The decision to emulate the Freedom Rides in the American South of the 1960s with a bus caravan of Reform Riders trying to create a national movement in 1994 to pressure Congress for health care reform was well intended. But a send-off rally in Portland, Oregon, was sabotaged immediately by an angry anti-Clinton mob who blocked the way with their own dilapidated bus covered symbolically in red tape and dragged by a tow truck with a sign that read, “This Is Clinton Health Care.” A low-flying light plane pulled a banner that said, “Beware the Phony Express.” The pro–health care, cross-country bus trek had been named the “Health Security Express.”
By the time the caravan reached Seattle, the threat of violence was constant. All week, talk radio hosts, both in the Northwest and on national broadcasts, implored listeners to confront the Reform Riders, to “show Hillary” their feelings about her. This “call to arms,” as she described it, attracted menacing hordes, many of whom identified themselves as militia members, tax resisters, and anti-abortion militants. She estimated that at least half of the 4,500 people in the audience of her Seattle speech were protesters. She agreed for the first time to wear a bulletproof vest. Rarely had she felt endangered, but this was different. During her speech, the catcalls, screaming, and heckling drowned out much of her remarks. When she left the stage and got into a limousine, hundreds of protesters surrounded the car. They were rabid with hatred. Several arrests were made by the Secret Service, which impounded two guns and a knife.
Though Hillary had returned to Washington, the buses were confronted at each major stop by angry demonstrators. They shouted that Hillary and Bill intended to destroy their way of life, “ban guns, extend abortion rights, protect gays, socialize medicine.” The protests were vocal, virulent, menacing, and well organized by a previously unknown organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). Its agents were secretly working with Newt Gingrich’s staff on Capitol Hill and with Republican senators and their aides, reporters later discovered. The funding for CES was provided by Richard Mellon Scaife, who was simultaneously providing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Arkansas Project.
There had been four caravan routes publicized by the Health Care Express riders. Each became “an expedition into enemy territory…with better-armed, better-prepared, better-mobilized anti-Clinton protesters at each stop along the way,” wrote David Broder and Haynes Johnson, in their study of Hillary’s health care failure. The implicit threats of violence caused many stops to be canceled and the buses rerouted.
The same week, Gingrich announced that House Republicans were now united against health care reform and hoped “to use the issue as a springboard to win Republican control of the House.” He predicted the Republicans would win an additional thirty-four House seats in November, and that enough Democrats, perhaps as many as six, would switch parties to give the Republicans control of the House. His prediction, though mentioned in the New York Times, received little media notice.
For months, Bob Dole had been toying with trying to work out a compromise on health care. “Is it time yet for the Moynihan-Dole bill?” he asked in a note slipped to the New York senator. There had been speculation that the two senators would quietly put together a deal that would provide a more limited health reform package than Hillary’s. Meanwhile, Dole was coming under pressure from his party’s right, including a letter signed by Richard Viguerie (the direct-mail maven of the conservative movement), Phyllis Schlafly (of anti-abortion crusades), and L. Brent Bozell (who had campaigned against “liberal bias” in the media for decades before the term became a buzzword) cautioning that signs of “willingness to compromise on behalf of Big Government” would mean that Dole—and Gingrich, who received the same letter—would “be denied conservative grassroots support in 1996.” Dole soon said he opposed any compromise.
By the time the Health Security Express reached the White House on August 3, its six hundred exhausted Reform Riders welcomed in the Rose Garden by Hillary and Bill, health care reform was on life support. Majority Leader George Mitchell submitted a “rescue” package in the Senate and Dick Gephardt a corresponding bill in the House. Both pieces of legislation were much scaled down versions of the original Magaziner-Hillary plan, less bureaucratic and less government-driven in the extreme. Two weeks later, at a congressional Democratic leadership luncheon at which the compromise was discussed, Senators Ted Kennedy and Bob Kerrey got into a loud argument about strategy. When word of the bitterness got out, it contributed to the image of a Democratic Party splintering on the Clintons’ watch.
By the time Mitchell pulled the plug on health care reform on September 26, 1994, it was an idea whose time had come and, tragically, gone.
WHEN POLLSTER Greenberg had first told Bill Clinton in the spring that Democrats might have trouble retaining the Senate, Greenberg also advised the president to attack the Republicans for obstructing health care reform, withdraw its consideration until after the 1996 election, and then, in its place, introduce a welfare reform bill. The administration at the time was already on the verge of passing a crime bill. If they could win passage of both a crime bill and welfare reform—a key enticement to independent and swing voters—they would have a strong record on which Democrats could run in the November congressional elections. Health care, meanwhile, could be postponed until after the voters had gone to the polls.
Clinton had asked Greenberg to discuss the matter with House Speaker Tom Foley. “Foley said absolutely not,” Greenberg reported. “He said the liberals would be totally opposed to welfare reform, and there was still the hope that health care could be pushed through.”
In the West Wing, by fall, the criticism of Hillary by some of the president’s aides was hard to ignore. Bill seemed disconsolate. He was obviously feeling isolated and withdrawn even from some of his closest associates. He was angry, yet at times he appeared almost bereft. They had never seen him in this state before. Stephanopoulos, Myers, and a few other deputies familiar with his habits surmised that such melancholia was occasioned not only by the harsh political realities and attacks, but from isolation and tension building between him and Hillary as well.
Since Vince Foster’s death, Bill had been trying to move gently in one direction, and Hillary in another, their aides said later. Often, it wasn’t even that stark, and Bill was probably trying to moderate her aversion to compromise and hadn’t been very successful. This applied to health care, the investigations of Whitewater and its fallout, the press, and the Washington establishment. He didn’t like drawing lines in the sand, at least until there was no room left to maneuver. Some aides talked about a “schizophrenic” co-presidency and implied that his negligence had let Hillary run away from his own instincts, and right off the cliff. He didn’t agree, but it was undeniable that Hillary, for all her immense strengths, her love and protection, had left them vulnerable, no matter how much her actions had been intended to advance a policy vision they shared completely, and to bury the difficulties of their Arkansas past.
Hillary had definitely upset his centrist compass at times, and rejected his attempts at getting her to compromise in the health care dilemma. On the other hand, he had made fundamental decisions against her wishes to pursue an economic plan and policy priorities in such a way that had made her health care assignment much more difficult. She obviously had difficulty accepting that.
In all their years together, this was the first time they had had an extended practical disagreement—not merely hypothetical or vaguely philosophical—about what political course to follow. And the consequences of their dilemma, at once deeply personal and intensely political, had roiled and complicated both their own relationship and the most important matters of national policy. Perhaps if they had been dealing only with such issues, the fabric of their marriage would have remained intact. But that fabric had been weakened by Whitewater, an eighteen-month-long nightmare for both of them in which they had been forced—with a national audience looking on—to reexamine every crevice of their past, a
nd absorb the suicide of a beloved friend devoted to them. And now, as it was becoming clear that the midterm elections could cost them congressional control and further empower a prosecutor obviously hostile to them, the Clinton partnership was fraying.
With the death of her health care effort, the major vocational and political undertaking of her life, Hillary could see the situation crumbling around her. Fourteen years earlier, at another moment when the walls of their personal and political lives seemed to be collapsing, she had called Dick Morris in desperation. It had been too late to prevent Bill losing his governorship, but Morris had worked with her and Betsey Wright through the following two years to resurrect his career, and thus their life together. Bill had never lost a campaign since in which Morris had signed on at the start. Clinton’s senior advisers insisted that Bill not use Morris in the 1992 presidential campaign. But Hillary had stayed in close contact with Morris through the transition and spoke on the phone with him frequently in the first eighteen months of the presidency, though she apparently told no one else, except occasionally Bill, about their dialogue.
In October 1994, after the burial of her health care ambitions, she called Morris. The implications of the coming November congressional elections were profound. They needed his ability, Hillary told him, as “a creative pollster and a brilliant strategist.” She knew Morris was unhappy that he had lost his place to Greenberg and that he was still resentful at the way Bill had treated him. But Newt Gingrich had just aggressively unveiled his “Contract with America,” a document that in its specifics was a reassertion of conservative, post–Rockefeller Republican orthodoxy—tax cuts, welfare reform, increased defense spending, restricted appropriations for the United Nations. It was threatening. Later Hillary said she summoned Morris because few other people seemed to sense the onrushing problem.
This ignored the fact that Greenberg had been telling the Clintons since the spring that the Democrats were in trouble. He had specifically warned her in his May memo of a coming “disaster.” Hillary was calling Morris simply because she believed he was better at devising a winning strategy and taking whatever steps necessary than Greenberg, whose approach to politics was premised on a consistent base of underlying political values and principles that identified him as a Democrat.
Morris reiterated that he was upset by the way he had been treated. But, Hillary wrote, he was unable to refuse the offer.
Morris was convinced the Democrats were going to experience huge losses, not just in the Congress, but also in the statehouses and governors’ mansions. The only way he saw for them to cut their losses, perhaps enough to hold on to the House, was for the Clintons to virtually disappear from the debate and, in Bill’s case, to do no campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates.
He conducted a poll to try to gauge sentiment about Hillary and Bill and “how the Clintons could best defend themselves.” “I found that very few Americans believed Clinton when he said he had cut the budget deficit or created a lot of jobs,” Morris said. “But they did give him credit for some small advances: AmeriCorps, his volunteer plan; the Family and Medical Leave Act; pro-choice judicial appointments; the Brady gun control bill; and the assault rifle ban. If they could be reminded effectively of these accomplishments, my poll suggested that enough voters might come back to the Democrats and avert defeat.”
Meanwhile, word began to circulate through the administration that Morris was back on the scene. Robert Reich was one of the first to hear and called Hillary to complain. “This guy is terrible,” he said. “He doesn’t stand for anything we stand for…. He’s a disaster. I’ve talked to him several times, and he just makes my skin crawl.”
Hillary said he shouldn’t be concerned. Reich, knowing that “she had been the one to bring him in in ’80,” had deduced that it was Hillary who brought him back this time as well. For the first time, Reich feared that Hillary, perhaps more than Bill, was willing to compromise basic beliefs to win.
The results of Morris’s poll angered the president. During a conference call with Hillary and Morris, he had thundered, “I cut the deficit by one third. I’ve created millions of jobs. I’ve done big things.” Morris judged it “a throwback to the arrogance of 1980 and his refusal to admit his license-tax mistake in Arkansas.”
The president thought Morris’s advice to stay away from the congressional races was overkill. Democrats had controlled the House since the Eisenhower administration. He was about to leave with Hillary for a four-day trip to the Middle East where he would be a signatory to a Middle East peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, which had resulted from direct talks he had encouraged between King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. No American president before him had been invited to address the Jordanian parliament in Amman. His speech to the Israeli Knesset and the Clintons’ visit with King Hussein and Queen Noor (who became one of Hillary’s close friends thereafter) were covered by the American press as a milestone in post–Cold War achievement. His personal poll numbers were up a tick, and upon his return, he was looking forward to getting out and campaigning, rescuing his party and his own agenda. He knew how good he was at campaigning and, if he couldn’t push through his policies in the Congress (a reference to the failure of health care), he could at least go out and do what he did best—appeal to the voters directly. Hillary was opposed to the idea. She thought Morris was right that the anti-Democratic tide was too nasty to be reversed by personal charm.
Almost immediately upon the Clintons’ return from Andrews Air Force Base by helicopter on October 29, they spoke with Morris. Hillary and Bill were in her cozy study-office attached to their bedroom. They listened together on a speakerphone to his report: the Democrats were on the way to losing control of both houses of Congress.
Hillary said later his assessment “confirmed” her sense of things, but neither she nor her husband were expecting how overwhelming the wave would be. Bill told Morris he was determined to go out and campaign even harder. More was at stake than the legislative agenda of one party or the other. The Clintons’ opponents had already served notice that, should they win control of Congress, they would drag Hillary and Bill through the Whitewater rapids with subpoenas.
NEWT GINGRICH was a once obscure party whip and former junior college professor who was riding an ideological bandwagon that gained camp followers each time he attacked the Clintons for their morality and political values. Things were so bad that during the summer Greenberg had distributed a strategy memorandum to Democratic candidates that recommended they virtually divorce themselves from Hillary’s expiring health care campaign and even the Clinton presidency itself. They should campaign as local candidates “fighting to get things done for” their districts, “not…advancing some national agenda.”
Election day 1994 was indeed a disaster for the Democrats—and Hillary and Bill. Republicans would now control both houses, claiming their first Senate majority in eight years and their first House majority since 1954. The Democrats lost an astounding fifty-two seats in the House, and eight in the Senate.
There had been historic losses by the president’s party in other elections—Ike had lost sixty-one Republican seats in the midterm elections of 1958. But this was a different kind of repudiation in that it was tied to the president and his wife. Only four times since the Civil War had there been such a rout. It was the worst midterm rejection of a president’s policies and persona since Truman’s in 1946, which proclaimed unequivocally that the New Deal was over. In 1938 Roosevelt had lost eighty-one House and eight Senate seats after his failed attempt to pack the Supreme Court.
The list of distinguished Democrats who had lost was disheartening for the Clintons. Tom Foley became the first speaker of the house to lose his seat since 1862. Governor Mario Cuomo lost in New York. In Texas Hillary’s great friend and feminist icon Ann Richards lost the governorship to George W. Bush.
The Clintons could see that the country, not just Washington, was on the verge of a new polit
ical age, much of it informed by antagonism to them. For the first time, the Southern states—once the “Solid South” of the Democrats—sent more Republicans to Congress than “D’s,” as they were called in the capital. Equally important, these were deeply conservative (by their own definition) Republicans, far to the right of those who had come to power, say, in the previous Republican wave of 1980. In nine of the most populous ten states Republicans won governorships. Perhaps the worst news from the Democrats’ point of view was that every Republican up for reelection in the country—for the House, Senate, and governorships—won.
Bill knew what had gone wrong, and he recognized the practical implications of the loss: the Republican control of Congress would not only threaten to scupper the Clintons’ agenda, but it would also embolden the Clintons’ enemies—including the new chairmen of several important House and Senate committees with jurisdiction to investigate Whitewater, the death of Vince Foster, or any aspect of the presidency, or his and Hillary’s past.
Hillary wrote in Living History that at this point she was “deflated and disappointed.” She knew she had mishandled her portfolio, and had inspired anger, and that both had helped bring Democrats down. Some soul-searching was in order.
“My view is Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party,” said Lawrence O’Donnell, Pat Moynihan’s aide. His perspective of the constitutional order of things was Moynihan’s as well: “It is more important to me in my definition of what America is,” said O’Donnell, “that the Democrats control the Congress than the White House…. Hillary was a disaster for what we were trying to do in government…this person who, with just a couple of tweaks, could have been great, it always seemed to me.” Her most prominent difficulty, he judged, was arrogance: “You simply had to have modesty instead of arrogance. Not any loss of idealism or loss of ambition. But modesty in the face of a guy named Bob Dole, who I knew could beat me when [he] wanted to, when he had to. So going up against that kind of force and saying, ‘I can beat it,’ was a recklessness of arrogance that ended up destroying the party’s control of government. And that, to me, is unforgivable.”
A Woman in Charge Page 56