Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  The Clinton team also needed to get its house in order. Too many people had the ear of the candidate: old friends from Arkansas, staff from the governor’s office, friends from New York and Washington, and paid campaign strategists and consultants. It wasn’t quite Noah’s Ark, but they needed focus and organization. The Clintons decided to keep the campaign headquartered in Little Rock—partly because of their daughter’s school and sports schedule, and partly because putting campaign staff in Little Rock would reduce distractions. Meanwhile, the Bush people were in Washington, where the campaign was just a regular job.

  Working on a modern presidential campaign demands all-consuming devotion and singular focus, and Little Rock provided that in a way Washington did not. The Clinton people were far from their homes and social lives in a small Southern city. So they worked all the time. When they weren’t working, they went to dinner together, and talked about work. When that was over, they went back to the office. They lived together in barely furnished apartments. They ate from vending machines. They were young and had a high tolerance for little sleep, bad food, and no work-life balance. They lived and breathed the 24-hour news cycle.

  For decades, the business of politics and policy had become increasingly professionalized and hermetically sealed in the corridors of power in Washington, with occasional detours up the Northeast Corridor to New York and Boston. The Little Rock operations reproduced a miniature version of that ecosystem in the Clinton campaign headquarters, but it permitted a good deal more of the “real world” to seep in. It communicated to voters that this was an “outsider” effort (despite being run by people who had spent their lives in politics), and it got the campaign staff to think of themselves as scrappy underdogs as well. “This is a very interesting place to be engineering the peaceful takeover of the Free World,” campaign advisor Bob Boorstin remarked drily. “Because Little Rock is America.”40

  The other critical decision the Clintons made after the convention was to establish a campaign nerve center where all parts of the operation could mobilize to rapidly respond to any breaking news. Rapid response had saved them during the grim march through the primary season; it would keep them hungry and aggressive in the fall campaign. They tapped their firebrand campaign strategist, James Carville, to run the operation. Hillary gave it a name: the War Room.

  George H. W. Bush’s staff invented modern message discipline with the orchestration of war reportage during the Gulf War, embedding reporters and tightly controlling the story. In 1992, the roles were reversed. The Bush campaign lost control of the story again and again. The Clinton War Room was all about message discipline. Carville posted a whiteboard in the middle of the War Room with the three main messages of the campaign scrawled on it:

  1. Change versus more of the same.

  2. It’s the economy, stupid.

  3. Don’t forget health care.

  The Clintons built a whole operation to serve these messages.

  The War Room also was about opposition research. Its staff performed the investigations on the other candidate that the press didn’t have the time to do. Sleep-deprived twenty-something researchers dug up facts about the Bush campaign and presidency that senior staffers leaked to reporters. Young staff shadowed the Bush campaign on the road and in the media, and kept track of everything said and promised. They relentlessly followed the news, with two staffers staying up all night to put together a daily briefing book of news clips from papers all over the country. Across the hall from the War Room, a windowless office featured a wall of television sets, each tuned to a different network—CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, C-SPAN—always on, day or night, scraping up every bit of campaign-related news. Fax machines buzzed. Beepers vibrated. A few lucky members of the team had shoebox-sized cellular phones, for quick communication on the road. “Everyone at the Clinton campaign has a CNN tan,” teased The Washington Post.41

  The exhaustive attention to information and to message discipline became even more critical in late September. A mere 33 days before the election, Ross Perot got back in the race. He said he was coming back in response to the pleas of his supporters. He also thought Clinton and Bush weren’t addressing the real issues. Drawing on his personal wealth, he went on television but, once again, on his own terms. Telling his ad men to spend “whatever it takes,” Perot bought 30-minute slots of time on the major TV networks for infomercials delivering his message. In a world of sound bites and talking points, Perot gave extended policy talks to his audience, armed with a pointer and a series of charts displaying key data.42

  He talked about the looming problem of the budget deficit, and assailed both Bush and Clinton for ignoring the problem. He talked about jobs going overseas and the need to change American trade policy. He slammed Republican trickle-down economics. He said that Clinton was going to raise taxes on ordinary Americans. Despite the worries of his advisors that no one would pay attention to such dry presentation—delivered by a big-eared and self-important candidate with dangerously low favorability ratings—the infomercials were a hit. Sixteen million people watched Perot and his charts. “Perot had discovered an unmet hunger for hard information and candid talk instead of the usual cant of politics.”43 Perot remained a distant third in the race, but his presence forced the two major candidates to address new issues—the budget deficit chief among them.

  October Surprises

  The race remained extremely close between Clinton and Bush, two imperfect candidates for an imperfect era. Compounding all of it was Perot’s reentry, which threw all the rituals of modern campaigning off-kilter in the last campaign weeks. Chief among these were the presidential and vice-presidential debates, events that had become the centerpieces of the general election season in the television era. In 1992, all the debates were compressed into nine short days in October, putting immense pressure on already exhausted candidates. The Texan’s folksy presence threw the usual format off-kilter. Despite their hoarse voices and sleep-deprived brains, Bush and Clinton had smoothly prepared answers. Perot spoke informally and without regard for typical political platitudes. In contrast to prior televised debates, the un-prepped approach proved effective. The debate format rewarded one-liners and “zingers” over long-winded matters of substance. When asked a question, the jug-eared Perot smiled, “I’m all ears.” When challenged on his lack of government experience, Perot observed “I don’t have any experience in running up a $4 trillion debt.” The audience loved it.44

  The Perot effort continued to disrupt. James Stockdale, the retired admiral Perot had recruited as his vice presidential running mate, gave a performance in the debate with Gore and Quayle that was so unscripted that it became rather disturbingly odd, turning the war hero into comical fodder for Saturday Night Live skits and diverting attention from much of what the other two candidates had to say. “Who am I? Why am I here?” Stockdale asked rhetorically, as his two rivals looked on in silent bafflement. In a world where campaign communications had become so slick, the Perot insurgency broke through the clutter with something that was the opposite of slick.45

  Perot continued to be an unpredictable variable in the final weeks, although his polling numbers didn’t improve considerably. His erratic personality began to shine through. He went on 60 Minutes and said his withdrawal in the summer had been the result of Republican operatives plotting to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. He didn’t provide any evidence. He started to seem rather paranoid. Yet Perot was a lifeline to voters who didn’t like either of the choices the major parties put before them. Clinton still had trust issues. In one focus group, a Michigan man sighed of Clinton, “he’s one of the most polished bullshitters I’ve ever seen.” George Bush fared even worse: “he’s status quo,” said another voter.46

  President Bush was already deeply frustrated by the campaign. Here he was, a war hero, a deeply experienced policy leader, a sitting president, and he was lagging behind a draft-evading, double-talking small-time governor of a small-time state. The return of Perot had made it
even worse. His insiders in Texas knew Perot was a little loony, but he was being treated as a political equal. “That son of a bitch is a psychiatric case,” the president said to one close advisor.47 On 15 October, at a debate with a town hall format, Bush was listening as Clinton ran overtime answering a question. Perhaps trying to send a signal to the moderator, and perhaps quite annoyed at having to share the stage with two undisciplined and unworthy competitors, Bush glanced at his watch.

  The media beast pounced on this one. Here was an incumbent who already seemed out of touch, whose campaign seemed to running on autopilot, who didn’t seem to care about Americans’ economic woes. And he was checking his watch during the debate, as if to say, “when can I get out of here?”

  Bush got tired and testy during those last weeks on the road. In one speech he called Clinton and Gore “bozos.” When some pro-Clinton hecklers interrupted another event, he said, “I wish those draft dodgers would shut up so I could deliver my speech.” He attacked the media as well, bashing them for covering Clinton so uncritically. He held up a favorite bumper sticker, reading “Annoy the Media: Re-Elect Bush.” Bashing the mainstream media became such a theme for the campaign that audiences started hissing at reporters when they showed up at Bush rallies. As the campaign came into its final week, however, Bush eased off. A poll had come out showing him only one point behind Clinton. It seemed reelection was possible after all.48

  However, the view from the White House was quite different from the view from Little Rock. The Clinton people were closer to the sea change. A country where a good deal of people wanted to vote for an odd and mysterious billionaire was a country that was not likely to reelect a man whose party had held the White House for over a decade. Yet the outcome remained uncertain; many states, many electoral votes remained in play in the final days of the race. Field teams hit the ground with a vengeance in Michigan, Wisconsin, California, Georgia. Clinton and Gore gave speech after speech; the Arkansas governor would lose his voice before it was all over.

  On the Friday before the election, however, the Bush campaign was dealt a fatal blow. Independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who had been investigating the Iran-Contra affair, came out with a report implicating President Bush in the scandal. It was the classic October surprise. The Bush team was convinced the timing had political motives (although no evidence exists that it was), but there was nothing to do.

  Both sides sensed then that the election was over. The mood in Little Rock became celebratory. Supporters and reporters and all sorts of political hangers-on streamed into the Southern city in the very last days of the campaign. The Democrats had been out of the White House for twelve long years, and they were ready for a big party on election night.

  What a party it was. Bill Clinton won 370 electoral votes, while Bush won 168. Perot did not win a single electoral vote, but grabbed a bigger chunk of the popular vote than any third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt: 18.9 percent. Like Woodrow Wilson eighty years earlier, Clinton won with a plurality, not a majority, getting 43 percent of the popular vote while the incumbent president got 37.4 percent. The electoral map shifted decisively. Clinton won California—home of Nixon and Reagan, and long a swing state—by more than two million votes.

  Bush spent election night in Houston, home of that fateful GOP convention, in the state that had given him his entry into politics just as the South was turning from blue to red. The angry campaigner of the previous weeks was nowhere to be seen; in his place was the patrician, polite, rueful man who sounded resigned to his forced retirement. “We have been in an extraordinarily difficult period,” he said. “But,” he urged the young people in the audience, “do not be deterred, kept away from public service by the smoke and fire of a campaign year or the ugliness of politics.… I urge you, the young people of this country, to participate in the political process. It needs your idealism. It needs your drive. It needs your conviction.”49

  Figure 30. New Administration, Little Rock, Arkansas, 3 November 1992. Thousands of supporters crowded in front of the Arkansas Old State House to greet newly elected Bill Clinton and Al Gore and their families on Election Night 1992. The Democratic victory brought not only a new party, but a new generation, into power in the White House. AP Photo/Susan Ragan.

  Bill Clinton also was thinking about the next generation as he gave his victory speech at the front of Little Rock’s Old State House, the same place he had announced his run 13 months earlier. The city had been turned into a giant street party, with 16 square blocks of downtown closed to accommodate the thousands of Democrats from near and far. More than 2,000 news organization from around the world descended on Little Rock to document the momentous occasion, their satellite dishes spiking up from hotel rooftops and parking lots. The War Room had turned into a jubilant pre-party, with staffers sitting on their desks and breaking out bottles of bourbon.

  Shortly after 10:00 p.m., the news became official that the Democrats had won enough electoral votes to go over the top. The Clintons and Gores came out on the Old State House steps, into the cool and crisp fall evening, to cries of “We love you, Bill!” and “Hill-a-ry! Hill-a-ry!” Clinton gave a speech that sounded like the liberal Robert Kennedy, speaking of “bring[ing] our people together like never before … where everyone counts and everyone is part of America’s family.” He also talked of reaching out to independents and Republicans, and of “empowerment” and “strength” in ways that evoked Ronald Reagan. Afterward he and Gore came forward and leaned into the crowd of staff and supporters like youthful rock stars, exuberant and heady with the glow of victory, thinking little about the hard road that lay ahead.50

  Conclusion: Hope and Change

  The redefinition of party. The role of the press. The reconstitution of left, right, and center. The things that had defined and determined pivotal elections in the twentieth century continued to hold true in the twenty-first.

  Eight years after Bill Clinton’s triumphal election night in Little Rock, the nation’s attention focused on two neighboring state capitals—Nashville and Austin—where the major-party candidates had gathered with their respective campaigns to see who would win the 2000 election. Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, had returned to his home state of Tennessee to watch the returns. He had sought the presidency for more than two decades. Now he would find out whether the American voters would give him the job.

  Gore’s Republican opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, sat in the Austin governor’s mansion and watched the same election night television coverage. Bush was a relative newcomer to elected office, having won the governorship only six years earlier, but he had a lifetime of exposure to politics as the eldest son of ex-President George H.W. Bush. The governor was fiercely ambitious and had positioned himself as a more overtly conservative candidate than his father. Yet he and his aides relished the idea of vanquishing a man who had helped deny the elder Bush a second term in office.

  The race had been tight, and election night was supposed to be the moment of decision. Little did Gore and Bush realize that it would be only the beginning of the greatest electoral drama of the modern presidency.

  As vice president, Gore had enjoyed a higher profile than many of his predecessors, serving as a key member of the president’s inner circle as well as leading major policy initiatives. By the time Clinton ran for reelection in 1996, it was clear that Gore had his sights set on taking over once his boss left office. The buttoned-down veep gave raucous speeches at black churches and deepened his friendships with deep-pocketed Silicon Valley titans and Hollywood power brokers. Yet by the time Gore became the frontrunner for the 2000 nomination, Clinton had become mired in scandal as the result of his dalliance with a college-aged White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

  The media and political uproar over the Lewinsky affair—and Clinton’s ham-handed attempts to cover it up—nearly sank the Clinton presidency and deeply damaged Gore’s candidacy. Cable news had become an even more powerful arbiter of political d
iscourse since the CNN glory days of the early 1990s. Now, more pointedly partisan cable news networks like the right-wing Fox News (founded by Richard Nixon’s 1968 advisor Roger Ailes) devoted hours of air time to the scandal, fueling calls on both left and right for action against the president. As a Republican-led Congress took steps to impeach Clinton for his moral and professional failings, Gore did his best to distance himself from his boss’s scandals. In doing so, he found himself unable to take credit for the Clinton administration’s accomplishments, including successful deficit reduction and steady economic growth.

  Keeping a politically damaged Clinton off the campaign stump also deprived Gore of the Democratic Party’s most powerful and persuasive voice. Although often witty and warm in person, Gore lacked Clinton’s remarkable ability to connect with voters on the campaign trail. His speeches often seemed stiff, his policy vision sounded poll-tested rather than heartfelt. Exhausted from eight years in a scandal-plagued White House, Gore’s aides ran a gaffe-prone campaign, full of backbiting and leaks to the press. In an effort to recapture the spirit of 1992, Gore relocated his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville. It was not enough.

  Anti-Washington sentiment still ran strong. About 35 percent of American voters identified as independents, a larger chunk of the electorate than those who called themselves either Democrats or Republicans.1 Though, at the end of the day, many of the self-styled independents tended to vote for a major-party candidate, their fickle mood raised the stakes for candidates to be “authentic” figures who bucked the party line. This time, Gore could no longer position himself as an outsider candidate as he and Clinton had done so effectively in their first run for the White House. He was the sitting vice president, barnstorming the country in Air Force Two, surrounded by Secret Service officers and White House aides. Like the elder George Bush in 1992, he lived and worked in a bubble.