A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  On the day Bill announced his candidacy, Hillary wore a conservative suit, permed her hair, and said: “I don’t have to change my name. I’ve been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I’m going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I’ll be Mrs. Bill Clinton. I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” But the personal sacrifice was real. “I teared up. I had a lump in my throat,” said Betsey Wright, who knew how hard the decision had been. Hillary had worked her way into it on her own. Bill had never asked her to do it, as she confirmed in a 1994 interview. He had initially resisted the change. “She understood that it was part of a picture that we had painted for the voters that had made them feel alienated from us,” he said. “And she said to me—I will never forget…I respected her so much for this, because she came in to see me, and she said, ‘We’ve got to talk about this name deal.’ She said, ‘I couldn’t bear it—if we’re going to do this, let’s try to win. I couldn’t bear it if this cost you the election. It’s just not that big a deal to me anymore.’”

  The fact that her physical appearance was a campaign consideration also hurt her personally. Though she had resisted her parents’ frugality as a child, she had come to respect and even appreciate their rather inconstant ascetic ethic. Her mother, who did not need a Cadillac or fancy clothes, had taught her not to concern herself with frivolousness. Hillary said with great earnestness she had been raised to look for “the inner qualities of people,” rather than what they wore.

  She was, in Dick Morris’s words, “really taking his career in hand. In meetings typically I would urge a fairly aggressive strategy. Clinton would demur and then Hillary would say, Bill, you’ve got to do this. This is what you’ve got to do. And she was always very much the person who would ram home the need to run negative ads, to be aggressive. For the most part, Hillary, Betsey, and I always saw eye-to-eye, and it was Bill who was sort of the odd man out as kind of the naive do-gooder who would come along eventually. She became his campaign manager, and sometimes the candidate was strong, and sometimes he was weak, but she was the manager. And her mental attitude at that point was, This guy is too nice to manage his own life. He doesn’t understand how venal people can be. He’s not tough enough. I’ve got to move in and take this over.”

  That characterization, of course, ignored a crucial part of the equation: Bill Clinton was perhaps already the best political campaigner in America. No politician better synthesized ideas or knew how to work a crowd, or how to think fast on his feet, or how to analyze the political landscape ahead. Hillary knew how to harness that.

  She also became a campaigner. She showed up at a parade where the incumbent Frank White spoke and when he attacked Bill, “she jumped all over me, said I wasn’t being truthful about her husband and his record,” White recalled. “This was a new thing in Arkansas politics. She comes in and lays waste to the opponents and you know it’s kind of difficult to get up there and let a woman have it.” When White refused to debate Bill she taunted him in absentia: “Frank White would probably try to avoid being in the same room as Chelsea. Chelsea could debate him and win.” The press took note of her transformation. “Mrs. Clinton is almost certainly the best speaker among politicians’ wives,” reported the Arkansas Gazette. “She is an Illinois native, perhaps a little brisker, a little more outspoken than the traditional Southern Governors’ lady…. The name change indicates she’s working at softening her image a bit…and succeeding apparently. She has become a good hand-shaking campaigner in the traditional Arkansas style…her spirit shows when she speaks on her husband’s behalf.”

  She was also motivated: if Bill lost this election, his political career—theirs—was finished.

  Bill, and Hillary, won reelection, 55 percent to 45 percent. No other governor of Arkansas had ever lost and come back to be reelected.

  IT IS INCONCEIVABLE that Bill Clinton would have become governor in January 1983 without his wife’s having taken charge. Now in office, at her urging he decided that education would be the single issue to define his administration, and that he would put the person he most trusted, his wife, in charge of reforming the state’s education system. Before taking the oath of office, however, he had learned that his task would be especially difficult—he was inheriting a $30 million budget shortfall from his predecessor.

  The same pattern would repeat itself a decade later. Hillary would be the key to managing his presidential campaign, he would inherit a potentially ruinous budget shortfall, and he would put Hillary in charge of the signature issue of his presidency, health care. The future of his presidency, like his governorship, and perhaps the prospects for his reelection, would depend on her performance.

  Bill far surpassed Hillary, or arguably almost everybody else in politics, both in seeing the long-term danger ahead for his state or his country from antiquated thinking and outdated policy, and developing nuanced ideas and substantial plans for dealing with the peril. By the time his family had moved their clothes back into the governor’s mansion, he had a sense that the state was facing imminent disaster, just as he perceived in January 1993, when he assumed office knowing George H. W. Bush’s people had fiddled with the budget numbers to obscure a huge deficit.

  He recognized that his state was not prepared to enter the modern economic age, in which success and competition would no longer be measured in the old manufacturing, mining, and agricultural sectors, but by education-dependent fields such as information services, engineering, and technology. As much as any of the other states, Arkansas was living in the economic dark ages, kept dim by an outdated education system that had left its children far behind the rest of the country in opportunity and achievement.

  Clinton had plenty of ideas about how to deal with these problems. He’d read everything he could get his hands on about political economy. Distinguished work in the field had been conducted by friends and classmates, including Bob Reich, now teaching at Harvard. But he’d also learned, from his experience with car tag taxes and Jimmy Carter’s transshipment of human cargo, that it didn’t matter how good the ideas were if somebody like Frank White could come along and tar your hide with negative ads. To be successful at governing—which was different from being successful at running and winning election—you had to find a way to preempt the critics. Hillary and Dick Morris believed that you had to make somebody else the villain before you got fatally tarred yourself.

  This strategy of villainizing became a dominant leitmotif of Clintonian governance, a strategy meant to allow Bill’s big ideas and grand goals—and Hillary’s tempered idealism and experience—to flourish. The villains were real most of the time, though their views did not always represent a simple black or white choice vis-à-vis the Clintons’. Not all teachers and health insurance executives were bad—but they were all made to seem like part of systemic problems and failures, in which the state legislature or the U.S. Congress were complicit as well. Hillary had learned something about this with her rural health care initiative in Bill’s first term, and it didn’t hurt to have the local medical association taking her to court.

  The Clintons’ villains of choice in 1983 were the utility companies, which Bill had campaigned against in the election with considerable success. But too many legal technicalities and constraints could get in the way of successfully villainizing them from the governor’s office, though there was no question that the companies were usurious and that their influence needed to be curtailed. So dealing with the utilities would have to be a secondary priority.

  The Arkansas State Teachers Association would become the leading villain instead for the rest of Hillary and Bill’s hold on the governor’s mansion. This was in spite of the fact that there was no difference of opinion between the ASTA and the Clintons about the need for a massive infusion of funds from the legislature to give Arkansas kids an equal chance to compete with kids in other states, even next door in Missis
sippi. The ASTA was not exactly the antichrist, and in fact had done some pretty good things in a state where the legislature had typically accorded more attention to protecting the rights of poultry farmers to saturate half of Arkansas’s topsoil with chicken feces than providing its children with a decent education. The little money that teachers earned (Arkansas teachers were the poorest paid in the nation), what little serious attention in the state was paid to the condition of schools and classrooms, was often at the behest of the teachers association.

  But Arkansas’s moribund education system represented an enormous opportunity for its governor. The system was about to get picked apart by the Arkansas Supreme Court for good reason: a lower court had ruled that the state’s system of funding public education was unconstitutional because it discriminated against students in poor school districts. During Clinton’s upcoming term, it was virtually certain that the Supreme Court would uphold the lower court, and toss the matter back at the governor and the legislature to solve. Better that Clinton get in front of the issue and use the case to his advantage.

  While he was reading Reich and others on political economy, Bill was also engaged in a nonstop strategic dialogue with Hillary and Dick Morris about how to attain lofty goals through the messy process of ground-and-gut-level politics. The education problem had to be solved on a practical, political level, combined with the best ideas for helping the students and the state—a synthesis of means and ends. The education agenda occupied the three of them during the transition between Bill’s election and inauguration, just as the health care agenda would occupy much of the transition period from election day 1992 to the start of the Clinton presidency.

  The most facile solution would be to raise taxes—the riskiest thing a governor (or a president) could do, as he had learned with the relatively simple matter of car tags. Another solution—combining some school districts and eliminating others, taking from the rich school districts and giving to the poor ones—was an invitation to racial and class warfare, and to ugly reminders of Orval Faubus; it also wouldn’t get to the basic problem, the state’s failure to spend sufficient money on education.

  The most perceptive of Clinton’s biographers, David Maraniss, would write about a strategy, managed largely by Hillary and Morris, to do whatever it took to get elected and use the same philosophy to govern. He called it the Permanent Campaign. The concept was derived from Morris, who had observed that Clinton, after learning his hard lesson on the high road in 1974 and being defeated for Congress, had become compliant enough to do almost anything not to get beat in an election. But once in office, he had continued to ignore a dangerous consequence of governance. “When you lead in an idealistic direction, the most important thing to do is to be highly pragmatic about it. And when necessity forces upon you a problem of great pragmatism, you need to use the idealism to find your way out of the thicket,” wrote Maraniss. Maraniss defined this as a basic tenet of the Permanent Campaign—interweaving ends and means, pragmatism and idealism, lofty goals and getting there. The supporting elements were a determination to use paid media in the form of TV and radio commercials and mailings to reach voters, rather than expect print and broadcast journalists, “free media,” to deliver a political message, and constant polling to see what voters were responding to at a given moment, what they would accept and what they would reject. It was a system that played to Hillary’s strengths as a strategist, disciplinarian, and motivational force, and offset Clinton’s sometimes lackadaisical optimism.

  So at Hillary’s urging, and trusting his own instincts and Morris’s polling as a litmus test, education was made the signature issue of his administration. Hillary would coordinate a great effort at reform, and, instead of focusing public attention on its financing by tax increases, she and Bill would promote it as an idealistic cause that Arkansans should be proud to support. They would also make sure that those who got in the way of the crusade were identified and stigmatized.

  Ten years later, they would do almost the same thing with health care. In both instances, there were solid reasons for choosing the crusade they did. The results were not the same.

  In May 1983, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s system of funding public education was inequitable and therefore unconstitutional. Hillary took another leave of absence from the Rose Law Firm and, as had been planned months earlier, became chairwoman of the governor’s Education Standards Committee.

  “We [Hillary and Bill] were sitting around talking about it,” Bill told a reporter, “and I said, ‘This could be the most important thing we’ll ever do. Who should I name the chairman of the Standards Committee? The chairman is the key.’ Either the first or second day we talked about this—we talk about a lot of things like this—she said, ‘I think I’d like to be it. Maybe I’ll do it.’” When he reminded her that she’d just taken eight months off from her law practice to help him get reelected, she responded, “Yeah, but this may be the most important thing you ever do, and you have to do it right.” Hillary’s memory was different: she wrote in Living History that it was his idea and that he was insistent about it when she protested.

  That Hillary was a woman didn’t hurt either. Most schoolteachers, most educators, were women; helping in this traditionally feminine area of endeavor was acceptable to the same Arkansans who had been upset about Hillary’s keeping her maiden name.

  In announcing to his staff and the state’s citizens that he was naming Hillary to head his task force on education reform, Bill 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”—words almost identical to those he would use in announcing that Hillary would become head of his health care task force in 1993.

  That summer and fall in Arkansas, the Education Standards Committee took public testimony across the state, held seventy-five meetings, and formulated a program of reforms, which had been largely predetermined by Hillary and experts with whom she was working. The reforms were overdue and addressed debilitating shortcomings in a public education system that had been built on inequality: 200 high schools in poor areas that taught no foreign languages or music, no physics curriculum at 150, no math beyond algebra at 135. Because of such conditions, the percentage of Arkansas students who failed standardized achievement tests was the highest of any state in the nation. Arkansas ranked last in the percentage of high school students who went on to college.

  Hillary’s preparation for her assignment (as in Washington with health care) was exhaustive, her expertise made almost as sharp as that of professionals with years of experience. She researched the curriculum of every Arkansas school district and traveled the state to attend public hearings. Hillary said she kept hearing stories about grossly incompetent teachers who could hardly read or spell.

  Ultimately Hillary would prevail in the political battle for education reform. It would be her greatest achievement in public life until she was elected to the U.S. Senate, though the substantive results fell short of the grand expectations of her plans. And the methodology she employed to win the battle, and the lessons she and Bill took away from the experience, would haunt the Clinton presidency and doom health care reform from the start.

  In addition to teacher-testing, the plan that Hillary and her task force eventually formulated required that all local school districts adopt uniform, state-imposed standards for curriculum and classroom size—devised by educational experts who were consultants to her commission. Any basic philosophical disagreements about those standards had been resolved before she traveled the state holding public hearings to solicit ideas. In June 1983, Hillary spoke at the statehouse before a joint House-Senate legislative committee and outlined her recommendations, including compulsory testing of students before they could matriculate to the next grade, a 20-to-1 student-teacher ratio, adding more math and science courses, and mandatory all-day kindergarten. At the end of the ninety-minute presentation, Representative Lloyd Ge
orge remarked, “Well, fellas, it looks like we might have elected the wrong Clinton!” (After her first trip to Capitol Hill to sell the Congress her ideas on health care, she received almost exactly the same encomium.)

  The Arkansas Department of Education estimated that $200 million would be needed to execute the plan adopted by Hillary’s task force; it would require 3,781 more teachers, administrators, nurses, counselors, and librarians, and two thousand new classrooms. The initiative would be financed by increasing the state sales tax for the first time in twenty-six years.

  Morris did the polling: 50 percent of voters would support the tax increase as a means to fund education; but if teacher-testing were a requirement in the reform package, which Hillary was secretly considering, the number went up to 85 percent.

  Early in their discussions of an education agenda, Hillary enthusiastically embraced the idea of competence tests for teachers, as did Bill. But she decided not to make her opinion public, even to members of her own task force. When Hillary announced the plan to the state legislature that fall, she called teacher-testing “the real heart” of the reform package.

  It was clear that the state’s teachers would therefore oppose it. The National Education Association, the most powerful lobby and union in the field of education, had long held that competence tests were an affront to the profession. The Arkansas Education Association was one of its affiliates.

  “She made it very clear that there had to be a bad guy in this,” said Richard Herget, Bill’s campaign chairman. “Anytime you’re going to turn an institution upside down, there’s going to be a good guy and a bad guy. The Clintons painted themselves as the good guys. The bad guys were the schoolteachers.” The day before Hillary’s plan was announced publicly, Bill told the head of the Arkansas Education Association that teacher-testing would be part of the reform package. The official was, predictably, furious.