How a young Bill Clinton made waves during his presidential campaign | Rewind the '90s

(Crowd cheering)

NARRATOR: It's 1992, President George H.W. Bush is up for re-election. With a squeaky clean image, he's had some of the highest approval ratings of any president. Then, a political bad boy joins the race. (Jazzy saxophone music)

AJ BENZA: Bill Clinton came on the scene. A young guy, the next Kennedy, handsome, charismatic.

ICE-T: Clinton's over here playing the saxophone. I'm like, oh, this dude is smooth. This dude is a real player.

NARRATOR: He may be smooth, but Clinton will need some serious help in a presidential race that promises to be anything but boring.

CONNIE CHUNG: Scandal wasn't a new thing in politics, but nothing was like Clinton when he was first running for president of the United States.

BILL CLINTON: Come on.

JOE KLEIN: In the old days, there was one news cycle a day. (Laughs) There was the evening news on television.

KURT ANDERSEN: Only during Clinton's campaign did we start getting the 24/7 news cycle that previous candidates didn't have to deal with.

NARRATOR: Clinton needs a team to stay on top of the news coverage, ready to spin the story. The leaders are young communications director George Stephanopoulos...

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: That's what the American people care about. They wanna move into the future.

NARRATOR: ...and their greatest weapon, political consultant James Carville, known throughout Washington as the Ragin' Cajun.

CARVILLE: I've always said a political campaign is like you've kicked down a door, you don't know what's behind it.

NARRATOR: Carville's a genius at political strategy and keeping the campaign on message.

CARVILLE: Stay focused, talk about things that matter to people, you know. It's the economy, stupid.

NARRATOR: Combative and loud, he ushers in a new era of political hand-to-hand combat, organized from his war room.

CARVILLE: The war room was conceived to deal with... to compress news cycles in a coherent and coordinated way.

GEORGE BUSH SR.: And I will stand on my record, and I won't let that Arkansas governor run away from his record either. (Crowd cheering)

NARRATOR: When Bush attacks, Clinton's war room ignores the old tactic of letting bad stories blow over and goes on the offensive.

CARVILLE: What are we gonna do when George Bush attacks us? Why can't we attack George Bush?

NEWS ANCHOR: Today, Governor Clinton accused the president's party of misrepresenting his past. Here's ABC's Jim Wooten.

CARVILLE: The idea was to answer somethin' in a creative, a provocative way, that editors would see and lead with that story.