All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  We flew south with our new security detail, a bigger jet, and a surge of confidence to soothe our New Hampshire hangovers. In a single day, we'd gone from doomed back to unbeatable. Lazarus, just like Clinton said. Kerrey and Harkin hadn't met expectations; both would soon drop out. Cuomo's write-in campaign fizzled; he'd never get in. That left Paul Tsongas as our prime opponent, which was fine with all of us except the one who counted most. On the flight out of Manchester, Clinton called Paul Begala and me to the front of the plane in a fury and waved an Atlanta Journal in our faces. The fact that editorial pages were bashing Clinton's middle-class tax cut and praising Tsongas's call for fiscal pain drove him crazy. Our more populist approach would win us the primaries, but Clinton felt as if he was slumming and hated getting called on it.

  The nomination was ours to lose — but we did our best to make it a race as the spring unraveled a skein of oddly joyless victories. We were winning ugly; every week we'd snuff out an incipient scandal, grind out a majority, and watch Clinton grow more unpopular. No candidate had ever compiled such high negative ratings while winning the nomination. Primary exit polls consistently showed that Ross Perot — the weird little man who was a ventriloquist's dummy for voter anger — was outpolling Clinton. Establishment Democrats wondered aloud whether a Bradley, a Bentsen, or a Gephardt could jump in and save the party from its damaged front-runner.

  When we formally clinched the nomination with a win in California on June 2, the New York Times ran a front-page story on the prospect that delegates to the Democratic convention would throw Clinton over for someone new. A “brokered” convention — the dream of political junkies and our worst nightmare.

  We bottomed out that night. Clinton was a wreck — exhausted, overweight, angry, and in danger of doing permanent damage to the asset no politician can do without: his voice. Our campaign was broke in every way. We hadn't been paid in months, and our team was split into squabbling camps: the consultants in Washington, the headquarters in Little Rock, and Clinton on the plane. Polls forecasting the November election put us in third place, behind Bush and Perot.

  Which set the stage for our comeback. By late spring, the still-stalled economy was making the country increasingly impatient with President Bush, but Clinton was not a credible alternative. To the general public, he was a slick Southern yuppie educated at silver-spoon schools like Yale and Oxford who had dodged the draft, cheated on his wife, and lied about smoking pot. But a crash research effort (dubbed the Manhattan Project) led by Stan Greenberg discovered that a simple story line could change minds. If you told voters that Bill Clinton was the middle-class son of a single mother who had worked his way to the Arkansas governorship and made progress in his poor state by focusing on job creation and education, it put the questions about his character in a new context and gave people permission to pay attention to Clinton's ideas. We didn't have enough cash to advertise these facts, so we booked the governor on every television interview show that would have him — from Today to Charlie Rose to Arsenio Hall — where Clinton would have the chance to talk at some length about his background and his plans. He demonstrated independence from Jesse Jackson over Sister Souljah but unified the party with a new economic plan that promised to both cut the deficit and increase government investments in jobs, education, and health care. In the single best decision of the campaign, Clinton broke with tradition and picked another young Southerner as his running mate. By the time the Democratic convention opened in New York, we were in first place — this time for good.

  It was only my second convention. Four years before in Atlanta, struggling to establish myself in the Dukakis campaign, I had spent the entire week in a basement as a volunteer, booking press interviews for the senior staff. They would bustle through the window-less room, each with an intern as shadow, on their way to the upper floors — where the real work was done. The highlight of my week came when I borrowed a floor pass and burrowed through a small claque off the convention floor to shake the hand of my political hero. “Your diary was an inspiration,” I told him, just before the crowd carried him away.

  Here in New York, Mario Cuomo was looking for me. But when he dialed my room on the fourteenth floor of the Hotel Intercontinental, I was in the presidential suite helping Clinton revise his acceptance speech. My friend Eric thought it was a joke when he answered the phone, so he hung up. When Cuomo called again, Eric figured he'd better find me.

  So much had happened in a year. Bill Clinton was now the Democrats' best hope, Cuomo was nominating him, and I was Clinton's guy — a man to see if you had a message to send or a problem to be fixed. Cuomo's call to me was both a sign of my growing power and a source of even more. When I excused myself to return the call, I made sure Clinton knew where I was going and why.

  Cuomo wanted to give me a sneak preview of his speech. The relationship between Clinton and Cuomo had been tense, especially after the Gennifer tapes, in which Clinton was heard calling Cuomo a thug. Cuomo picked me out because I wasn't from Arkansas or the conservative wing of the party. His former economic adviser Gene Sperling, a friend of mine from the Dukakis campaign whom I'd recruited to run our campaign's economics shop in Little Rock, had also told him that I was his biggest fan in Clinton's camp. During the vice presidential selection process, I had written Clinton a memo advocating that he choose Cuomo as his running mate.

  So even though I was trying to act cool, I was thrilled. Hunched over the edge of my bed, my ear pressed tight to the receiver, I heard Cuomo in full performance mode. The reluctance he showed when Democratic Party chair Ron Brown had to cajole him into nominating Clinton was not in evidence now. Cuomo was proud of his speech, and the more he recited, the more he seemed to convince himself that Clinton really was our “new captain for a new century.” His Flushing-inflected bass flowed over the phone in a pumped-up rush, punctuated by jokes about Captain Queeg and questions that answered themselves. “You like that? You like that!”

  Later that night, I watched the actual speech in the governor's suite. Watching the Clintons watch Cuomo with their arms wrapped around each other's shoulders and Chelsea on the floor between them was a small revelation. It was all starting to sink in. The two of them slowly shook their heads from side to side, as if to say what they saw just couldn't be true. But it was, and they were already planning ahead. Clinton mused that Cuomo would make a perfect chief justice; Hillary nodded.

  As Cuomo accepted his cheers, I went straight to the floor. There are times in politics when you experience the pretense of a private moment in public. Cuomo stood at the base of the towering podium that moments before had been his national perch. He was flushed, encircled by an entourage, and throwing off an aura that felt like a force field. As I approached, the crowd around him parted to let me in, “The governor asked me to give you his personal thanks,” I said in a shout that had the intimacy of a whisper. Then I reinforced my message with a point that also underscored my place in Clinton's constellation: “I was up there watching it with him. Governor, he was crying.”

  The people around us watched Cuomo and me talk in a way that made me feel as if we were actors in a silent movie. In a way, we were, with Cuomo in the role of elder statesman and me playing new kid on the block. Not only had my months with Clinton brought me political power, I was also becoming a political celebrity.

  It starts out slowly. You're quoted on behalf of your boss, and the circle of people who follow politics the way most follow professional sports takes note of the unusual name. You do a call-in on C-Span and get photographed next to the candidate on a tarmac in New Hampshire. A few more people take notice, especially Greeks, who love seeing a big name like Stephanopoulos on the small screen. Political reporters do profiles of the new candidate's team. Then the campaign takes off, leading to a series of firsts: first Today show, first Face the Nation, first press conference of your own. When you're on the rise, political celebrity creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more you're known, the more you're approached for in
formation and political favors, which increases your influence, which makes you even better known and more powerful.

  I enjoyed the attention, encouraged it, loved it — even when I was embarrassed by it and wished I didn't need it. But the convention also brought some deeper satisfaction. Shortly before Clinton's acceptance speech, I left our holding room and stood on the floor of the arena at the base of the podium. In front of me, the standing-room-only crowd was singing, screaming, and swaying, with signs held high, creating a swirl of color and sound that cut all the way to the rafters. Until that week I had never been on the floor of Madison Square Garden. The closest I had come was front row for the circus, or the imaginary ringside seat supplied by the transistor radio stuffed under my pillow the night Ali and Frazier met for the fight of the century.

  Now I stood in the center of the floor, hypnotized by the motion and emotion, feeling tiny and ten feet tall at the same time. I normally don't like crowds; they scare me. But that night, the crowd filled me with pride and awe, with a sense of ownership — and possibility. I wasn't always proud of the way I had handled myself during the campaign. I had learned to calculate, scheme, and maneuver — to say things I didn't fully believe and do things I might later regret while telling myself that, maybe, it would do some good. That night, I had no doubts. I had faith in my candidate, his crowd, and myself. I believed that our compromises and our trials were our contribution to the common good — and that anything was possible if only we could do what had seemed improbable back in that Little Rock paint store. If only we could win.

  Back in the holding room, Clinton pulled his face out of the inhaler long enough to tease me. “George, you didn't think I could do it, did you?”

  “No, sir,” I replied, “but I'm awfully glad you did.”

  The next morning, Clinton and Gore rode a fleet of buses across I-80 toward New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois — the “battleground” states. I stayed behind to enjoy a lazy day in Manhattan before flying to Little Rock with James.

  Not being on the bus made me wonder if I was missing something — the excitement of the crowds and connection with the country. But two months before, on a flight to Minneapolis, Clinton had pulled me aside on the plane and reassigned me to Little Rock headquarters. Our campaign was balkanized and adrift, and our whole team of consultants threatened to quit if things didn't change.

  James outlined the demands — a complete overhaul of our headquarters and operating philosophy. The Republicans were pros. They had won three presidential campaigns in a row, and they were ruthless. We had to be battle ready just to be in the game — to break down the bureaucracy and replace campaigning by conference call with a single strategic center for attacks and counterattacks. Hillary got it immediately. “What you're describing is a war room,” she said, giving us both a name and an attitude.

  The purpose of the War Room wasn't just to respond to Republican attacks. It was to respond to them fast, even before they were broadcast or published, when the lead of the story was still rolling around in the reporter's mind. Our target was the public's filter for information; our goal was to ensure that no unanswered attack reached real people. James summed up our approach on a T-shirt saying, “Speed Kills … Bush.” The fact that we had a War Room would be as important as anything we did there. Its purpose was to make us appear relentless, to intimidate, to make anyone who was paying attention think of us as aggressive, different, and a little unpredictable — pretty tough for Democrats.

  James would be the general, but he needed a second in command. Paul was the logical choice, but his wife was due to deliver their first baby that summer, so he couldn't move to Little Rock. That left me. Clinton knew I was reluctant to leave his side, to relinquish the power that accompanies proximity. Out of sight, I feared, out of mind. I had seen it happen. So he made a point of making my transfer seem like my choice, of telling me how much he trusted me and how much he needed me to do this job. Aware that my reaction would be noticed, I pushed myself to appear eager. Instead of completing this last trip with Clinton, I dropped off in Minneapolis and took the next flight back to Little Rock.

  Working in the War Room gave me the chance to prove myself away from Clinton's shadow. Back in Little Rock, we traded up headquarters again — to a four-story gray stone building that had recently housed the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Our fourth-floor War Room was the paper's old newsroom. Carville's command post was a fold-out conference table flanked by a couch, where we held our twice-daily meetings. Scattered around the room were outposts for every campaign department: research, press, issues, field, and all the rest. Four TV sets suspended from the ceiling provided us with instant access to CNN, network news, and other necessities like Seinfeld, sports, and Showtime.

  While I was constantly in and out of the War Room, I spent most of my time in the old managing editor's office down the hall, making phone calls, holding meetings, talking to the road, and reviewing a constant flow of speeches, statements, and press releases. We had a team of writers led by Bob Boorstin, but I was ultimately responsible for accuracy and tone, and the counterattacks to Bush charges were released over my name.

  The War Room never closed. Day and night, teams of young volunteers worked in shifts, tracking every Bush move on their computers. On the roof, a satellite dish pulled in broadcasts, including the occasional intercept of a still-unaired Republican commercial on its way to a local affiliate. Much of this technology was relatively new. At the Dukakis headquarters in Boston, the AP wire had reached us via a clickety-clack teletype machine. Now our kids were downloading stories onto their laptops.

  We also subscribed to the New York Times on-line news service. At first, the Times inadvertently included an internal midday preview of the stories scheduled for the next day's front page. This was inside information, and it reminded me of the scheme in The Sting where Paul Newman booked bets on horse races after receiving the actual results on a hijacked wire. Knowing what the Times was working on, we could adjust an attack, prepare our defense, or springboard off a story to advance our agenda. When Bruce Lindsey made the mistake of mentioning our new research tool to a Times reporter on the plane, our windfall came to an abrupt end.

  But for all of our high-tech toys, the most useful item in the War Room was a low-tech template — a hand-lettered white board that James stuck on a pillar in the middle of the room. It said:

  Change vs. More of the Same

  The economy, stupid

  Don't forget health care

  I thought of it as a campaign haiku — an entire election manifesto condensed to nineteen syllables. James drilled it into our heads, and every speech, every event, every attack, and every response had to reflect one of these three commandments: New unemployment numbers are released? Put out a statement — it's the economy, stupid. Bush repeats the ludicrous charge that as a student Clinton was a KGB tool in Moscow? Closer call, but see line 1 and go with it: The president is at it again, giving us more of the same old negative politics. A new controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts? Tempting, but let it go. We can protect the NEA later, from the White House, but talking about it won't help us get there. In our world, the only mortal sin was to be “off message.”

  I was the first senior staffer to arrive in the morning, getting in around 6:15, unless I had an even earlier appearance on one of the morning shows (Little Rock is in central time). When I was on the road with Clinton, he knew he could count on me to have read the papers, reviewed our overnight polling, checked in with headquarters, and checked out our opposition and the rest of the world before I walked into his room. As he cooled down from his morning jog while munching his morning bagels and bananas, I wanted to be able to tell him things he didn't already know. To make myself indispensable.

  In my War Room office, I'd plow through a pile of Xeroxed clips while our overnight researcher filled me in on any new developments since the papers were printed. Around 6:45, James would call from his room at the Capitol Hotel.
I was his third call of the morning. First came Mary Matalin, his future wife, who was a senior staffer on the Bush campaign. He then checked in with Stan Greenberg to review our overnight polling before calling me. Getting those numbers from James was as essential to me as a second cup of coffee; I couldn't function without them. After that, we would waste a couple of minutes speculating on the state of the Bush campaign — a rigorous analysis based entirely on James's take on the tone of Mary's voice that morning. “She's really ragging on me today,” James might say, “so their numbers must be as bad as we think.” Or, “I'm scared. Mary's being a little too nice. You think they have something on us?”

  James wanted to win this election even more than I did. He was forty-seven; just a few years earlier, he was broke and unemployed. Now he had the opportunity of a lifetime. A lot of talented strategists get the chance to run presidential campaigns. Only the lucky ones have it happen at a time most suited to their talents, and the sense of frustrated ambition fueling the country's desire for change in 1992 was something James understood in his bones. He was smart enough to know that the stars would never line up like this for him again. This was his one big chance, and he ran our War Room with a combination of intuitive genius, intensity, and eccentricity — as if Machiavelli, a marine drill sergeant, and an extra from the movie Deliverance had been morphed into a single Cajun creature.

  After the morning meeting, James and I would retreat to my office with a handful of other staffers for a conference call with our counterparts on the road. Clinton would then get on the line to make sure that we weren't making strategy without him. He knew how easily a candidate could get out of the loop of his own campaign. We would brief him on the polls, our new commercials, and what Bush was doing, then get braced for the morning outburst about his grueling schedule, or our flaccid speeches (“Words, words, words — all you write is words — they don't mean anything”), or the fact that Chelsea had seen a blistering Bush attack on Arkansas television without a response from our side. Mostly he was just letting off steam and letting us know he was watching our every move. If the yelling got real bad, I would disconnect the speaker-phone by picking up the receiver. No reason for the rest of the campaign to hear the candidate melt down — and even getting yelled at can be a power play. While he talked, I'd pretend to slap myself on the face.