How to raise taxes? How to solve this practical dilemma? Rule number one of the permanent campaign: Turn to idealism. The first decision of Clinton and the inner circle was to move the focus away from the tax by making it an idealistic crusade. Rather than merely raising enough money to satisfy the court mandate, they would seek twice as much, and build an entire program around it. There was a national context to this approach: the National Commission on Excellence in Education had just issued a landmark report citing a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s schools and detailing a long list of needed reforms. Some southern states had already launched education reform efforts, most notably Mississippi, whose threadbare schools usually ranked fiftieth, below Arkansas’ forty-ninth, in comparative studies of the states. The traditional sarcastic cry in Arkansas, “Thank God for Mississippi!”, might no longer apply.
Hillary Rodham, now going by Hillary Clinton or Mrs. Clinton, took a leave of absence from Rose Law Firm to spend the summer and early fall chairing the Education Standards Committee. It was not the first time she had worked for her husband (in the first term she had chaired a committee on rural health care), but it was her widest public exposure, reflecting her idealistic and pragmatic sides: her profound interest in children and education issues and, even more, the extraordinary commitment she had begun making to advance Clinton’s cause since the 1980 defeat. In selecting her for the committee, Clinton had said, “This guarantees that I will have a person who is closer to me than anyone else overseeing a project that is more important to me than anything else.” From then on, increasingly, he would turn to her for critical tasks that he needed done or was not good at himself.
The Education Standards Committee held seventy-five meetings, in which it took public testimony at the same time that it prepared the public for a largely predesigned set of reforms, from mandatory kindergarten to smaller class sizes in elementary school to competence tests for students in third, sixth, and eighth grades to minimum standards and scorecards for every school. The inadequacies the committee members found in many Arkansas school districts were stunning: no physics classes in 148 high schools, no advanced math in 135, no foreign languages in 180, and no music in 204 schools. At every session, parents would hover around Hillary Clinton after the meetings and tell stories about their troubled schools. Gradually, over the course of the hearing process, it seemed that Hillary, after living in Arkansas for nearly a decade, was finally being accepted as a member of the family, viewed less as a professional outsider and more as an intelligent public servant. When she appeared before an interim committee of the legislature to outline the reforms that her panel was considering, Representative Lloyd George said into his microphone, “I think we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!”
While Hillary concentrated on substance, Clinton and Morris experimerited with tax strategies, testing a variety of options in polls which they wrote and rewrote together. Clinton finally decided to try to raise most of the money by increasing the sales tax I percent. It was the least progressive form of taxation, unpopular with organized labor and advocates for the poor, but it was also the surest way to get the money. It required only majority approval in the legislature, whereas most other tax hikes would require three-quarters approval. Some of Clinton’s allies thought it was time to reform the sales tax by eliminating food from items that could be taxed or expanding it to include a variety of exempted services. But Morris, strongly supported by Hillary, argued that it would be counterproductive to make the tax that interesting because it would then become the issue, “rather than the good things it would achieve.”
As the final education package was prepared for the special session which was to begin in early October, an idea that had not been part of the committee’s recommendations took on a central role: competence tests for public school teachers. It was a concept that Hillary had considered privately, especially after coming home from hearings where she heard horror stories about some teachers. In their strategy sessions, the Clintons would recall the teacher who taught his class about “World War Eleven”—apparently mistaking the Roman numerals of World War II. But the overriding reasons for adding the teacher tests to the program were political. Frank White, the former governor, who represented the conservative business establishment, announced in a speech a few weeks before the special session that he would support the tax increase and pay raises for teachers only if they were accompanied by teacher tests.
Morris offered two other reasons to include teacher tests in the package in tandem with teacher salary increases. In surveys he had conducted going back to 1978, one of Clinton’s highest negatives was that people thought he was the tool of special interests, which to many Arkansas voters meant not powerful business forces but liberal groups such as the Teachers Association, labor unions, and blacks. Public employee unionism was un-popular in the state. When Morris polled on the teacher tests, he found that the support for it was overwhelming, exceeding 75 percent. “It distills the quality of helping children from the soup of helping children and helping the teachers’ union,” Morris told Clinton. “It boils off what people didn’t like, which was caving in to the teachers who want more money, and shows the purity of your motivation of helping children, because you are offending the special interest that would be most gratified by what you are doing.” It was also, Morris noted, a decisive break from the Democratic left.
On the day before Clinton appeared on statewide television to unveil his proposal, Betsey Wright invited Kai Erickson, executive director of the Arkansas Education Association (AEA), to her office in the Capitol and told him what was in the package, including the teacher tests. Erickson was stunned. He told her that the teachers had worked with Clinton and Hillary throughout the hearing process and had never been informed that the competence tests were on the table. He asked whether it was something that could be discussed and negotiated. Wright said no.
RULE number two of the permanent campaign: Never rely on the press, the free media, to get your message across. The education campaign started before the special session began, and it was almost indistinguishable from an election campaign. Clinton formed a finance committee, Arkansas Partners in Education, that raised and spent $130,000 for radio and television commercials promoting the reform package. Another support group, the Blue Ribbon Education Committee, distributed satin blue ribbons and 250,000 brochures explaining the program along with postcards that could be mailed to legislators by citizens supporting the reform effort. Most of the money was raised from financial institutions and corporations in a four-day solicitation blitz orchestrated by Clinton and his executive secretary, W. Maurice Smith, the rural financier and farmer, who also began making personal loans to Clinton from his own bank to sustain the permanent campaign.
On Tuesday, October 4, in an address opening the special session, ten months into his term, Clinton declared that the legislature was presented with a “magic moment” to change Arkansas history. It was an emotional speech, infusing his personal struggles with his hopes for his state. “In the life of our state, as in the life of a person, there are times of growth and decline, times of joy and sadness, times of triumph and tragedy, and times of ordinary getting along,” Clinton said. “Much of what life brings is a matter of circumstance beyond our control. Yet always our will makes some difference, and sometimes our will can make all the difference. We are here tonight in such a time.” He cited one of his favorite quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “’I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.’” He read from Robert Frost: “ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference.’” And, mindful of Morris’s polls indicating that the public was overwhelmingly behind teacher tests, he called mandatory tests a “small price to pay for the biggest tax increase for education in the history of the state and to restore the teaching profession to the positi
on of public esteem that I think it deserves.”
What had been a last-minute, throw-in idea now became the symbolic center of the reform package. The Teachers Association accused the Clintons of labeling their entire profession incompetent. One of the major fears of the AEA leadership was that a standardized teacher test, like many standardized tests, would prove to be culturally biased against some black teachers, but they were reluctant to make that case in public, fearing a backlash among redneck legislators. Carol Willis and other black aides on Clinton’s staff also thought that the tests would have racial implications: they drafted their own satiric version of a test with a cultural bias toward the inner city, with such items as “Q. When is Mother’s Day? A. The day the welfare checks arrive.” Clinton expressed chagrin at the AEA’s charges that he and Hillary were smearing the teaching profession. But in private, according to Morris, he appreciated the political benefits of picking a fight.
With the poll numbers behind him, Clinton struck an unyielding position. If the legislature killed the testing plan, he said, he would drop the entire package. Angry teachers roamed the halls of the Capitol and packed the Senate gallery for the crucial vote, which was close enough to go either way. Clinton did much of the last-minute lobbying himself, calling senators out of the chamber and displaying the full range of his abilities to plead, cajole, and persuade. He cornered Vada Sheid, the former treasurer of Baxter County who had been his friend and ally since the day in the spring of 1974 when he had stopped at her furniture store in Mountain Home to ask for her support in the congressional race against John Paul Hammerschmidt and she had sewed a loose button on his shirt. Sheid wanted to vote with Clinton, but the teachers in her district were putting pressure on her to go against the tests. “Bill Clinton comes to the Senate and he calls me out and he says, ‘Vada, you’re not thinkin’ clear, you’ve forgotten your grandchildren have always had priority with you,’” Sheid recalled. “He said, ‘You’re afraid, Vada. But I have to have one more vote to pass this thing.’”
Clinton “had tears in his eyes,” according to Sheid. “He had to have that one vote. He was dead meat. He was emotional about it.” She told him that she was nervous about reelection. “This will defeat me,” she said.
“No it won’t,” Clinton promised. “It will help you.”
Sheid voted for the tests. The teachers campaigned door to door in her district against her. She lost the next election, but did not hold it against Clinton, who rewarded her act of loyalty by appointing her to the state police commission.
In the legislative endgame, Clinton also had a problem with the tax aspects of the package, and he resorted to a different sort of gamesmanship to prevail. Among the issues still in dispute were his insistence that the sales tax hike include an emergency clause making its effect immediate, and an amendment pushed by labor and public action groups giving an annual rebate to low-income families for the sales tax on food. At a meeting in the governor’s office, Clinton struck a deal with J. Bill Becker of the AFL-CIO and citizen activist Brownie Ledbetter, two vocal advocates of the food tax rebate. If they would lobby for his emergency clause in the House, he would support their amendment. The deal was witnessed by two legislators, one of whom interrupted Clinton and repeated the terms to make sure the governor understood what he was saying. Clinton said yes.
The House then passed the tax measure with the rebate amendment, but the emergency clause failed by a narrow margin. The rebate lobbyists, satisfied that Clinton was upholding his end of the deal, joined forces again with the governor’s aides the next day and pushed through the emergency clause. The following day, however, when leaders of the Senate said they had troubles with the rebate amendment, Clinton started backing away from it. By the time the Senate had passed the bill without the rebate and sent it back to the House for final action, the governor and his lobbyists were actively working against it. Clinton said that the deal was only temporary, and that he had to turn away from it in the interest of getting the reform package enacted. Whatever savings low-income residents might gain from the food tax rebate, he said, were of transitory and minimal value compared with the permanent benefits of better educational opportunities.
Becker was enraged. He complained that Clinton had turned away from the rebate amendment too hastily. The vote in the Senate would have been close, he agreed, but with a full-scale lobbying effort by the governor it might have passed. When he was lobbying the House for the emergency clause as part of the deal, Becker said, several representatives had warned him, “Clinton’s lying to you! He’s lying to you! He’s not going to do it!” Becker had not believed them then, but now he decided that they had been right. He had been a presence in Arkansas politics since the days of Orval Faubus, Becker said, but never before had he felt so deceived by a governor. He called Clinton’s maneuver “inexcusable” and one that he would not soon forget.
Becker held his grudge, and so, for a long time, did the teachers. The AEV spent most of the next three years and two elections trying to defeat Clinton and repeal the competence tests. But as influential as it could be in isolated legislative races, such as Vada Sheid’s, it was rendered powerless against Clinton. The more it took him on, the more his popularity grew statewide. The substantive results of the education reform package were uneven. Over four years, all of the school districts eventually complied with the new standards on class size and course offerings. Advanced math, science, and foreign languages eventually became available in every district. The number of graduating seniors who moved on to college increased from 38 percent to 50 percent. Teacher salaries went up, but still remained near the bottom nationally, as did student test scores. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education indicated that scores for Arkansas high school seniors taking the American College Test declined in the four years after the reforms were enacted.
Still, Bill Clinton now had a cause, a story, a political identity. From the passage of the reform package in November 1983, in every poll, the people of Arkansas could cite something they liked about him as governor: he was the one who had improved the schools and forced the teachers to prove their competence. He was the education governor.
JOGGING was the craze in Little Rock during that era, and Clinton took up jogging. One day he ran in a four-mile race on a course that weaved its way past the Victorian homes in the historic Quapaw District, around the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, and back down to the Capitol. Jim Blair, his lawyer friend from Fayetteville, was in town and ran the race at the governor’s side. As they jogged by the mansion, Clinton decided to take a break. He walked for a few minutes, catching his breath and playing with his dog Zeke. Then he started up again, lumbering down the street to catch Blair. “Let’s finish strong!” Clinton huffed as they crossed the highway and neared the Capitol, and suddenly he sprinted past his friend to reach the finish line first. It was a fitting performance for Clinton’s second act as governor. Now he was the long-distance runner, plodding along mile after mile for his state. To stifle the inevitable talk that he was looking for a faster track, he said that he hoped and intended to serve as governor for another six to eight years. He was in it for the long haul, the marathon man.
Clinton’s Arkansas experience became a testing ground for strategies and policies that might be applied on the national level. Since the morning after he and Jimmy Carter had been defeated in 1980, Clinton had focused on what it “would take to recreate a new majority for change in America,” which is to say what it would take for an activist Democrat to make it to the White House. He felt that his party had become stuck in “no-win situations” and become known as “the party of blame.” It got in trouble, he said, when “the need for change conflicted with people’s most deeply ingrained habits or most cherished values. If you want to be for change, you have to render that change in ways that people can understand and relate to.”
That did not mean, he said, resorting to the familiar nostrums of the New Deal coalition. Clinton had long since turned away f
rom what he viewed as the politics of nostalgia. Going back even a decade before his defeat to Frank White, back to the Duffey Senate campaign in Connecticut in 1970, he had been searching for new formulas for Democratic success. By the time his party gathered in August in San Francisco for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he believed that the great divide that needed to be narrowed was not so much between liberals and conservatives as romantics and realists. Although he had remained neutral in the presidential primary battle that year between former Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, and although he eventually cast his convention vote for Mondale, his intellectual sympathies rested with Hart, his onetime boss in the McGovern campaign, who was basing his challenge on generational change. During an informal gathering at the convention, Clinton asked one of his colleagues, Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado, what he thought of the keynote address by Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a rhetorical masterpiece that had stirred the crowd with its rich evocation of the core Democratic principles of empathy and equality. Lamm said he was impressed and moved, to which Clinton responded, “Come on, what did it really say about the issues we’re trying to raise?”
In Clinton’s own speech to the convention that week, he cited Harry Truman to talk about the future of the party. “Harry Truman would tell us to forget about 1948 and stand for what America needs in 1984,” Clinton said. “That’s the way to attract the millions of Americans who feel locked out and won’t vote because they think we’re irrelevant. That’s the way to attract millions more, mostly young and well-educated, who intend to vote against us because they think we have no program for the future. Harry Truman would say: America has a productivity problem. What are we going to do about it? America is getting its brains beaten out in international economic competition. What are we going to do about it? America has millions of people who want to work but whose jobs have been lost because of competition from low wages abroad or the necessity to automate at home. What are we going to do about it? America is mortgaging its future with high deficits, driving interest rates too high, making our dollar too expensive and our trade deficit enormous. What are we going to do about it?… America is pricing itself out of affordable health care. What are we going to do about it? America needs an invigorated education system based on high standards and real accountability, as well as more money. What are we going to do about it?”
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