long time, and you don’t want false modesty from me. You want the truth. The truth is, I have done this for a long time, and I’ve done it as well as I think anybody else. I really, just something I really understand. I had a little bit of coverage in 1988 when George W. Bush won, George H.W. Bush won, but really in 1992, I got assigned to cover the governor of Arkansas running for president, and I’ve spent most of my career doing it. And I’ve talked before about the difference between politics and campaigns and elections. I understand all three, and I’ve worked hard at it, and I’ve worked alongside many talented colleagues. I’m not saying they’re the only one who can do it, but I really understand the rhythms of this, and a big part of it is also understanding the media, okay? And crazily, a lot of people in the media don’t understand the media. If you look at the presidents who’ve won, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, not Biden, I’ll get to Biden, they all had crucibles when they were running. They all faced extraordinary controversy about their past, and they survived it. But they didn’t survive it by accident. They and their teams understood, in the modern era, which has changed because of digital, we’ll get to that too, they understood what it took. What does it take to be faced with something that would potentially knock out someone else? Because along the way, people who they beat, whether it was in a nomination fight or the general election, they also faced controversy from their past. It’s inevitable. If you’re going to be a potential president, your past is going to come back. But these guys were able to overcome it. Now, Biden, in 2020, didn’t face very much of this, even though he should have with Biden, Inc., because of COVID and because the press protected him because they wanted Trump to lose. So Joe Biden’s the exception. Joe Biden got elected without really having to go through one of these crucibles of confronting the past. And the reason this is on my mind is I look at all these people talked about as potential presidential candidates, including J.D. Vance, and just say, what do we know about their past that could come back, that they’ve never confronted? Because you confront things when you run for president, regardless of what office you’ve run for before, from your past, that could knock you out of the race. And people run for office knowing they’ve got skeletons, but they often don’t tell the people around them about the skeletons. So the staff is caught unaware. Oh, my goodness. So Eric Swalwell, there were rumors about him for a long time, decided to run for, instead of staying in his house seat, decided to run for governor of California. And it is because he decided to run for governor of California that his past was scrutinized and allegations have come against him. Now he is out of the governor’s race. He’s out of the House of Representatives. He faces legal peril. And he didn’t handle it well at all. But now his friend, one of his best friends, Ruben Gallego, senator from Arizona, is also facing peril. And this is this is the peg. This is the reason I’m talking to you about this today. I called around to the smart people I know who’ve been through this to talk about the phenomenon. It’s difficult to run for president for a thousand reasons. But one of the reasons it’s difficult is because you and your family will face scrutiny like you’ve never faced. And not everybody can handle it. Now what determines whether someone can handle it or not? What determines whether they run the gauntlet, survive this level of scrutiny about their past? One is the nature of the allegations. How serious are they? How true are they? How much the voters care about them? But the other variable, without a doubt, is how skillful are the candidate, his spouse or spouse and their team? How skillful are they in handling it? And it’s not easy. And particularly in this age of A.I. and digital and social media and fierce partisanship. If you run for president, unless you are absolutely clean, nothing in your background and come on now, even Mitt Romney, a guy who didn’t smoke or drink, Mormon, had plenty of stuff from his professional life that got scrutiny. Even if you’ve got nothing, they’re going to come after you. And nobody has nothing. So how do you handle it? Ruben Gallego has said openly he might run for president. I’ve been skeptical. I have not put him on my list of aid for 28. And why is that? Because he’s had a messy divorce on the public record. Republicans tried to make an issue of it in the Senate campaign. Left his first wife under poor circumstances and got remarried. And I’ve watched the coverage of that and I’ve watched how he handled it. And the reality is, a lot of people get away with stuff because the press, if you’re not running for president, doesn’t ask you about it. So now, this guy, friends with Swalwell, the Capitol Hill press corps swarmed him this week and said, how could you not have known what Eric Swalwell was allegedly doing? And he had a long press conference. I recommend if you’re interested in this topic, you go watch the whole thing. But he had his arms crossed, he was defensive, and it was basically any political professional of either party or any experienced analyst who watched it would say, this is not what to do. So let’s start, as we walk through this, before we go down memory lane, let’s start with Senator Gallego. This is from Tuesday this week, being asked a volley of many questions about his past and about his knowledge of and relationship to Eric Swalwell. SEN. RUBEN GALLEGO (D-AZ): I don’t know what’s going on with his family, but it’s definitely a horrible situation for family. They’re using that as a cover to attack me right now, because they couldn’t take back 2024 because he ran a horrible race. But now this is what they wanna do. They just wanna hurt me as much as they can. Presidents, anything else like that, I don’t care. We’re gonna wait, and that’s not even a thing right now. The most important thing is I wanna protect my family, I wanna protect my family’s reputation. And this is why we’re talking about right now. HALPERIN: Again, throughout the thing, he crossed his arms, he looked away from the reporters, he spoke too quickly. Every professional who’s watched that has said that’s not the way to do it. Now, what is the way to do it? The two greatest survivors in modern American presidential politics are Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. But George W. Bush and Barack Obama both faced crises, not like Clinton and Trump, but they both faced crises. But there’s ways to handle it. Now, again, you gotta have a team, you gotta have supporters, but the candidate himself has got to step up. So let’s start with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, in the winter of 1991, 1992, he had become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. He’d come from nowhere. Most people hadn’t heard of him.

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