Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  Because Harkin was from Iowa, his competitors barely contested the caucuses that year, and Harkin got 77 percent of the vote. Even in New Hampshire, there was a near-favorite son: Tsongas lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, very close to the New Hampshire border. So it was assumed that he would probably win. The battle was to see who finished second, and how close that candidate could come. In mid-January, Clinton was well positioned. And then came the two controversies that would define the campaign. The month would be Clinton’s fire walk.

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  On January 23, 1992, the political world got word that a supermarket tabloid, the Star, was in possession of transcripts of telephone conversations Clinton had had with an alleged ex-paramour named Gennifer Flowers, a TV reporter and Little Rock chanteuse. The media in the state capital, the journalists who’d covered Clinton for years and the few national reporters who happened to be there, lit into a frenzy. Clinton was flying back home that day for another reason: he was coming to sign the execution order of Ricky Ray Rector, a convicted and brain-damaged cop killer. This was a time of high crime rates, and the move was another signal to centrist voters that Clinton was a different kind of Democrat—tough on crime and not a softhearted liberal. (Rector was so mentally incompetent that after his last meal he left his dessert in his cell as he was hauled off to meet his fate because he wanted to save it for later.)

  Clinton’s roving eye had been the subject of much gossip for some time by then. The previous presidential campaign was the first in which a candidate (Gary Hart) had been asked by the media about marital infidelity, and journalists went so far as to stake out the Washington apartment of Hart’s girlfriend. But even that episode didn’t compare to this. Clinton generated far more intense passions within his party, pro and con, than Hart had. And since Hart had been forced to withdraw, and there was no precedent for a major politician surviving such a revelation, everyone wondered: was the Democrats’ seeming best hope for victory going to be knocked out of the race before it started?

  For a few days the campaign flailed. Then 60 Minutes invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to be interviewed on Sunday, January 26, 1992, which would mean they’d be on the air right after CBS’s broadcast of the Super Bowl. The interview, by Steve Kroft, was taped that morning in a Boston hotel room. The only thing Clinton explicitly denied was the charge that he’d had a “twelve-year affair” with Flowers. He acknowledged causing “pain” in his marriage. At one point, Kroft referred to the Clintons’ union as an “arrangement,” and here, Clinton interrupted and played a little offense: “Wait a minute. You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage.”

  It was enough. Polls showed that people understood what Clinton was saying, and the Flowers story wasn’t going to finish him off. But just as all that was dying down, on February 6, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of Clinton’s efforts to avoid the draft in 1969. Colonel Holmes, who throughout Clinton’s political career in Arkansas had said that he’d handled Clinton’s case the same as anyone else’s, now told the Journal’s Jeffrey Birnbaum that he felt Clinton had duped him—that Clinton’s verbal commitment to ROTC was just a way to get out of serving. (Holmes was a World War II veteran who had been held as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and forced into the Bataan Death March.) A few days later, ABC made public a letter that Clinton had written to Holmes that included the sentence “I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.”

  One of Clinton’s top campaign advisers, James Carville, argued in internal discussions that “this letter is our friend,” and indeed it included its share of thoughtful passages. But all anyone ever mentioned was “political viability.” The campaign was in a panic. Pollster Stan Greenberg recalls that he could see Clinton’s numbers dropping, as Clinton himself later put it, like “a turd in a well.” There was a conference call on which the pollster delivered the bad news. “I can’t remember if I used the word meltdown,” he says, “but the numbers just went off a cliff.” There was talk of withdrawing, but Clinton wasn’t having that, and instead the campaign shifted into high gear. Clinton campaigned almost nonstop, arguing to people that their votes should be about the future, not something that had happened more than twenty years earlier.

  When the votes were counted, Clinton finished second in New Hampshire, with 25 percent to Tsongas’s 33 percent. It wasn’t a win, but it was enough for the campaign to spin Clinton as “the Comeback Kid,” and an obliging media, for whom Clinton provided what was clearly the best story line among the Democrats, bought it. What turned things around? Somewhere in the twelve days between when the draft story broke and when the voting took place, the voters seemed to have turned some kind of psychological corner. In his book All Too Human, campaign aide George Stephanopoulos reflects:

  What I didn’t realize at the time was how the focus on Clinton’s problems was paradoxically helping him, turning the New Hampshire primary into a referendum on what politics should be about. Clinton was channeling public disgust and transforming it into a reason to vote for him. The best way to strike a blow against the obsession with scandal was to vote for the candidate most plagued by scandal.

  From that point on, Clinton was more or less immunized against scandal. He rolled through the primaries, sweeping the South. He hit a late pothole when Jerry Brown upset him in Connecticut, which lent some drama to the New York primary—it seemed briefly that perhaps Brown could win the Empire State. But Clinton had won the Illinois and Michigan primaries three weeks prior, on March 17, 1992, and it was clear from then that he was going to collect enough delegates to be the nominee.

  The period between the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election battle is often an awkward one for campaigns. For the Clinton team, it was something worse than that. The main reason was the appearance of H. Ross Perot, the Dallas businessman who’d made his fortune in federal data systems contracting and who had become a public figure largely through his pronouncements on the evils of the federal deficit. For some years, political scientists had forecast the emergence of a “radical center” in American politics—voters who hated both parties and wanted sweeping change but not in a uniformly left or right direction. “Irresponsible” federal spending was exactly the kind of issue that infuriated such voters.

  Perot was radical centrism personified, and he lit a fire across the heartland. In June, he led both Clinton and Bush in the polls. Clinton was exhausted and overweight. And worst of all, recalled Greenberg, “In our own polls we were in third place. There were people who were talking about not going to the convention. And we were just above the threshold for public funding. It was pretty tough. And he was depressed.”

  Late June brought a moment that has lived in history in some ways more than any other in the campaign. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition was meeting at a Washington hotel. Several hundred attendees—mostly African American educators, labor leaders, and activists—spent three days listening to speakers such as the financier Felix Rohatyn, who came to talk about infrastructure investment. Clinton was due to address the gathering on its last day. This was originally supposed to be a bridge-building event between the New Democrat candidate and the civil rights leader who had twice sought the Democratic nomination, in 1984 and 1988. Jackson was the moral leader of the left wing of the Democratic Party, which regarded the Democratic Leadership Council as too willing to sell out the party’s principles. Jackson had memorably called the DLC “Democrats of the Leisure Class.”

  But the night before Clinton’s speech, a little-known rapper named Sister Souljah spoke at a panel on youth. Some weeks prior, during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers who had beaten Rodney King, she had given an interview in which she said blacks should stop killing one another and have a week when they killed whites. Clinton writes in My Life that he had thought of denouncing her a
t the time but refrained because the circumstances didn’t feel right to him. (He was in Los Angeles at a charity event.) But now, with Clinton appearing at the same venue as Souljah, he agreed with those aides who pushed him to use the moment as a way to distance himself from the liberal (and black) Jackson wing of the party and send the message to centrist white voters that he wouldn’t kowtow to “them.”

  Clinton rebuked Souljah, saying that if you took her use of the words white and black and reversed them, “you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” It got Clinton some great press: Democrat stands up to mau-mauing interest group! Presidential candidates ever since have kept an alert eye open for just the right kind of interest-group punching bag that would permit them a potential “Sister Souljah moment.”

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  The next month, in July, the campaign’s fortunes grew even better. First, on July 9, Clinton chose Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee to be his running mate, in defiance of the convention that a running mate should be from a different wing of the party and a different region of the country—and, in the forty-five-year-old Clinton’s case, should have been an older, experienced Washington hand, preferably with some foreign policy experience. Gore had some of that—up to this point, he had mostly distinguished himself in Congress as a rare Democratic expert on weapons systems and the nuclear arsenal. But in the main Gore was much more like Clinton than unlike him: a southerner, a New Democrat, and a baby boomer. Indeed, the chief message Clinton wanted to send was one of generational change: Gore was a year and a half younger than Clinton, so the duo, if they won, would be the youngest ticket ever elected in the country’s history.

  Four days later, the Democrats opened their convention at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The party was still known for chaotic conventions in this era, whereas the Republicans had already mastered the art of turning them into slick and airless coronations. In 1972, just twenty years earlier, the party’s nominee, George McGovern, hadn’t been able to deliver his acceptance speech until three a.m., owing to an undisciplined and drawn-out vice presidential nominating process in which delegates barked out such names as Archie Bunker and Martha Mitchell. In 1980, the tensions between the Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy camps had been palpable.

  There were a few rough edges at the 1992 convention: Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who opposed abortion rights, was denied a speaking slot. Jerry Brown, who had still not withdrawn from the race, seconded his own nomination. But in essence the convention was a well-produced show. And as it ended Clinton got a great and unexpected windfall: Ross Perot dropped out of the campaign, with little by way of a credible explanation. The combination of a successful convention and Perot’s departure shot Clinton up twelve to fifteen points in the polls. He took the lead and never lost it.

  By this time, President Bush, whose approval rating had been as high as 90 percent in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, was down to 37 percent, according to Gallup. The 1990–91 recession was the culprit, and though it was over by the time the general election campaign started, the recovery was slow: unemployment peaked at 7.8 percent in June 1992. The wealthy and patrician Bush, who hadn’t paid a utility bill or had to go to a hardware store in the twelve years he’d lived in the vice president’s home or the White House, had trouble connecting with people. Clinton, in contrast, had been telling voters “I feel your pain.”

  The fall campaign was in some ways anticlimactic, since Clinton stayed ahead the whole time; but twelve years is a long time to be shut out of the White House, and many Democrats couldn’t quite believe that a victory was imminent. Clinton and Gore had good chemistry and campaigned well together. Bush swung at wild pitches. He called Clinton and Gore “a couple of bozos” at one point, and the way it came out it sounded overly defensive. Stan Greenberg recalled, “I think Bush couldn’t believe that this guy, this draft dodger, could really beat him. They were convinced they could bring him down on trust. We were convinced the voters had factored all that in.” Greenberg believes in retrospect that the Bush camp made an error in opening its campaign with attacks on Clinton’s character. The Bush team should have instead attacked Clinton’s record, which, since he’d led a small, poor state about which any number of unflattering statistics could be turned up, might have been more resonant.

  On October 1, a potential problem arose, or re-arose: Perot got back in the race. The Clinton team was concerned that he might shake up the race in ways that couldn’t be anticipated, but Perot was more spoiler than contender at this point, with his support in polls at about 15 percent. He was, however, invited to participate in the presidential debates. The most important single moment of the general election campaign came in the second debate, on October 15, when a woman in the audience asked the candidates, “How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives?” Bush didn’t seem to understand the question, which admittedly was confusing. (The woman appeared, in fact, to mean “the deficit” or perhaps simply “the weak economy.”) Clinton walked to the edge of the stage, locked eyes with the woman, and delivered one of those perfect empathetic answers that politicians always strive for but rarely achieve. “I’ve been governor of a small state for twelve years,” he said, and “in my state, when people lose their jobs, there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them.”

  In a foreshadowing of what was to come over the next eight years, some in the media and on the right tried to call attention to various allegations against Clinton. Congressman Bob Dornan, a California Republican, took to the floor of the House of Representatives to charge that Clinton had protested against U.S. involvement in Vietnam while on his trip to the Soviet Union during his time at Oxford and had perhaps even met with KGB agents while there to conspire against America. Dornan acknowledged he had no proof, but the way the story grew provided a textbook example of how allegations with no evidence to support them could gain footing. The conservative Washington Times ran a “news story” on Dornan’s antics, then conservative talk radio picked it up, then the Bush campaign decided to use it to attack Clinton; finally, the campaign was forced to respond. It didn’t do Clinton any damage, but he should have taken note of the process by which this new kind of sausage was made.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas ROTC wrote a memorandum that was read into the Congressional Record stating that he felt compelled to insert himself into the campaign because of “the imminent danger to our country of a draft dodger becoming Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.” And the New York Times published many stories about Whitewater; it had a funny smell to it, with the titillating nugget that Jim McDougal later became a failed savings and loan operator and that Clinton may have leaned on state bank regulators to help him out. But it was far too complicated to be converted by the Republicans into red meat.

  In the end, Clinton won handily: he got 43 percent of the popular vote to Bush’s 37.5 percent and Perot’s 19 percent. The electoral college tally was a rout: Clinton 370, Bush 168. The six high-population states that Bush had won in 1988—California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, and Maryland—were flipped by Clinton to the Democratic column, and through 2012 they would never flip back. He won four states of the former Confederacy—Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and his native Arkansas—along with Kentucky and Missouri. He had sold middle Americans on the idea that they could trust the Democratic Party again. And the Republicans, who had come to believe that the White House was somehow “theirs,” didn’t like it a bit.

  3

  The New Realities of Politics

  Clinton may have won the electoral college handily, but that 43 percent popular vote total was seized on by the Republicans to diminish or even delegitimize his victory. Senate majority leader Bob Dole of Kansas wasted no time conveying the message. On election night itself, Dole denied on television that Clinton had been given any kind of mandate, sa
ying, “Put our votes together with Ross Perot, and we have a majority of the American people.” (What “we” did he mean? Clinton was the second choice of about half of Perot’s voters, so Dole’s assumption that a Perot voter was automatically part of an anti-Clinton coalition was off base.) Dole having covered the mandate of the people, Paul Weyrich, a religious conservative who had coined the term moral majority, turned his attention to the mandate of heaven, announcing that an America governed by a man such as Clinton “deserves the hatred of God.”

  Signs of divine disapprobation were, however, few on Inauguration Day 1993. The weather was balmy enough that January day that Clinton wore no overcoat as he delivered his brief address, telling the crowd: “We have heard the trumpets. We have changed the guard.” Maya Angelou read a poem—Kennedy’s Robert Frost recast for a more multicultural age. The Clintons made appearances at nearly a dozen balls, including, in more generational signposting, one sponsored by MTV, where the president’s brother, Roger, sang Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The next day brought another symbolic gesture as the Clintons welcomed regular Americans into the White House to say hello.

  It wasn’t long, though, before the clouds gathered. There were some cabinet-appointment problems, most notably with regard to the attorney general post. Clinton’s first choice, Zoe Baird, withdrew her name after it was revealed that she and her husband had hired undocumented immigrants to work as their nanny and driver and had not paid their Social Security taxes. Incredibly, the “nannygate” issue also felled Clinton’s second choice, Kimba Wood, a New York judge. Wood had at least paid the required taxes for her undocumented employee, but in a scandal climate, such details don’t matter as much as they should.