All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  Gingrich, meanwhile, looked more like America's brat. At a November 15 breakfast, Gingrich had told a roomful of reporters that he had sent the tougher CR to the White House because of how he'd been treated by the president on the trip to Prime Minister Rabin's funeral. “You land at Andrews Air Force Base and you've been on the plane for twenty-five hours and nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp. … It's petty,” he concluded. “But I think it's human.”

  And not completely crazy. We did deliberately avoid any discussion of the budget on Air Force One — in part because the president was grieving for the foreign leader he most respected, but mostly because of our continuing worry that Clinton would concede too much in a private negotiation with Gingrich or Dole. I was appearing at fund-raisers in California that weekend, but I made sure to call Erskine and Harold with the warning that we had to find a way to prevent any budget negotiations on the plane ride. One of Leon's responsibilities on the trip was to stop any budget talks before they got too serious. Newt's childish reaction, however, transformed a largely abstract issue into a story everyone could understand; now our plot had a crime (shutdown), a culprit (Newt), and a motive (personal pique).

  An hour after Newt's breakfast, my phone was ringing off the hook. By noon, the White House photographer had found a picture of Clinton and Gingrich conferring in the Air Force One conference room, a photo we helpfully released to our friends in the media. By nightfall, the beltway was buzzing about the Speaker's temper tantrum; the next morning, the rest of the country would be too. Democrats displayed the front page of the New York Daily News (a cartoon of Newt in diapers under the headline “Cry Baby”) on the floor of the House. For Clinton, we scripted a more subtle dig. When asked if he knew of “any reason” that Newt would react so strongly to his treatment on Air Force One, the president delivered an unhesitant apology. “I can tell you this,” he answered. “If it would get the government open, I'd be glad to tell him I'm sorry.”

  Despite these gaffes, the Republicans were still in a strong position. On Sunday, November 19, six days into the first shutdown, the White House was functioning with a skeletal staff, and our coalition was cracking. Forty-eight Democrats had voted for a new Republican CR that didn't include the Medicare premium increase but did require the president to submit a seven-year balanced-budget proposal on their terms. Still blackmail, but the threat was less partisan now and especially difficult to oppose given that the president had already said we could balance the budget in seven years. With Thanksgiving approaching, Democrats were bailing out on us by the hour. In the House, we couldn't hold enough Democrats to sustain a veto.

  To ward off that disaster, our budget team drove to the Capitol with an offer to meet the Republicans' demand for a balanced budget in seven years “if and only if” they agreed to provide “adequate funding for” the president's priorities: Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. In our minds, the two halves of the resolution canceled each other out; nothing would be agreed to until everything was agreed to. Certain that the Republicans would reject it, we returned to the White House and waited. The president was puttering through the Oval Office suite in his sweatsuit. He stopped by my desk for an update. Sperling joined us, then Panetta and a few others, so we migrated back to the Oval to plan our response to the inevitable override. Clinton was grumpy; the rest of us were grim — until Betty cracked the door and handed Leon the Republican counterproposal, fresh from the fax machine.

  Reading over Leon's shoulder, I saw that the only changes were cosmetic, replacing “if and only if” with “and,” and adding language praising veterans and citing the need for a strong national defense. “This is it!” Panetta exclaimed. “Yes!” I screamed in his ear. The president high-fived the whole room. Our fellow Democrats back on the Hill immediately agreed to accept the amendments, and the government was back in business. We Democrats emerged from the first shutdown more unified, while the Republicans fractured. Whether the cause was hubris, naïveté, or a failure of nerve, the Republicans had blown their best chance to splinter our party; from that point on, everything started breaking our way.

  The CR gave the Republicans time to pass their overall budget, which Clinton promptly vetoed with the same pen LBJ had used to sign Medicare. Then, while Panetta led our negotiating team to the Hill to see if a deal was now possible, the president floated above the fray. He signed the Bosnian peace accords in Paris and was greeted like a hometown hero in Belfast. Back home, knowing that a second government shutdown was possible when this CR expired on December 15, we devoted hours to keeping the Democrats unified and developing a consensus budget we could all stand behind if the negotiations with the Republicans eventually broke down. The days of triangulation were long gone. Feeling neglected, Morris left for a long Christmas vacation.

  While the president still preferred a bipartisan deal, he was getting more comfortable with confrontation. He allowed Leon to hold a hard line in the Capitol Hill talks, which was driving the Republicans rabid. The Speaker also understood that the calendar was working in our favor now: He knew full well that if there was another government shutdown, he'd be blamed — “the Gingrinch who stole Christmas.” But by now, he'd lost control of his troops. They refused to reopen the government unless we agreed to their terms, and the second shutdown began. The freshmen had become Newt's Frankenstein monster — and my new best friends. The more they dug in, the better off we were. Even pragmatic veterans adopted their kamikaze spirit. “We will never, never, never give up,” thundered Lousiana's Bob Livingston on the House floor. “We will stay here until doomsday.”

  Not Bob Dole, though. A few days before Christmas, we were in his Senate office, chatting before another round of budget talks. The room was fragrant with pine; a fire was crackling. For the Senate majority leader, this was home. But he wanted the office next to mine, and the government shutdown was preventing him from campaigning for it. Clad in a cardigan, he offered me a Moravian spice cookie and mused aloud about his predicament. “I've got to get to New Hampshire,” he confided. “One way or the other, it's over on the thirty-first, because I'm out of here.”

  Mistake or message? Doesn't matter. All we have to do is hold on one more week. They'll break. “It's over on the thirty-first. …”

  On New Year's Eve, the budget talks at the White House recessed for the holiday. The two sides were still far apart, and, true to his word, Bob Dole was about to bolt. In two days, he'd announce that Senate Republicans were abandoning their House colleagues and voting with Democrats to lift the government shutdown. The Republicans had finally become the “roving bands of hunter-gatherers” that Morris had predicted we'd see in September. There would be no budget deal.

  The president was still in a good mood. He never lost hope, and he was about to make his annual pilgrimage to Renaissance Weekend with some of the highest poll numbers of his presidency. Before he left, he called me into the Oval. “You should know,” he said, handing me a piece of paper, “that Dick's blaming this on you.”

  “Confrontation Is the Key to Clinton's Popularity: Adviser Morris's Strategy Proves Inconsistent.” It was a clip from the December 24 Washington Post, a story I'd already seen and savored several times. Not only did its detailed analysis of public polls show that Clinton's popularity had actually fallen after the June budget speech; it also concluded that the “only time Clinton's ratings have improved substantially the past year as a result of his actions has been when he adopted a strategy of confrontation, not triangulation.”

  Without saying anything, the president watched me reread the entire article. I couldn't help myself. Every sentence was sweet vindication. The year that began for me in exile was ending in victory. We'd done the right thing, it was paying off, and now I was getting credit for it. Or was I? He's awfully quiet. He can't really be mad about this, can he?

  No, Clinton was just being Clinton. For months, he'd been playing me off against Morris, taking the best from both
of us and turning it into something better. Dick had been right to push the president to propose a balanced budget. My White House colleagues and I were right to insist on a firm defense of New Deal and Great Society commitments that Morris would have sacrificed in a second. Clinton was right to pick and choose, creating a synthesis that was good for him and good for the country. But in this quiet encounter at the close of the year, Clinton must have sensed how maddening it was to be subject to his mercurial will — and he was making up for it with the perfect gesture at the perfect moment. “Don't worry.” He smiled. “Dick's a little paranoid. “Just keep on doing what you're doing.”

  16 GETTING OUT

  Idon't want to stay. …”

  The words escaped my mouth before I realized what they meant. But Dr. Hyde's smile showed he understood. Around my age, with the short hair and bulky build of a rugby player, he was a specialist at the top of his field — neurology and psychiatry. And he had just explained that if I didn't learn to manage the stress, I wouldn't make it through a second term. When I blurted out that all I wanted was to get through the next year and get out, he applied some gentle pressure: “Can you really walk away from the White House? … Don't you feel an obligation to stay?” But his questions didn't make me feel ungrateful for being unhappy or guilty for wanting to go. That's how I knew it was time.

  Of course, the decision wouldn't necessarily be mine. It was only 1995, a dark afternoon in mid-December on the brink of the second government shutdown. We still didn't know how that confrontation and the 1996 campaign would conclude. And I was determined to leave on my own terms — after we had prevailed on the budget, after Clinton had become the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to get elected twice. So I bargained with the doctor: Patch me up now, and I'll promise to change my life later. He prescribed Zoloft, a medication for anxiety and depression — and ordered me to take more walks.

  I had been putting off this visit for months. Although the worst of my depression had lifted by 1995, my nerves were shot, and it had started to show. During the June battles on the budget and affirmative action, hives had erupted across my chin. I grew a beard. The rash subsided after an August vacation, but my most pernicious symptom persisted unseen. It was a sound: of fingernails screeching across slate or the tines of a fork scraping a bone china plate. Several times a day, for up to an hour straight, it would loop around my brain and reverberate through my torso like feedback from an over-amplified guitar. I'd blink hard to force the sound out of my ears and compulsively rub the back of my scalp when my hair started to stand on end. But I couldn't control the sensation. My therapist prescribed mind games: Imagine yourself in a warm bath or wrapped in cool sheets. Cook a four-course meal in your head; if you miss a step, start again. We discussed medication. She gave me Dr. Hyde's number. I resisted. The Spartan in me said, “Suck it up”; the spin doctor saw future headlines.

  By December I couldn't take it anymore; I needed quiet now. So when Clinton flew overseas, I finally drove myself to a nondescript high-rise off Wisconsin Avenue, where I sat on the edge of the sofa as Dr. Hyde told me what I already knew: I was burned out. A serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Zoloft, he then explained, would help stop my nerves from flooding my brain with the chemical fueling my compulsive symptoms. Just hearing the mechanics calmed me down, and the medication helped even more. Soon I slept four hours straight, then I was up to six. I no longer woke up waiting for the sound to start. The feedback cleared, and I could breathe deeply again. Testing myself, I would see fingernails on a blackboard, hear the sound track, then switch it off.

  All of the White House stresses were still there, but they didn't affect me so severely. The medication stripped away layers of worry, allowing me to remember what it was like to be me — a melancholy nail biter, sure, but not someone consumed by anxiety, not someone who measured himself by his proximity to a president or convinced himself that his words and deeds would make or break a presidency. It helped restore my sense of perspective, the internal balance my father had taught me to prize. I still worked hard, but I worried less. I cared about what we could do, but I didn't obsess. Calmer, more detached, I prepared to leave.

  Even as my health improved, I wasn't tempted by the thought of a second term. Of course, I still wanted Clinton to win. Victory would redeem our failures and validate our successes. Four more years in the White House would mean more Democratic judges on the federal bench, perhaps another seat on the Supreme Court. It would mean that more of our people would be managing the government for more time, making the day-to-day decisions that add up to meaningful change. Legislatively, Clinton would use his veto to prevent the Gingrich Congress from doing too much harm and his bully pulpit to persuade them to do some good. As commander in chief, he'd be more confident; as chief diplomat, more creative. Attuned by experience to the power of the office, freed from the burden of another election, he would become a better president.

  But not a bolder one. In 1993, Clinton groused that the bond market was turning him into an Eisenhower Republican. By 1996, with the nation prosperous and at peace, with Republicans controlling the Congress, it seemed that Clinton's second term would be even more like Ike's — and he didn't seem to mind. I couldn't fully blame him for bending with the times. The voters did send us a message, and moderation did have its virtues. But it wasn't all that inspiring. So like my boss, I would play it safe. While serving in the White House, I had survived failure, scandal, and internal exile. The next time I made a mistake or came under attack, I might not escape. Protective of my reputation, less enthralled by Clinton now, I wouldn't press my luck in a second term that promised to be competent but complacent — a second term encapsulated in the slogan “The era of big government is over.”

  A product of Dick Morris's word processor, that phrase was the heart of the 1996 State of the Union. Dick said it captured a “new national consensus.” I thought it proved that we had won some battles but lost the larger war, that we were the prisoners of conservative rhetoric, and that the American people were as full of contradictions as their president. How would they like it if we said, “The era of Medicare is over” — or Social Security? How would they like it if the “era of disaster assistance” was over the next time they faced an earthquake or flood? So much of Clinton's comeback had been propelled by a defense of “big government.” Even if the phrase reflected reality, even if government had gone too far at times, the triumphalist tone of the declaration felt dishonest and vaguely dishonorable, as if we were condemning Democrats from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to the trash heap of history for the sake of a sound bite.

  But it was solid-gold politics, testing at 80 percent in the polls. And Clinton had paid a price for reducing the deficit, so he might as well get some credit for it. Eliminating the sentence from the State of the Union wasn't going to happen. Instead, a few of us wanted to balance it by adding, “… but the era of every man for himself must never begin.” Morris, surprisingly, didn't object; but our political-correctness police did. Displaying the same kind of thinking that was behind the attempt to prevent the president from wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball cap on opening day because it might offend Native Americans, they now argued that “every man for himself” was a sexist insult, and they appealed directly to the president. Clinton neutered the sentence: “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

  Not the same. In a political speech, it takes a cliche to counter a cliche. Maybe it didn't matter; maybe the man-bites-dog quality of a Democrat's declaring the death of “big government” would drown out whatever words followed. But if Clinton's compromise was too clunky, the editorial decision itself was poetically concise. The fall of a single sound bite to the Oval Office carpet summarized the Democratic Party's journey of a generation: from a party unified by the belief that government could promote the common good to a loose coalition of caucuses alienated from average Americans by a fixation on identity politics. It showed, as s
peechwriter Michael Waldman said when we left the Oval, “the death of liberalism at its own hands.” Clinton's bold and bland synthesis also revealed a secret of his personal popularity in the face of his party's decline. While striking deep into Republican territory, he covered his flank just enough to keep his fragile coalition whole. The centrists got the sound bite; the feminists excised a phrase; the traditional liberals like me couldn't really complain. A remnant of our idea survived even if the rhetoric wasn't ringing.

  The country loved it. Not just the death of big government, the whole presentation — with Clinton's patently passionate delivery of issues designed to appeal to suburban moms: school uniforms and curfews, stopping big tobacco from targeting kids, V-chips to block televised sex and violence. Ironically, though all involved government intervention, the proposals were wildly popular, which was at least half the point. Of course, I was no virgin. Taking a poll, to me, was like taking our temperature, and I had advocated the relatively inconsequential middle-class tax cut in 1992 not only because it symbolized whose side we were on, but also because it scored well. But during the Morris era, it seemed more and more as if we were polling first, proposing later.