All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  But timing is everything, and I wasn't the only person reading the Washington Times. The Republicans needed to change the subject from their Medicare cuts, so Gingrich and Dole held a gleeful “I told you so” press conference next to a huge poster of Clinton's admission. Already suspicious of the president, wary that he would sell them out in the budget talks, the Democrats ranged from distressed to apoplectic. At a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Moynihan incited his colleagues by handing out photocopies of Clinton's latest betrayal. The leadership made livid calls to Leon demanding a retraction. Evicted from Congress thanks to her vote for Clinton's tax increase, all Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky could say was “Oh, my.”

  By midday, McCurry was getting pummeled at his daily briefing. The evening news was a chorus of criticism from Democrats, Republicans, and independent observers, who all agreed on one point: that the president would say anything to anyone to get his or her support. Clinton had to retract his remarks — before the morning papers. But he was resting in the residence after several days of travel, and no one was eager to disturb him with this news. Shortly before the president left the White House again for an evening fund-raiser in Baltimore (those Medicare ads didn't come cheap), Gene Sperling and I implored Erskine Bowles for a five-minute meeting. “I know he's going to yell at us. I know he's going to be angry,” I said. “But he has to take it back or it will kill him.”

  The three of us met Clinton by the elevator across from the map room. He was exhausted; an angry fever blister on his nose flashed like the beacon on a sea buoy. Erskine told him why we were there, and I plunged into my opening argument before he could erupt. “We've been defending you all day, Mr. President, but after talking to the Hill and watching the news, we really feel we have a problem that needs to be fixed.” I then outlined a four-part presidential retraction that mixed three parts sugar and one of castor oil: “First, you can definitely say that your words were taken out of context. They were. Second, repeat that you're very, very proud of your economic plan. Third, say that nobody likes to raise taxes. And fourth, we have to say something like ‘I shouldn't have said what I said,’ or ‘It wasn't right to say what I said,’ or ‘It was a mistake. I was wrong.’”

  The forefinger was back in my face before I could finish the sentence, Clinton stepped toward me, glaring down, using every inch of his physical advantage. “I'm not going to say that,” he declared. “You just want me to go out there and say something that's not true.”

  He followed up with an intricate, if somewhat convoluted, digression on how the tax increase on the wealthy we had promised in the campaign was marginally lower than the one that passed the Congress because the bureaucrats wouldn't score our budget proposals accurately, the Republicans wouldn't vote for any tax increase, and the Democrats wouldn't cut spending as much as he would have liked. Never mind that most Democrats had originally opposed the energy tax increase proposed by the president and that we had promised more spending in the campaign than congressional Democrats eventually approved.

  After Clinton's first flurry, Sperling took over our tag-team effort. Matching the president line for line with citations from Putting People First and our 1993 economic plan, Gene closed like a lawyer. “We just can't litigate the past, Mr. President,” he said. “Even if you're right, we just can't do it.”

  Sensing an opening, I followed up with a modified pander. “Mr. President, what you are saying may have some deep truth to it, but it's not going to help. We can't win the argument.” Now he had a way to walk off the plank, I hoped. It wasn't that he was wrong; it was just that he couldn't clearly communicate in an environment where the press was always playing “gotcha.”

  “So what would you have me do?” he said, still testy but on the verge of surrender.

  “We need a concession of sorts,” I replied. “Can we say something like, you're proud of your plan, and you have no regrets?” It wasn't good enough. Not really an apology, and Clinton agreed only to have me issue a statement, not to appear before the cameras himself. But it would have to do for now. Gene and I drafted a short response — “The president has absolutely no regrets. Period. None. And he didn't mean to suggest otherwise”— and phoned it into the major papers. The “didn't mean to suggest otherwise” fillip was farther than the president wanted to go. But it would be the bare minimum necessary to get us through the night.

  After hearing the questions shouted at him on the way to his car, Clinton began to realize that too. He called me several times that night to ask me how the story was spinning. That was his way of thanking me and of apologizing for his earlier outburst. But the next morning, he was still in no mood to make the full mea culpa that Democrats and the press were demanding. The senior staff was unified in its recommendation: Clinton had to go to the briefing room to clean it up. Hillary called me twice to make the same point. But when we met with Clinton later that morning, he was still reluctant to go all the way. Gore, Panetta, Rubin, Bowles, and Ickes all weighed in, but the most the president would agree to was a conditional apology — an “if I said anything that people took the wrong way” statement coupled with a lame joke about how his mother had warned him not to give speeches when he was tired.

  Even Clinton's mistakes, however, had a way of working out for the best. To assuage the Democrats, his opening statement was his best blast yet at the Republican budget — “So my message to the Republicans is simple. … I will not let you destroy Medicare, and I will veto this bill” — solidifying the intransigent strategy we hardliners preferred. Of course, Clinton still desperately wanted a deal, so badly that later in the press conference he blurted out that we could balance the budget in seven years instead of the nine our budget now called for — which amounted to a unilateral concession of about $200 billion in spending cuts to the Republican side. Watching the television above the entrance to the briefing room, I pressed my forehead silently to the wall to keep from screaming; Gene looked as if he were about to cry. Just when we were cleaning up one problem, another popped out of the president's mouth.

  What we didn't know, what we couldn't know, was that even that slip would work to our advantage. Force, diplomacy, treachery, and luck were complementing each other in a manner Machiavelli would have appreciated. The hard public line coupled with our advertising campaign was unifying the Democrats and weakening the Republican position. Simultaneously, Morris's secret talks with Lott, Clinton's soothing phone calls to Gingrich, and his distancing from Democratic allies and premature public concessions — all sincere in their own way — combined to create an inadvertently ingenious disinformation campaign. It lulled the Republicans into believing Clinton would cave, if only they waited long enough.

  But they didn't know that toward the end of October, the confrontation camp (Trent Lott called me, Panetta, and Ickes “the Sandinistas”) had a new asset. As Morris became more prominent, he started to get more press scrutiny. The Sunday Times ran a front-page story detailing how, in his previous work, Morris had “openly and forcefully ridiculed Mr. Clinton's personal conduct and policy stands — and advised his clients about how to seize on the president's vulnerabilities in their own campaigns.” Other reporters started to comb through Dick's record and discover that he'd worked in Republican campaigns that had been roundly criticized for their racist overtones. Morris had bragged, for example, that he had been behind the infamous “white hands” ad for Jesse Helms, in which Helms's black opponent, Harvey Gantt, was accused of supporting quotas for racial minorities. For another Southern Republican candidate, he had developed a radio ad that defended the symbols of the old Confederacy to the tune of “Dixie.”

  It didn't take long for Dick to realize that these revelations were a threat to his checkbook. Democrats on the Hill were already gunning for him. Given the president's commitment to racial healing, Dick's association with race-baiting campaigns could give them the ammunition they'd need to get him fired. At least I hoped it would. When reporters first poked around on the �
�white hands” story, I asked Morris if it was true. “Well, not exactly,” he began. “I discovered the issue, polled it, advised Helms on it. …” Then he suddenly realized that I was laying a trap. He paused, and his voice rose, becoming righteously indignant. “But I didn't write that outrageous, despicable, racist ad.”

  To me, that was a distinction without a difference. In a meeting with Harold, Erskine, and Leon, I argued that Morris should be fired if the charges were true. “We dump Lani Guinier because of her views on race,” I said, “but this guy writes the most racist ad in modern politics, and we say, ‘What's the big deal?’” All of us wanted Dick out of there, and Leon asked Erskine to review the rest of his record for potential land mines. But Morris went into damage control mode, orchestrating an effective campaign to obscure all of his past work. When I returned to my office, he was working from my easy chair. “I just got off the phone with Roger Ailes,” he said. “He'll take full credit for Willie Horton, which is great — because I wrote it.”

  When I asked Dick what Clinton knew about the Helms ad, he didn't even blink. “Clinton knew all about it,” he said. “I was talking to him through the whole campaign about how great we were doing with this issue.” I didn't know how much was true, but this was exactly what I didn't want to hear. Of course Clinton knew. He just didn't care. Not the world's worst failing, a sin of association rather than action, but disheartening all the same — and I knew again that Morris wasn't going anywhere.

  But the public exposure weakened Morris. With the debt limit and government shutdown deadlines only days away, Panetta, Pat Griffin, and I took the opportunity to confront Dick in a meeting around Leon's conference table. “The next time something happens, these Democrats are going to go after you,” Pat told him. “The price for a vote is going to be your head.” Now the blackmail was working for our side.

  Terrified at the prospect that he would be triangulated, Dick experienced a political deathbed conversion: “I have now reassessed everything. It is becoming clear to me that we cannot compromise now, that we cannot reach a deal. … I'm not even sure we need to balance the budget anymore. People believe that we wanted to balance the budget, so we don't have to do it. But the only way this strategy of intransigence can work is if we go heavily, heavily, heavily into paid media.”

  Going “heavily” into paid media, of course, meant millions more in commissions for Morris. Pat and I started kicking each other under the table to keep from laughing at Dick's transparent performance, but Morris kept right on talking. “Some people need a shot of vodka for courage,” he said. “The president needs paid media. I need paid media. I have no courage without it.” It wouldn't last long, but at a crucial moment, for the right price, Morris was a liberal like me. We were standing shoulder to shoulder, shaking our fists, saying, “No, no, no … we're going to veto.” Morris would get his money; we'd prevail in the budget shutdown. I thought it was a small price to pay.

  Clinton, however, was still a true believer in the original Morris doctrine of accommodation — an inclination reinforced by the increasingly likely prospect that the United States was about to go bankrupt. The Republicans were refusing to extend the government's credit line unless we made unilateral concessions on the bud-get. Treasury Secretary Rubin was using creative financing to forestall the day of reckoning, but if Congress didn't grant the government authority to issue more bonds, the United States was, at most, weeks away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in history — on Clinton's watch.

  Publicly, the president was resolute; privately, he was wavering. “I'm not comfortable being this hard-line,” he said at a Morris residence meeting (yes, in late September, I was finally invited to the weekly strategy sessions). Not only might he bear the blame when 43 million Americans failed to get their social security checks, but the president was understandably afraid that default could trigger a free fall in global financial markets. It might, replied Bob Rubin; but in keeping with his sphinxlike demeanor, he declined to predict the consequences, simply repeating his mantra that default was “unthinkable.” But so was capitulation. Steeled by years of weighing probabilities and placing billion-dollar bets in the bond market, the treasury secretary believed that buckling to a congressional blackmail threat would set a terrible precedent, weaken the presidency, and eliminate our leverage in the budget talks. His resolve was consistently our best counter to Clinton's vacillating tendencies.

  So when Gingrich called Clinton to discuss the debt limit, we intercepted the message and had Rubin return the call instead — joking that to keep him from calling Newt and trading away the store we would disconnect Clinton's phones, “like they did to Gorbachev during the coup.” But the Speaker, correctly, would deal only with the president. An Oval Office meeting was scheduled for Wednesday, November 1.

  In the two days prior to that encounter, our budget group spent nearly eight hours strategizing about how to keep the president from caving; and to lock Clinton in more securely, Panetta spoke to the Washington Post and the House Democratic Caucus on Wednesday morning to say that the president believed that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” As Gingrich and Dole drove down from the Capitol, our Oval Office prep had the feel of a family intervention. All of us — Rubin, Panetta, Tyson, Sperling, Rivlin, Bowles, and Griffin — surrounded the president, bucking him up, telling him how strong he looked when he stood on principle and reminding him of the consequences of retreat. I went negative on Newt. His objective was total victory, I said. “Newt will lie and Newt will leak to force your hand,” I told Clinton, adding that he had to be on his guard and willing to let Newt walk away. In this case, I concluded, “a failed meeting is a successful meeting.”

  “George is exactly right about that.” Welcome words from a powerful new ally — the vice president. Over the course of 1995, as our views began to converge on the big issues — affirmative action and the budget — the tension between us had eased. Back in June, Gore had been a strong advocate with Morris of proposing a Clinton balanced budget (a position Morris attributed to a specific deal he made with the vice president in March: “I would fight for his priorities — reinventing government and the environment — in return for full power”), but he believed that we would ultimately reach an acceptable deal only if we held firm against the Republican threats, and he was willing to live without one if necessary. Gore also had a strong partisan streak and wasn't afraid of a fight. When Newt opened the meeting by complaining about our attacks on their “extremist” budget, the vice president fired back: “At least we didn't accuse you of drowning those little children in South Carolina.”

  The remark referred to a recent Gingrich press conference in which he had cited the case of Susan Smith — a South Carolina woman who had drowned her children — as a reason to vote Republican. Gore's shot rocked Gingrich and fortified Clinton. A president has no real peers, but Gore was getting close. Always respectful in public, he leveled with Clinton in their sacrosanct weekly lunches. Over the course of the budget talks, Gore became Clinton's bad cop. In this initial meeting, however, watching Gore coldcock Newt tapped the competitor in Clinton. As Newt pressed for concessions, the president fashioned a dramatic moment of his own. “If you want somebody to sign your budget,” he said, pointing to the remains of the HMS Resolute across the room, “you're going to have to elect Bob Dole to sit behind that desk, because I'm not going to do it.” The meeting ended successfully — in deadlock.

  A week later, Clinton's brotherly rivalry with Gore manifested itself in another way. At noon on November 8, I was in the Oval to brief the president for a fund-raising lunch with minority entrepreneurs who were showing their gratitude for Clinton's stand on affirmative action. Both of us, however, were preoccupied.

  “You really think he's not going to run?” Clinton asked.

  “Dead certain,” I replied. “He's announcing it within the hour.”

  “It's because of his sense of duty. McClellan was the only sitting general to run against his
commander in chief. Ike could have run against Truman, but he waited.”

  The president returned to his paperwork. Apparently that was his only comment on the happy news: Colin Powell was about to announce that he would not be a candidate for president in 1996. I waited to see if Clinton had any questions. No; but as he handed Nancy Hernreich his homework, he peered over the rims of his glasses with a mischievous grin that revealed a momentary lapse of empathy. “Too bad for Al,” he said.

  We burst out laughing, and the president broke into a big smile, proud of his joke. Just as quickly, though, he backpedaled, a little embarrassed by our delight in his display of political selfishness: “Al knows it's better for him if we win this time around.” But the smile didn't fade. If Powell ran next time, it was Gore's problem.

  General Powell's withdrawal also eliminated a key risk of our confrontational budget strategy — that a prolonged, partisan standoff would create space for an outsider like Powell to run up the middle by attacking both parties for Washington gridlock. But during the two government shutdowns that occurred in November and December, the Republican leaders themselves were our secret weapon. As much as I would love to think that we were the sole authors of our success, their self-inflicted wounds and tactical blunders made the crucial difference.

  First, they failed to pass their budget on time. Although “continuing resolutions” (aka CRs — legislation designed to keep the government running while Congress completed its normal budget process) had become standard operating procedure, the fact that the Republicans missed their deadline made it marginally easier for us to blame them for the government shutdown. Even more damaging, however, was their decision to attach the politically poisonous Medicare premium increase to the CR. Hitting that one back was like batting practice. Not only did their maneuver amplify our television ads (which had been recut with fresh footage of Gingrich praising the day when Medicare would “wither on the vine” and Dole bragging about being “one of twelve” senators to vote against LBJ's original Medicare proposal), it proved our blackmail point. Clinton vetoed the CR, effectively shutting down the government. But when he appeared before the cameras to scold the “deeply irresponsible” Republican leaders for cutting Medicare “as a condition of keeping the government open,” the president was the picture of stern compassion, America's dad.