All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  At first, Clinton was enthusiastic about the strategy. He felt he had done the hard work of deficit reduction without any Republican help and that they had an obligation to do the same. But as the months passed, he became increasingly uncomfortable — and not just because of Morris. Clinton's a doer by nature, and an optimist; he believed there had to be a way to balance the budget without abandoning his principles or past promises. He doesn't like playing defense, and he was rankled by the consistent Republican critique that he was AWOL in the balanced-budget fight. “I'm president. I need to be for something,” he would tell us. “I can't just stand on the sidelines.” The New Hampshire interview was Clinton's way of sneaking off the bench.

  By Monday, May 22, the press corps was buzzing. Although the president had couched his proposal in conditional terms, the reporters knew they had a story here: The president was breaking with his allies and advisers and striking out on his own. When Sperling tried to spin down the significance of Clinton's new pledge with David Broder of the Post, Broder dryly replied, “I hope you don't mind, Gene, but I'd rather use his words than yours on this one.” Tuesday morning, the clandestine budget debate inside the White House was front-page news.

  At eleven A.M., the economic team filed into the Oval for a damage control session. Everyone was on edge, perturbed by Clinton's unilateral shift and uncertain about what he would say that afternoon at a Rose Garden press conference. Although the players arrayed on the couches flanking the president and vice president held diverse views on budget policy, we thought we had a consensus on the negotiating strategy: that the president should hold off from announcing a new budget until after the House and Senate Republicans had spelled out their cuts in a single, specific plan; that we should offer a counterproposal only when we had a credible document that could withstand scrutiny, and only after the Republicans made concessions in our direction on Medicare, education, and taxes. While Morris (who didn't attend the formal policy meetings but was clearly there in spirit) was fighting this approach, even he agreed that Clinton's offhand comment in a local radio interview wasn't the best way to signal a shift in strategy for the most momentous legislative battle of the presidency.

  Clinton was both sheepish and defiant. He knew that he'd made a mistake, but he groused with some justification that the press had taken his words out of context. And he chafed at our counsel for patience: “You guys want me to go out and criticize the Republicans, and when they say, ‘Where's your plan?’ you want me to say, ‘Well, who am I? I'm just the president of the United States. I don't have a plan.’” Even though the president still maintained that he was sticking by our strategy, he clearly wanted to produce a balanced budget sooner rather than later. The best we could hope for was to buy some time.

  Panetta and Pat Griffin led off the meeting with a report from Capitol Hill. The Democrats were angry and confused. Their disciplined drilling of the Republican plan was drawing blood, and they didn't want the focus to shift from the Republican plan to our counterproposal. Just the week before, in a closed-door session with the leadership, the president had reiterated our commitment to stick with a joint strategy. At a minimum, they thought they deserved to be consulted before such a significant departure.

  Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget, followed with a briefing on balanced-budget options — all of them bad. An eminent economist and committed public servant, Alice was a feisty bureaucrat and a sincere deficit hawk. She relished the job of drafting a balanced budget as much as I feared it, which was why we were constantly feuding. As she went down her spreadsheet of proposed reforms, I made a parallel list of broken promises and alienated constituencies: veterans, farmers, senior citizens, college students, police, any middle-class American who'd taken Clinton at his word when he promised a tax cut. In 1995, neither the Office of Management and Budget nor the Congressional Budget Office analysts realized that the American economy would grow far faster and far longer than their forecasts predicted. Given the economic assumptions we had to work with, you couldn't balance the budget on paper without big cuts in programs that affected broad slices of the population.

  Gene Sperling and I were the only ones in the room that day (aside from the president and vice president) who had actually worked on the 1992 campaign. Dejected as we watched promise after promise disappear under the budget director's blue pencil and our boss's seemingly blithe indifference to his past commitments, we resorted to gallows humor. Leaning over to me on the couch, Gene whispered, “You know this guarantees a primary.”

  “I think I'll run,” I replied. “Do you have to be thirty-five to enter the race or just to be elected?”

  Two years older than I, Gene saw his opening. “Just to be safe, I'll run.”

  “No way. I may have to miss Iowa, but I'll be old enough when New Hampshire rolls around. Besides, I have better stump skills and higher name recognition than you. I'm running.”

  “OK, OK.”

  But we weren't giving up yet. Rivlin's budget review was a reality check for the president — a useful antidote to the happy talk Morris was feeding him over the phone about how easy it would be to propose a balanced budget that protected our priorities. The more he heard, the less ready he was to change strategy. Figuring that a late intervention would be most effective, I waited until the meeting was nearly over to repeat the litany I had drafted in response to Rivlin's presentation. “If you proposed a budget like this, Mr. President,” I concluded, “Gene and I could produce a book in three days called Putting People Last, showing how it defies the promises you made in 1992. We can't do this.” The flip on Putting People First was over the top, and though I was trying to strike a lighthearted tone, I knew I was right on the edge of being rude. But I also wanted to break through, and I saw myself as the ghost of campaign past.

  Our combined efforts must have made an impression. In the Rose Garden, Clinton came out squarely against a seven-year balanced budget. When asked whether he was going to propose a counterbudget, the president dodged, reiterating our original strategy of waiting for the “reconciliation” process, which “the president has a role in because I have a veto.” Of course, Clinton's use of the third person was a subtle hint that he wasn't really sold on our strategy, and you always have to listen for what Clinton doesn't say: He didn't rule out proposing a nine- or ten-year balanced budget.

  Morris was still lobbying hard behind the scenes. He opened our end-of-the-day conversation with a flourish —”Le roi est mort. Vive le roi” — which was his way of telling me that although I had won this early skirmish over the timing of the balanced-budget speech, I would lose the bigger war.

  The next day, the budget dominated our 7:30 A.M. senior staff meeting. As I went through my usual spiel about how disastrous a change in course would be and how we had to make sure that the president really, really understood all the implications of making a move, Erskine Bowles blew up. “Damnit, George,” he said, “the president has made a decision. He wants a ten-year budget. Let's just give it to him and make sure he has a balanced presentation.” Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin seconded the motion. Although both knew that Clinton hadn't formally made up his mind, proposing a ten-year budget was clearly the president's desire. Erskine was telling me to get with the program.

  This was my reality check. I respected Bowles and Rubin. We worked well together, and they generally deferred to my political judgment. Although their faith in the ultimate fairness of ungoverned markets was deeper than mine, I had to concede that Rubin had been dead right in 1993 when he said that the economic benefits of deficit reduction would make up for the costs of scaling back our “putting people first” investments. As successful investment bankers, they were also seasoned and disciplined negotiators. Through the early months of 1995, they had supported the hard-line budget strategy I advocated. But they were looking ahead to the next move. Above all, they were telling me, “The president has made a decision. Deal with it.”

  They're right. Face it,
George, you lost this fight. Grow up and make the best of it. I still believed in holding out as long as possible, and that moving too far and too fast in the Republican direction was too high a price to pay for staying in power. But I couldn't blind myself to political reality. The Republicans had won the last election. The president did have a responsibility to work with them in a reasonable manner, and arguing against the notion of balancing the budget was politically untenable. If people weren't convinced that we shared their commonsense belief that government should live within its means, they wouldn't even listen to the rest of our arguments. Finally, whether I liked it or not, the president wanted to make this decision.

  So I made one too — to play ball. After the meeting, Leon, Harold, Erskine, and I huddled for an hour to figure out a rational process for moving forward. The goal was to produce a credible balanced budget, through the normal channels of the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council, as quickly as possible — within a month. But we also needed to account for the irrational. Our best-laid plans could still be ruined by a single phone call from Morris. After clearing it with Leon, I called him.

  “Dick,” I said, “if the president is determined to come up with a balanced budget, which I'm still not happy about, I think you and I owe it to him to make it as politically prudent a document as possible. We ought to see if we can develop a common position.” In victory, Dick was gracious. He said he now realized that I wasn't acting only from “knee-jerk liberalism” or my past ties to the Democratic Congress, but also from a legitimate concern for the president's political positioning and the real-world consequences of further budget cuts. We agreed to meet Friday, the morning after his next session with the president.

  Having made my deal with the devil, I tried to get some credit with Clinton. At the end of the day, as we were walking back from a “drop-by” with a delegation of Greek Americans, I raised my dinner with Dick to the president and added that we'd been discussing the budget: “We'd like your clearance to work together.” Clinton didn't say anything right away, just looked down at me out of the corners of his eyes, skeptical. Terrific; now he's worried that we're cooperating too much. Or does he think I'm bullshitting him? But when we reached the Oval, the president pulled a pad from the drawer by his phone. It was covered with his hieroglyphics. “I've been thinking hard about how we can shave the budget without doing too much harm. …” he said. Maybe I hadn't been giving him enough credit.

  The era of good feeling didn't last long. At 6:15 on Friday morning, Harold slipped into my office and flipped a plastic-laminated folder at the newspaper spread before my face. It was Dick's “neuro-psychological profile” of the American electorate, his handout at last night's seance. Harold was my spy at Dick's weekly strategy sessions in the residence, and his report this morning couldn't be worse. “It was pretty tough on Leon last night,” he said, looking disgusted, sounding dejected. Morris had responded to our success at stalling a balanced-budget announcement with a furious counter-strike at Panetta and the rest of us on the day team. Calling the White House “a graveyard of speeches,” he circulated a list of his brilliant ideas that had been “snuffed out by the bureaucrats” and browbeat Clinton into scheduling the budget speech for Tuesday night — four days from now.

  At our morning meeting, the strain of holding two White Houses together showed on Leon. Testy, his normally ruddy cheeks waxy with fatigue, he pulled Press Secretary Mike McCurry and me aside. “Guys, I felt awfully lonely in that meeting last night,” he confided. “I need your help.” Panetta knew that we had meetings with Morris later that day, and he asked us to do what we could to change his mind about a Tuesday speech. Not only was it bad budget strategy, but the Serbian bombing of another “safe area” in Bosnia the day before meant that we had a weekend of NATO air strikes ahead. To have Clinton slap together a budget and spring it on the country in the midst of an intensified military action in which American troops were at risk didn't seem presidential or prudent.

  Morris was unmoved by that argument. He came to our meeting bearing me a gift — a Diet Pepsi — but he wouldn't budge on the timing of the speech. The polls, he divined, dictated next week: “There's been a ten percent drop in the number of people who would vote against Clinton, but no increase in the number of people who would vote for him,” he said. “The key to getting that ten percent — the swing vote, the Perot vote — is to give a prime-time speech. It has to be next week, or we lose them forever.”

  Next week or we lose them forever? No wonder we're proposing a Republican budget. Our strategist is Nancy Reagan's astrologer. How does Clinton listen to this crap? Actually, I thought I was beginning to understand. Morris had a strong fix on Clinton's psychology. His focus on swing voters was solid analysis that appealed to the president's intellect; his obsession with the timing was superstition that inflamed the president's insecurities. When he told Clinton, “I can't guarantee that you win if you follow my advice, but I can guarantee that you lose if you don't,” he played into the same part of Clinton that covertly consulted New Age gurus. A man blessed with political luck, Clinton usually took precautions to protect it.

  Over the course of our two-hour meeting, it was clear that Dick didn't really care about the budget — as long as it was ready by Tuesday and we could claim it reached balance. He didn't understand the numbers, and he was happy to work with me to protect Democratic priorities and preserve lines of attack against the Republicans. We reviewed the Rivlin budget options and agreed that Clinton couldn't scale back his tax cut or propose tax increases, that we needed to maintain a net increase in funding for education and our commitment to a hundred thousand new police, and that we should draw a clear contrast with the Republicans on Medicare by proposing far smaller savings and no new premium increases on its beneficiaries. The problem, of course, was figuring out how to do all that and still produce a balanced budget. Dick was willing to make cuts in welfare and benefits to legal immigrants that I opposed, but it still wasn't enough to fill the shortfall. No matter. “I'll work with Alice over the weekend,” he said, concluding our meeting.

  I spent the rest of the day reporting to my colleagues. Panetta was busy when I went to his office, but he walked into mine a few minutes later, his sour mood replaced by an air of resignation. I told him that Dick had signed off on most of my substantive objections, but that he still insisted we had to go on Tuesday. Leon just exhaled, slowly shaking his head from side to side. It wasn't just the substance of the decision that offended him; there was plenty of room for honest debate over budget policy. It was the assault on the integrity of our policy-making process, the fact that we were beholden to polls, and the double indignity the night before of being insulted by a charlatan and hearing no defense from the president in return. This wasn't the way a White House was supposed to work. He leaned his elbows into my desk for something of a heart-to-heart. “You know, Leon,” I said. “If the president actually does this on Tuesday, Laura [Tyson, director of the National Economic Council] and a couple of other people might resign.”

  “I don't know that I can stay either,” he replied. “I've been doing budgets for a long time, and the way we're going now just isn't right.”

  “I guess I'd leave too,” I said, tentatively. Neither one of us could believe, I think, that the president would actually stick to Dick's schedule. It wasn't really possible to produce a new budget over the Memorial Day weekend, and we didn't think Clinton would propose it over the opposition of his entire economic team. Still, we couldn't be sure. When Leon left, I called Laura Tyson to commiserate over how the National Economic Council process had been corrupted. “No, George,” she said. “I feel sorry for you. You went through the whole campaign. Now it's all going down the drain.”

  My next stop was Erskine, who said he was leaving the White House by the end of the summer. His wife had just been promoted, and it was his turn to take care of the kids. Besides, he added, “this situation can't last much longer.” By that, of
course, he meant the trouble with Morris. Erskine was Dick's official control officer. But even though he generally agreed with the Morris approach on the budget, Bowles said he felt like “taking a shower” every time he dealt with him. Before I left, Erskine showed me the memo Morris had already faxed him that detailed the agreements we'd reached on the budget. Though overstated, it was a surprisingly fair summary. Just in case, Erskine asked me to speak directly to Clinton.

  But the president didn't really want to hear it. While noting my arguments on his pad, he set his jaw when I argued that we wouldn't be ready and it wouldn't be wise to go on Tuesday. “We have to move quickly. We have to move quickly,” he insisted. “We're losing the spin war on the budget.” Then Harold and the vice president joined us, and the president seemed intent on getting me out of there. “I agree with a lot of your points, but I want the option of going on Tuesday. I want all the numbers.” Clinton's impatience was a sign that I was winning the argument; he'd have been more solicitous if the decision were going against me. But we still had to go through the motions. OMB would spend the weekend crunching numbers, and our budget group would meet with the president on Monday, Memorial Day.

  A lurid lightning storm enhanced the surreal quality of our late-holiday-afternoon meeting in the Oval. Despite a weekend of all-nighters, the OMB analysts hadn't completed the options paper for the president, but we were still laboring under the fiction that he would present a full budget to the country the next night. Clinton pressed the issue, and Gore joined in, suggesting that the president cancel his Thursday trip to Montana if we couldn't be ready by Tuesday. There's a plan. We're bombing Bosnia, but we scrap the president's schedule to propose a budget that doesn't exist. I couldn't resist the bait. It's one thing to cancel a presidential trip for a national security crisis, I responded, but doing it for another flip on the budget would send the signal that this was another knee-jerk reaction and not part of a well-thought-out plan.