Clinton was now more than a decade removed from his Oxford days as an antiwar protester, eight years beyond the McGovern struggle, six years past the Watergate scandal. It all seemed so long ago. Mandy Merck, the radical lesbian who had befriended Clinton at Oxford, realized what a different world he was now moving in when she looked him up at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Merck was covering the convention for Time Out, a counterculture magazine in London. She had no credentials, only a note on Clinton’s official stationery inviting her to a reception for the Arkansas delegation. All of the stereotypes that Merck had carried about Clinton’s Arkansas, impressions that he had fostered with his stories of old farmers and huge watermelons, were smashed when she walked into the reception room. Here was a congregation of yuppies: lots of dark suits, a smattering of jewel-studded denim jeans, the aura of money and power and sex in the air. Clinton looked like a well-groomed young banker. He greeted her warmly, and started to introduce her around the room. In his thickest Arkansas accent, his eyebrows raised in his classic can-you-believe-this? style, he would say, “I want you to meet a real Marxist-feminist from London, England.”
Two days later, Merck met Clinton in his hotel room for an interview. She told him she was surprised to learn that he was working as a floor whip for Carter opposing a platform plank on federally funded abortions. If women were seeking abortions as a matter of choice rather than health, Clinton told her, then he thought they should pay rather than the taxpayers. Merck was tempted to argue with him, but decided, “What’s the point? I’m not going to change his mind.” Clinton changed the subject to his convention speech. He hoped it would be in prime time.
Hours before delivering the speech, Clinton received a telegram from Carolyn Yeldell Staley. “Energize us,” she wrote. “Renew our flickering faith that leadership does care, and that government can respond. America waits.” Whether Clinton energized his audience that night is open to debate. But it is fair to say that his speech, which he wrote himself, was the shortest, clearest address that he would ever give at a Democratic convention—a cogent analysis of the troubled, transitional period that the Democratic party was enduring.
Simply putting together the old elements of the Democratic coalition and repudiating Ronald Reagan was not enough anymore, Clinton said. The Democrats had to start looking for “more creative and realistic” solutions to the nation’s problems. “We were brought up to believe, uncritically, without thinking about it, that our system broke down in the Great Depression, was reconstructed by Franklin Roosevelt through the New Deal and World War II, and would never break again. And that all we had to do was try to reach out and extend the benefits of America to those who had been dispossessed: minorities and women, the elderly, the handicapped and children in need. But the hard truth is that for ten long years through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, this economic system has been breaking down. We have seen high inflation, high unemployment, large government deficits, the loss of our competitive edge. In response to these developments, a dangerous and growing number of people are simply opting out of our system. Another dangerous and growing number are opting for special interest and single interest group politics, which threatens to take every last drop of blood out of our political system.”
GOVERNOR Clinton was a creature of habit. When someone went in to brief him on a subject or upcoming event, his habit was to keep doing some other activity, either reading or writing, at the same time that he was being briefed. Every half-minute or so, without looking at the aide, he would blurt out, “What else”—not as a question but as a sign that he had catalogued the information and it was time to move on. They were two of Clinton’s most frequently uttered words: What else. What else. What else. He was always working the telephone in search of inside information: much like his friend Jim Blair, who sought constant reports on cattle futures, only Clinton wanted the latest reading on Clinton political futures, up or down. He would end many conversations with another of his favorite phrases: “Keep your ear to the ground.” He was a young man of oversized appetites. Any aide who spent time with him could tell stories of his inhaling apples in a few massive bites, swallowing them core and all. Hot dogs went down so fast that they barely touched his teeth. The mansion cook could not bake chocolate chip cookies fast enough. Plates of enchiladas and nachos disappeared in seconds. What else. What else. What else.
He was competitive, always looking for a challenge. He put a pinball machine in the game room in the basement of the red brick Governor’s Mansion. One day seven-year-old Matt Moore, Rudy’s son, stood on a box to reach the levers and rang up a score of 800,000 points, lighting up the whole machine. The governor could not believe it. A child had broken his record. When everyone had left for the night, Clinton stayed up, Billy the pinball wizard, shooting, pounding, leaning, tilting, until two in the morning, determined to reclaim the record. What else. What else. What else.
For all of the frustrations that came with being around Bill Clinton, most of the people who fell into his orbit found it exhilarating. Life around him, they said, seemed more vital, closer to the edge, less routine, more physically and intellectually challenging. But in the final months of the 1980 election, Clinton’s “what else” personality took a dangerous turn. It started to seem less a product of boundless energy and more a reflection of self-absorption. To Moore, he seemed distracted, unable to focus as he should, unwilling to make clear decisions. People would approach travel aide Randy White and ask what was the matter with the governor: “They’d tell me when they would meet him or shake his hand, it seemed that he was looking at the next person in the room, the next person to talk to. I had a lot of friends comment that he really wasn’t listening to them.” Moore thought it might be a midlife crisis, a private conflict between Clinton and Rodham, something involving Clinton and the other women who hovered nearby wherever he went.
Clinton’s behavior was a symptom of something larger. He was fighting his own emotions related to ambition and expectations. For most of his life, people had been talking about how he would be president someday. Those great expectations had both carried him along and circumscribed his path. He often seemed to be doing things because they were what someone who might be president should do. Or, occasionally, in rebellion, because they were precisely what a future president should not do. In either case, it was reactive. And when the public started to turn against him, it left him at a loss.
His reelection campaign organization provided little help. It was directed by well-meaning but inexperienced newfound friends from the Little Rock country club and business set who had little sense of how to react in an unexpectedly tense situation. When Frank White’s campaign team began running television commercials depicting the Cuban refugee riot at Fort Chaffee, Clinton’s lead dropped 10 percentage points in one week. There was no response. Clinton could not believe that people would blame him for it. When he tried to turn the Fort Chaffee aftermath to his advantage by traveling up to Fort Smith and personally handing out federal reimbursement checks, he was blasted for partisan pandering by editor Jack Moseley in a front-page editorial in the Southwest Times Record The publisher of the Times Record, who owned several newspapers in Arkansas, ordered Moseley’s editorial reprinted on the front page of all of them, including the newspaper in Hot Springs, Clinton’s home town, which so enraged Virginia Dwire that she stormed down to the office of the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record and canceled her subscription.
Hillary Rodham, who again had become an issue because of her use of a different last name, was enraged, too, and tried in the final weeks to assert control over the campaign. She began reworking her husband’s schedule day by day. With eight days left, she placed an emergency long-distance call in search of Dick Morris. The New York pollster had been deposed from Clinton’s inner circle before the campaign, replaced by Peter Hart, a nationally regarded Democratic pollster. The marks against Morris were varied. Some of Clinton’s aides distrusted him as a mercenary who
represented Republicans as well as Democrats. Others thought of him as an evil force willing to do anything to win a campaign. Clinton himself had contradictory feelings about Morris. Before the 1978 election, when they were plotting Pryor’s race together, they were brothers. Once Clinton was in office, Morris felt a distance in their relationship. It was, he said later, as though Clinton “had gone from being a practical hard-nosed political operative to being a Boy Scout.” Morris started to feel that Clinton thought of him as “something dirty, that he didn’t want to touch without gloves.”
When it came time to fire Morris, Clinton backed away from doing it face to face. At their final meeting, the governor complained that Morris’s polls did not seem as thorough as Peter Hart’s. He also, according to Morris, declared at that meeting: “You are an assault to my vanity. Politics is what I do best and you do it as well as I do.” Morris later concluded that Clinton was setting him up to be fired. Two weeks afterward, an aide in the governor’s office called and said his services were no longer needed.
Until now, when the campaign was disintegrating with eight days to go. Now, Hillary Rodham made the practical decision that they needed Morris back. She called his house in New York City. Morris’s wife, Eileen McGann, answered the phone. “We’re losing. Frank White’s gaining. He’s hitting us with negatives. They’re working. We need Dick,” Rodham said. “He’s got to come to Arkansas right away.”
Morris was not home, McGann said, and in any case, Clinton had fired him and he had other candidates to work for now. Rodham tracked him down in Florida, where he was advising the Republican Senate candidate, Paula Hawkins. She persuaded him to come to Arkansas for the final days of the campaign. Morris took a final poll that showed Clinton under 50 percent, which for an incumbent he took to be fatal. They put up a final negative ad against White, but with little hope that it could make a difference. Nothing could go right. On Saturday, November 1, Clinton attended a Razorback football game at Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium. Arkansas was playing Rice, the perennial doormat of the Southwest Conference. Rice won 17-16. “This,” Clinton said, “is the last straw.” In private, he started attacking himself. “God, I’m an idiot!” he said. “I should have seen it coming. How could I be so dumb!” Morris noticed a clinical detachment in Clinton’s lament. It seemed to him that Clinton “was more hurt that he had screwed up as a politician than that he had screwed up as a governor.”
Clinton ended the campaign with a fundraiser in El Dorado at the home of Richard Mason, an environmental activist who owned an energy company. The crowd was large and enthusiastic, which temporarily lifted Clinton’s spirits. But while the guests mingled, he spent much of the night in the kitchen, working the telephone, getting reports from his county coordinators around the state. The reports were not encouraging. There were not enough volunteers for the get-out-the-vote effort on Tuesday. After the event, Clinton retreated to Mason’s guest house down the path from the main residence. His light stayed on most of the night. The next morning, after Clinton had gone, Mason went to the guest house to clean up. He found a deck of cards that Clinton had left behind. The governor had been playing solitaire; he had lost the last game. Mason noticed that the playing cards were adorned with pictures of the presidents of the United States.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE ONLY TRACK
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Someone once said you don’t understand politics until you’ve been defeated—then all the mysteries become apparent.”
CLINTON AND RODHAM were still at the Governor’s Mansion when the early returns started coming in on election night. They had an open line to Rudy Moore in the campaign headquarters war room on the second floor of an old Victorian house near the Arkansas Capitol. As soon as Moore received the first results from Texarkana, he passed them along to Clinton, who immediately grasped their meaning. He could analyze the voting boxes better than anyone in the campaign. He knew the precise totals that he had received in every county in the state in the past two elections. Now he was carrying Texarkana, but with numbers far below what he needed. At the same hour that his supporters at the Camelot Hotel were shouting with joy at a television network’s premature declaration that he would win, Clinton was swearing into the telephone, raging at his fate. It was over. He had lost.
His first wave of anger passed quickly, and by the time he and Rodham reached campaign headquarters he appeared calm and analytical, the political scientist again picking apart the data of defeat. Rodham remained more emotional. One friend noticed that she was trembling slightly, struggling to keep her composure, as she walked down the hallway with her husband and entered a private room to take a condolence call from Ted Kennedy.
Clinton had lost before, but none of his previous defeats compared with this one. This was catastrophic. Maybe the Oxonian curse had found another victim. At thirty-four, he fit the ironic description of the quintessential Rhodes Scholar: someone with a great future behind him. He had attained the achievement of being the youngest defeated governor in American history and only the third Arkansas governor in the twentieth century to be denied a second two-year term. His reaction, characteristically, was of two parts. Here he was whining, feeling sorry for himself. There he was resolved, plotting a comeback course.
The petulant side of Clinton’s personality sought to place blame on people and factors beyond his control. The press was his first target. He phoned Bill Simmons, the Associated Press bureau chief in Little Rock, a journalist known for fair-mindedness, and screamed about how Simmons had conspired to get him defeated. Simmons was puzzled by the attack and thought the governor seemed out of control. That Clinton deigned to talk to him was unusual: he gave most of the statehouse press corps the silent treatment for several weeks, brushing them off at public appearances with a wave of the hand. He was more accommodating to national journalists, although when David Broder of The Washington Post visited Little Rock shortly after the election, Clinton chided him, only half-jokingly, for mentioning the young governor in a Parade magazine account as someone who might someday be president. Clinton later carried a similar complaint to a meeting of the Society for Professional Journalists in Little Rock, where he broke his post-defeat silence by claiming that he had been unfairly portrayed as an overambitious young man interested in the governor’s job only as a steppingstone.
Clinton also took aim at Jimmy Carter, who had lost to Ronald Reagan.
“The guy screwed me and never tried to make amends,” he told Rick Stearns, his political confidant, from the Oxford days, in a late night telephone conversation. During an informal meeting with David Broder over a cup of coffee at the Governor’s Mansion, Clinton seemed consumed by bitterness toward the president. He said that he had warned Carter administration officials that their handling of the Cuban refugee crisis at Fort Chaffee would be a political disaster for everyone, but that the White House would not listen. When Carter belatedly expressed regret that Fort Chaffee might have played a role in Clinton’s defeat, Clinton responded with a touch of sarcasm that did not humor the earnest president: he told the press that he was “coming to Washington with a few refugees” for Carter to sponsor.
In the interregnum before the end of his term, Clinton traveled to Washington frequently and spent less time than usual in the governor’s office. When he was in Arkansas, he seemed sometimes to be overtaken by self-pity. One day he invited several aides to lunch at the Tracks Inn at the old railroad station down the hill from the Capitol. As they sat around the table after lunch, Clinton launched into a melodramatic soliloquy on what he should do next. Should he practice law in Little Rock? Should he compete for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, which would entail a move to Washington and a six-figure salary? Should he take another high-visibility public interest post being dangled in front of him by a progressive alternative to the religious right, People for the American Way, which was looking for a new chairman, preferably a Southern Baptist?
This was
not his most sympathetic audience. No one else at the table had any plans or job offers because they had not expected to be out of work so soon. “You sonofabitch!” said Randy White. “You’ve got every offer. You can do all these things. What are we gonna do? What am I gonna do? You’ve got everything in the world!” After they returned to the office, a chastened Clinton spent the remainder of the afternoon strolling from desk to desk, asking his staff members what he could do for them and how he could help them find new jobs.
Clinton’s own job offers included more than those he had mentioned to his staff at lunch. One day he took a call from Governor Jerry Brown of California, who suggested that Clinton and Hillary should move to the West Coast and reestablish a political base there, in a state more attuned to their progressive politics. To help Clinton get started, Brown offered him a job as his chief of staff in Sacramento. Clinton mentioned the proposal to Mickey Kantor, a longtime Brown friend and Los Angeles lawyer who worked with Rodham on the board of the Legal Services Corporation. “I indicated to him for a lot of reasons that might not be the most productive thing you could do,” Kantor later recalled. At the same time, Kantor was also serving a dual role in the maneuvering for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship. As the law partner of Charles Manatt, he was leading the campaign to get Manatt the job; and as a friend of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, he was advising Clinton that it would be the wrong move for him. Kantor was awed by what he saw as Clinton’s political potential: after their first meeting a few years earlier, he had gone back to California and told his friends that he had just met a young man who would be president someday. But running the DNC, Kantor told Clinton now, would not help him reach that ultimate goal. The national party was not held in high repute, especially in the South. Anyone who wanted to run again in Arkansas would have difficulty surviving the association with the party.
First In His Class Page 54
