Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  Bill Clinton ran for Congress in 1974, the year of the Democrats’ most overwhelming electoral triumph in the past half century, immediately in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. It was an uphill race against an entrenched Republican incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt. In that year of the “Watergate babies,” when so many young Democrats won election to the House and Senate, Clinton didn’t quite make it to the mountaintop; he got 48 percent. But even while losing that race, he left a footprint. “He showed up at the Pope County picnic in 1974—which is our traditional political kickoff—opened his mouth, and everyone just knew,” said George Jernigan, an Arkansas politician.

  Two years later, Clinton set his sights on the office of Arkansas attorney general, where he faced Jernigan and one other opponent in the Democratic primary (oddly, no Republican ran). As Jernigan would succinctly recall, “He beat the living hell out of me.” In the South especially, where regulations are few and state legislatures tend not to be energetic with respect to their investigatory powers, a state attorney general can make a good name for himself by taking on a well-chosen powerful interest. Clinton chose very well indeed: he battled Arkansas Power and Light, opposing a rate increase and an attempt to build a costly coal-fired power plant in the state.

  The profile he gained in that office positioned him well to run for governor in 1978. He breezed past four opponents in the Democratic primary and swamped his Republican foe, becoming at age thirty-two the nation’s youngest governor.

  * * *

  He was a young fellow in a hurry, and by all accounts too much of a hurry. He was credited in that first term with doing good work on education, getting the legislature to raise teachers’ salaries. His other big goal was transportation and road improvement. He proposed increasing the car tag levy, and he wanted to do it by the value of the car, so that Arkansans driving old pickup trucks would take less of a hit than those tooling around in new Lincolns. But the state legislature approved an increase based on vehicle weight, which hit working people harder. The young governor had a choice: sign a bill that accomplished his goal but in what he considered to be a bad way, or have no bill at all. He signed. “It was the single dumbest mistake I ever made in politics until 1994,” he writes in My Life, referring to the year of his fateful decision to agree to the appointment of a Whitewater special prosecutor.

  Then, in Clinton’s reelection year of 1980 (gubernatorial terms in Arkansas were then just two years), Fidel Castro deported 120,000 political prisoners and “undesirables,” who sailed to Florida for refuge. President Jimmy Carter, facing reelection that year, had a huge crisis on his hands, which he had to deal with by locating these people in various federal facilities, one of which was Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. On the night of June 1, about a thousand of them broke out. The National Guard defied Clinton’s instructions to block the Cubans from getting anywhere that might bring them into contact with Arkansans, who, Clinton knew, would be worked up—and armed. No one died that night, but sixty-two people were injured before order was restored.

  Car tags and Cubans were the main reasons Clinton was defeated for reelection in 1980—the last election he ever lost. There were others. An ancillary one revolved around the birth of his daughter, Chelsea, in February of that year. This man who’d never known his biological father wanted to make sure that his child knew hers, and some say he lost a little focus then. But mainly the explanations are centered on the widely shared impression that he was a know-it-all who had stopped listening to people.

  The loss devastated him. He thought his political career was over, and he nearly ended it of his own volition—he seriously considered multiple job offers, from heading the World Wildlife Fund to becoming the president of the University of Louisville. But in the end he stayed in Little Rock and joined a law firm. Then one day in the spring of 1981, at a small-town gas station, he ran into a man whose rage at that car tag increase was so thoroughgoing that he bragged to the ex-governor that he’d persuaded ten family members to vote against him. Clinton then asked the man if he’d consider voting for him if he ran again. The man said, “Sure I would. We’re even now.” Clinton ran to a pay phone, called Hillary, and told her he thought he could regain the governorship in 1982.

  Here, Dick Morris enters the picture for the first time. Clinton brought in Morris, a New York political consultant, to advise him on his comeback. Morris worked with Tony Schwartz, the adman who had made the famous Goldwater-daisy-nuclear-countdown commercial for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, to create a mea culpa ad starring Clinton to launch his 1982 campaign. “My daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing,” the once and future governor said. Meanwhile, another quasi-apology: Hillary announced that she would henceforth be known not as Hillary Rodham but as Hillary Rodham Clinton, finally bowing to custom and taking her husband’s name. Bill Clinton went around the state talking about the lessons of defeat, and he won over the voters who had thrown him out two years earlier. It also helped that the state’s economy wasn’t in great shape, and come election night Clinton won 55 percent of the vote.

  Back in office, Clinton now set his sights higher. He began an aggressive effort to transform his state, in an attempt to receive some national notice. The biggest marker here was a package of education reforms, an effort that he appointed Hillary to lead. The state greatly increased its investments in education; more controversially, the package included a teacher testing program that infuriated the Arkansas Education Association, and Governor Clinton and the union’s president had numerous debates about it that sometimes drew national attention. He also raised the sales tax to help fund Arkansas’s schools, after the state Supreme Court ruled that the state’s school financing system was inequitable and unconstitutional. Results in the classroom were positive if short of overwhelming; graduation rates rose and many more high schools began to offer advanced science classes, in some cases where they hadn’t taught chemistry at all.

  Arkansas has never been known as a laboratory for cutting-edge progressive change. Its political culture has historically been dominated by big industries such as oil and gas, poultry, and lumber—and, by Clinton’s time, the Walton family, whose Wal-Mart stores started in Bentonville. Clinton certainly made his peace with these interests, but he did change the political culture of the state to a considerable extent. He expanded access to health care for poor children. His economic development and job-training efforts helped buffer the state against the worst effects of two recessions. He fought the old-line segregationists, led by the notorious “Justice Jim” Johnson, an associate justice on the state supreme court, and pushed hard for the integration of the state’s schools and workplaces. (Clinton always wore their enmity as a particular point of pride.) And he developed a reputation as an innovator at a time when many Democrats were talking about “reinventing government” as a way of pushing back against the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the Reagan years.

  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party nationally was in its worst shape since the 1920s. In the 1984 presidential election, Ronald Reagan destroyed Walter Mondale, who carried only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The postelection conventional wisdom held that the party had become reflexively paleo-liberal, chained to its special interests. If it didn’t modernize, it might never win the White House again. An Indiana native named Al From, who’d worked on the Johnson-era War on Poverty and in the Carter White House, took it upon himself in 1985 to create the vehicle that would remake the Democratic Party: the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Clinton was involved from the start, invoked by the group as a model for the type of “New Democrat” who could make the party competitive again in national elections.

  Clinton kept at his job, winning reelection every two years and shifting his emphasis toward the state’s economic development. Hillary settled in to her work at the Rose Law Firm, one of Little Rock’s largest and most influential firms. The Clintons were not among Arkansas’s richest citizens; he barely made $35,000 as
governor, and she usually brought home around $100,000, which was a very nice living in Little Rock, but not all that much for a law partner in a major firm. In 1986, in an effort to build up their personal wealth, they invested in a land-development deal in the Ozarks called Whitewater. They entered into the arrangement with Jim McDougal, a friend and political science professor, but in the end the investment didn’t pan out—they lost around $50,000 on the deal and had good reason to think that that was the end of it.

  No particular aura of scandal surrounded Arkansas’s first couple. There was the sense that he was overly clever and calculating (the “Slick Willie” business). There was gossip about Bill’s extramarital excursions, presumed to be numerous, and he aroused the kinds of passionate emotional responses in supporters and (especially) detractors that one would expect of a brash, young governor trying to alter a sedentary political culture, but few thought him genuinely corrupt.

  * * *

  By 1988, Clinton was running for his fifth term and was enough of a national figure that he was given a coveted slot at that year’s Democratic convention: placing Governor Michael Dukakis’s name in nomination. He was supposed to talk for fifteen minutes. The convention delegates, who started chanting “We Want Duke!” just six minutes into Clinton’s speech, were first bewildered and then exasperated and finally infuriated—and booing loudly—as Clinton just wouldn’t stop talking, insouciantly smiling through the catcalls. When he finally finished, thirty-three minutes had elapsed. At least he was talking about Dukakis and not himself, but it was impossible to imagine what he was thinking—his first national exposure, and he turned himself into a punch line. It did, however, land him a guest spot on The Tonight Show soon thereafter, and he was appropriately self-effacing as Johnny Carson needled him.

  Dukakis’s loss was the Democrats’ third straight, and now From, who felt that the DLC had failed to have sufficient influence on Dukakis’s platform, saw his opening. Clinton was the horse From hoped to ride to the White House. From had met Clinton in 1979 or 1980, he says, but started to get to know him well in 1987, soon after Clinton had impressed From with a speech he gave at a DLC meeting. Over the course of 1987 and 1988, From says, the two spoke constantly, and From quickly became persuaded that Clinton could carry the New Democrats’ message to victory. From was also impressed by Clinton’s recall, his attention to detail, and his exuberance with people. And so he made his pitch. As he later recalled:

  A little after four o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, 1989, I walked into the office of Governor Bill Clinton on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.

  “I’ve got a deal for you,” I told Clinton after a few minutes of political chitchat. “If you agree to become chairman of the DLC, we’ll pay for your travel around the country, we’ll work together on an agenda, and I think you’ll be president one day and we’ll both be important.” With that proposition, Clinton agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and our partnership was born.

  From soon saw for himself that he’d made the right choice. After Clinton became the DLC chair, he and From traveled to about twenty-five states together. “We’d leave from Little Rock or maybe Washington,” From recalled, “and we’d travel the whole day and get to San Francisco at eleven o’clock at night, and he’d see somebody in the lobby and he’d go, ‘Oh, I remember you. You did this and this and this when I first ran for Congress in 1974.’ It was just out of sight.”

  From’s strategy was broader than just finding the right candidate. It involved intellectual spadework, which in 1989 produced one of the most famous white papers in white-paper history: “The Politics of Evasion,” by the scholars and party activists William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck. It argued that “too many Americans have come to see the [Democratic] party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their national security,” and laid the groundwork for a DLC platform that departed from liberal orthodoxy in all three realms. As Kenneth S. Baer, who participated in and chronicled the rise of the New Democrat movement, has noted:

  Throughout 1990 and 1991, the DLC plied [Clinton] with critical aid during this important “invisible primary” phase of the campaign. The organization unveiled a developed and distinct public philosophy that took controversial stands on a variety of issues, and it established state chapters to give its putative candidate a reason to travel the country and a chance to construct a network of supporters in key states.

  Most of the national media, and many Democrats, were waiting to see what New York governor Mario Cuomo was going to do. Though he was more of a traditional Democrat, he was considered in the fall of 1991 the strong favorite for the Democratic nomination—he was the governor of a large and important state, and he had won liberal hearts and minds with a galvanizing speech at the party’s 1984 convention. The thinking among the experts was that if Cuomo ran, he filled the “governor slot” and there was no room for Clinton. But Clinton saw matters differently.

  2

  The Comeback Kid

  In October 1991, President George H. W. Bush was sitting on an intimidating Gallup approval rating of 64 percent. More than that, it seemed to many political observers that the White House simply “belonged” to the Republican Party. In 1988, Bush had clobbered Michael Dukakis, 426 electoral votes to just 111. Bush won a number of large-population states that in only a few years would come to be thought of as solidly Democratic: California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, and Maryland. But no one could have seen that then. At the time, the Democratic Party had the three major problems that Galston and Kamarck described in their paper: it was not trusted on issues relating to the economy and the role of government, considered out of the mainstream on social issues, and labeled “soft” on national security. The job of turning those perceptions around and taking back the White House looked like an awfully heavy lift.

  Of the Democrats lining up to take a shot at it, aside from Cuomo, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska seemed best on paper. Not only was he a senator, but he had previously served as Nebraska’s governor, so he had proved he could win in a Republican state. Kerrey had served in Vietnam as well. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was a native of the state that hosted the first caucuses and had close ties to organized labor. Former senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts cared most about reducing the deficit, and thus could stand immune from any charge of being an old-line liberal. Douglas Wilder was the first African American governor of Virginia. And Jerry Brown was a former governor of California who was positioning himself as a populist, refusing campaign contributions greater than $100 and attracting appreciative laughter (from supporters) and cynical snickers (from detractors) as he stood at podiums in those pre-Internet days and recited the toll-free number that his hoped-for army of small donors could call.

  Excitement about Clinton—among New Democrats, if not old ones—had been building since May 1991, when he gave an inspiring speech at a DLC convention in Cleveland. It was there that he first articulated the three-word mantra of “opportunity, responsibility, and community” that would define the New Democrat approach. Each word was intended to carry a message for the swing voters who had abandoned the party in the prior three elections. Opportunity was meant to convey that the Democrats were now pro-growth and not concerned only with economic fairness and equality; responsibility was aimed at fighting the widely held perception that the party gave too many handouts to those who didn’t work (and carried a strong racial subtext); and community was intended to suggest that New Democrats wouldn’t ignore broader community goals and standards in favor of individual or group claims that seemed outside the cultural mainstream. “We have got to have a message that touches everybody, that makes sense to everybody, that goes beyond the stale orthodoxies of left and right, one that resonates with the real concerns of ordinary Americans, with their hopes and their fears,” Clinton said.

  He was still gov
ernor, and he had promised his state’s voters in 1990 that he would serve a full term, which was now four years. He drove around the state in the spring of 1991 asking voters’ permission to go back on that promise, and he generally received it. At a July 4 picnic, he saw the first “Clinton for President” signs. By the time he celebrated his forty-fifth birthday on August 19, he had started assembling his team—Stan Greenberg to do polling, Frank Greer to make ads, and Mandy Grunwald to plan the broader communications strategy. And on October 3, at the Little Rock statehouse, Clinton made his candidacy official. “A Clinton administration,” he promised, “won’t spend our money on programs that don’t solve problems and a government that doesn’t work. I want to reinvent government to make it more efficient and more effective. I want to give citizens more choices in the services they get, and empower them to make those choices.”

  On December 15, 1991, Clinton decisively won a nonbinding straw poll in Florida. It was an early sign of organizational strength in a key state, although, as the New York Times noted at the time, “Mr. Clinton’s opponents said that given the attention he focused on the straw poll, he was the only candidate who had any real stake in its outcome.” And then, on December 20, Mario Cuomo announced that he would not run. He was set to fly to New Hampshire to file his papers of candidacy for that state’s primary, and he had even instructed the gubernatorial airplane to rev its engines. But at the last minute he left the airplane sitting on an Albany tarmac. The presumed front-runner was out. The thing was wide open.