All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  I spent the rest of the morning gathering intelligence, swapping information, and trying to shape the news, concentrating on our beat reporters, the journalists on President Bush's plane, and my old contacts on Capitol Hill. After lunch at my desk, I'd check in with the producers at the national networks. In the afternoon, we'd meet with the other consultants to review the research, draft ads, look over the long-term schedule, and bullshit about the race. Sometimes I'd grab a quick nap on Carville's couch. Then we'd enter the chute toward news time.

  If either side had drawn blood during the day, I'd spend the late afternoon chatting up the networks and trying to get our licks in, beeping the Bush reporters one last time, and checking in with our team on the road. In the end, a political campaign boils down to talk, talk, and more talk. What are they saying? What are we saying? What are they saying about what we're saying in response to your question? And on, and on, and on. The official War Room day ended with our evening meeting following the top of the network news. James went for a run, and I stayed around another hour to make sure the next day was set before heading off for my evening bout with the StairMaster.

  Around 9:30, we'd have a late dinner, usually at Doe's. A spartan steak house with Formica tables and linoleum floors, Doe's was where the reporters wanted to eat when they came to town, which made our back-room table the campaign equivalent of the cool corner at the high school cafeteria. We always invited journalists to eat with us, partly because it was our job, partly because it was fun, and partly because they paid for dinner. Nothing made Paul and Dee Dee madder than to call the War Room and be told that James and I were at Doe's. We worked long hours, but their day was even longer. While we devoured rare rib eyes washed down with Heinekens, they were calling from a holding room in some anonymous hotel, waiting for Clinton to leave a fund-raiser so they could return to the plane to fly half the night on a moldy sandwich for the privilege of getting up three hours later to start another day. I sometimes envied their place at the center of the action, but not when I was at Doe's.

  My day ended around eleven. I'd fall asleep on a full stomach within minutes of getting home. About six hours later, I'd beat the alarm by a minute and get up to do it all again.

  The War Room's best moment was the Republican convention in Houston. Working with a SWAT team who had sneaked into the Astrodome, we countered every Republican attack and managed to write and release an annotated response to Bush's acceptance speech even before the president reached the podium. Our tactical triumph was picked up by the press and made us feel like winners. But nothing we did helped us more than what the Republicans did to themselves. By turning their convention over to Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and the rest of their right-wing base, they turned off the rest of the country — and gave me a chance to be Hillary's public defender.

  When the campaign started, it didn't look as if Hillary would need to be defended. She was an unqualified political asset — her husband's chief adviser and candidate in her own parallel campaign. Clinton would cite her work on education and children as a reason to vote for him and refer to her in every speech: “My wife, Hillary, gave me a book that says, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’” We circulated “Buy One/Get One Free” buttons, and progressive primary audiences, especially women, loved the modern-marriage pitch. The fact that Clinton was with such a strong, smart, and successful woman made people like him even more.

  I liked most of what I saw in private too. They really were complete partners, businesslike in meetings, often childlike with each other. Hillary adored him despite herself, giving him a Nancy Rea-ganesque gaze when he tightened his tie and talked nonstop about his upcoming speech, or later, when he loosened it with his arm around her and laughed about the evening's events. She could soothe him too. One night, after a particularly useless debate prep during which Clinton was hoarse and cranky, I went up to their suite with the next day's schedule to find her on the couch with him, legs laid over his lap, feeding him lemon slices dipped in honey. In playful moments, Clinton called for her in baby talk: “Hee-a-ree, Hee-a-ree.”

  Of course, they fought too, and it wasn't fun to watch. She lit into him when she thought he wasn't being tough enough on himself or the people around him, particularly the “boys” like Paul or me, or the more encompassing “kids on the plane,” a term that included Dee Dee. One morning during the New York primary all I saw as I walked in their door was her standing over him at the dining-room table, finger in his face, as he shoveled cereal into his mouth, his head bent close to the bowl. I backed up without turning around and quietly shut the door.

  The Hillary backlash began with 60 Minutes. Tammy Wynette took offense at Hillary's derisive-sounding reference to “Stand by Your Man” and publicly demanded an apology. Most viewers were happy with Hillary's defense of her husband; it made them think his affairs were the Clintons' private business. But the undercurrent we couldn't eradicate was the notion that their partnership was less a marriage fired by love than an arrangement based on ambition. Hillary's prominent public role also made her a more legitimate political target. If voters were being promised two presidents for the price of one, the press and our opponents figured that we ought to expect twice the scrutiny. They examined Hillary's private law practice and whether she did business with the state while Clinton was governor. The New York Times started to ask about one of the Clintons' joint investments, a resort development project called Whitewater.

  Hillary's litigator instincts made her hunker down. Whitewater and Rose Law Firm questions were directed to her friend and fellow lawyer Susan Thomases. A pattern began of revealing as little as possible as slowly as possible, which was stupid, because the underlying information — about Hillary's investments and legal practice — was embarrassing but not scandalous. The early stories were too convoluted to do any real political harm, but the Hillary controversy reached a fever pitch during the Illinois primary.

  In a Sunday-night debate, Jerry Brown charged that Hillary was profiting from Rose Law Firm business with the state of Arkansas. Anticipating the attack at the predebate prep, we had urged Clinton to hit back hard. Anger in defense of his wife would play well; it was a form of chivalry — and the least he could do after Hillary had stood up for him during Gennifer and the draft. Standing on a chair at the dining-room table, I got carried away: “The minute you hear the word Hillary, rip his head off. Don't let him finish the sentence.” Clinton didn't. The counterpunch was perfect, leaving Brown looking petty and confused on the facts.

  But Sunday night's planned confrontation gave rise to an unscripted moment Monday morning. At the Busy Bee coffee shop in Chicago, Clinton was bantering with reporters when they asked to speak to Hillary.

  “Sure,” he said, catching her off guard. Andrea Mitchell of NBC News asked Hillary whether it was ethical for the governor's wife to be a partner in a law firm doing business with the state. The question struck a nerve. Hillary prided herself on her integrity and resented the fact that it was being challenged, especially since she had refused her share of Rose Law's profits from Arkansas state business. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” she replied. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

  From her mouth to the nation's ears. There are few things more unnerving to a staffer than the buzz created when a press corps that's heard the same speech six days in a row captures a spontaneous gaffe that's guaranteed to lead the news. Hillary's sound bite sent them scurrying for the phones. We knew immediately we had a problem. “Tea and cookies” was so rich and resonant a phrase that it could be the subject of a graduate seminar on semiotics. It also seemed to reveal what many voters most feared about Hillary, that deep down she wasn't really a “traditional” woman. Most of the reporters shared her progressive side and kind of liked her sarcastic sense of humor. So did I, but the Republicans would have a field
day if Hillary didn't clean this up before the close of the news cycle. We had to make her take it back.

  Right. That'll happen. Too bad Mandy's not around. Hillary might be more open to the advice if it came from Grunwald rather than a couple of guys like Paul and me who didn't intuitively understand the struggles women faced. Paul took the lead and convinced Hillary to appear before the cameras again. She did, explaining that she had the greatest respect for women who chose to stay home with their children and that one goal of her husband's campaign was to make sure more women had more choices. But the damage was done. “Tea and cookies” was all over the evening news — and it stuck.

  A month later we were reviewing campaign research with Clinton at a Holiday Inn in Charleston, West Virginia. Part of the presentation was the videotape of a “dial group,” where a roomful of voters are hooked up to handheld meters and asked to respond to news reports, TV spots, and tapes of speeches to gauge what works and what doesn't. The results are superimposed on the screen in real time, so you have an instant analysis of voter response.

  When a shot of Hillary speaking was played, the line on the screen dropped like a downhill ski run.

  “Oh, man,” said Clinton, demonstrating both husbandly concern and his capacity for denial, “they don't like her hair.”

  Nobody said a word, but James — who was sitting next to me on the couch across from Clinton — started grinding his fist into my thigh. That pressure and the laughter building up inside me made me double over until James mumbled something and burst out of the room. I was right behind him. We collapsed in hysterics the second we hit the corridor. From then on, whenever I wanted to make James laugh, all I had to say was “They don't like her hair.” To him, it was the single most memorable line of the campaign. To me, it was just a sweet moment.

  But the Republicans remembered “tea and cookies.” Frustrated by their inability to close the gap before their convention opened, they tried to make Hillary a major issue. Party chairman Rich Bond opened the attack. In a gross distortion of views that Hillary had expressed in a 1973 journal article on the rights of abused children, Bond charged that if Clinton became president, he would be advised by “that champion of the family Hillary Clinton, who believes kids should be able to sue their parents rather than helping with the chores as they are asked to do. She has likened marriage and the family to slavery.”

  Big mistake. “Tea and cookies” hurt Hillary because her words seemed to reveal a secret, somewhat scary, side of her. Bond's broadside helped her by transforming her from a radical feminist with a secret agenda into a political victim of the Republican right. The attack was a willful misreading of Hillary's text, and we saw it as an opportunity to defend her and return the fire. Hillary was controversial, but people liked the fact that she was a children's advocate, and hated political attacks that were perceived as personal. What could be more personal than attacking a candidate's wife? We accused them of trying to turn Hillary into Willie Horton.

  Nightline scheduled a whole show on the issue, and after studying Hillary's writings, I volunteered to argue our side. Having Hillary defend herself was too big a risk; it would send the message that the charge was substantive rather than a nasty symptom of political desperation. It would also subtly reinforce the Republican subtext — that Hillary couldn't wait to advance her extreme agenda on the national stage. Hillary knew this, and I was relieved that she agreed to have me be her surrogate. To prepare me for the show, we reversed roles: She was the staffer and I the principal. On a phone from the road, she pelted me with the toughest attacks she could make on herself and asked what a nice boy like me was doing defending a radical feminist like her. Although she doesn't show it much in public, self-deprecating humor comes a bit more easily to her than it does to her husband. She also likes a good political rumble.

  From my perspective, the show couldn't have gone better. The Bush campaign didn't even send an official representative; instead I got to debate Phyllis Schlafly. If anyone was going to attack Hillary, who better than a far-right old-timer with a beehive hairdo? Of course, I could also imagine the other side thinking they could do worse than opposing a liberal punk with a mop top. The pictures were probably a wash. What turned the debate was Ted Koppel's using his anchorman's authority to subtly suggest that the attacks on Hillary were misleading. All I had to do was fall in behind and remind viewers that the Republicans were up to their old tricks.

  After the show, Hillary called with thanks for “defending my honor.” Good thing too. Her best friend, Susan Thomases, was constantly looking to replace me with a “serious, gray-haired” talking head, like their friend Arkansas attorney Jim Blair, or Don Fowler, who would later run the Democratic National Committee. She and Hillary were suspicious of how much I enjoyed the spotlight and rightly worried that I simply looked too young to be serious. My response to this was passive aggression: agree in principle, ignore it in practice. I appreciated the argument but also resented it. Didn't the fact that I had effectively defended the Clintons in difficult situations for most of the last year count for something? Of course it did, but my vanity and arrogance were also creeping in. Both would later come back to haunt me. But that night, and for the rest of the campaign, Hillary's blessing brought me all of the job security I needed.

  When Hillary was angry, you didn't always know it right away — a calculated chill would descend over time. Clinton's anger was a more impersonal physical force, like a tornado. The tantrum would form in an instant and exhaust itself in a violent rush. Whoever happened to be in the way would have to deal with it; more often than not, that person was me. I guess Clinton figured that I could fix whatever problem was causing his frustration, and he must have sensed that I didn't take his temper personally. The trick was to have a kind of thin skin — to understand that Clinton didn't really yell at you; he yelled through you, as the rage passed through him. My job was to absorb the anger and address its cause.

  One function of our daily morning phone calls was to give Clinton a chance to take out his frustrations on us so that they wouldn't come out in public. We also tried to provoke him in prep sessions before press conferences and debates, which created a kind of perverse pleasure. You got to put your boss on the spot while telling yourself that it was for his own good: “Governor Clinton, electing a president is ultimately a matter of trust, and polls show that the American people just don't trust you. What's your response?” Silence. His eyes would become slits, and his lips would disappear. “So what do you want me to say,” he would finally reply in a voice muted by contempt. You could almost hear the next word: “smartass.”

  Clinton's anger was often well placed. Once, in rural Georgia late in 1992, we needed a good picture to highlight a Medicare event, which meant that a hundred senior citizens had to sit for hours under a baking sun. Clinton was steaming. He got on the phone and screamed at us for “grinding these peoples' faces in the dirt. You're treating them like props.” He was right.

  But we all have limits to how much we can take, and mine came on a late night in early October. I was asleep in Little Rock when my beeper went off at about one A.M. with a message to call Clinton in Milwaukee. My telephone was broken, or maybe I hadn't paid the bill, so I called him back on my cell phone. Clinton was upset about a foreign-policy speech he was scheduled to give in the morning, and Bruce handed him the phone in midrant. He wanted to cancel.

  I tried my usual technique: listen for a spell, concede a point or two, then remind him of the underlying facts — that we had invited ethnic leaders from all over the country to the event, that we needed one more foreign-policy speech before the debates to establish his credentials as commander in chief, that the press was primed and the speech was solid. Nothing worked; he was overtired and anxious. Then the battery died on my cell phone, which left me with a real dilemma. At 1:30 in the morning, should I get dressed, get in my car, and drive a mile or two to find a working pay phone for the privilege of being yelled at again about a situation we c
ouldn't change?

  The answer to that would be no.

  Three months earlier, when I was less secure in my new role, I would have done it. Three months later, when Clinton was president, not calling back would never cross my mind. But now, I took a stand and went to bed. Go yell at somebody else. Try California, where people are still awake.

  It's true that no man can be a hero to his valet. But every day Clinton also showed how extraordinary he was. Like when he spent his downtime stroking the hand of a little girl, bald and yellow with cancer, and looked into her eyes until she believed she'd grow up to be a movie star. Or when you would prep him for a late-night car-ride-to-the-airport interview after sixteen hours of nonstop campaigning. His eyes would float, the lids fluttering with fatigue, but once the reporter ducked into the backseat, Clinton would repeat the briefing word for word and add six points we missed. We called him Secretariat, the ultimate political Thoroughbred. Most of the time I was just happy to be his stablemate, the little goat by his side who usually knew what to say and had a knack for keeping him calm.