All Too Human: A Political Education (14 page)

In my War Room office, I'd plow through a pile of Xeroxed clips while our overnight researcher filled me in on any new developments since the papers were printed. Around 6:45, James would call from his room at the Capitol Hotel. I was his third call of the morning. First came Mary Matalin, his future wife, who was a senior staffer on the Bush campaign. He then checked in with Stan Greenberg to review our overnight polling before calling me. Getting those numbers from James was as essential to me as a second cup of coffee; I couldn't function without them. After that, we would waste a couple of minutes speculating on the state of the Bush campaign — a rigorous analysis based entirely on James's take on the tone of Mary's voice that morning. “She's really ragging on me today,” James might say, “so their numbers must be as bad as we think.” Or, “I'm scared. Mary's being a little too nice. You think they have something on us?”

James wanted to win this election even more than I did. He was forty-seven; just a few years earlier, he was broke and unemployed. Now he had the opportunity of a lifetime. A lot of talented strategists get the chance to run presidential campaigns. Only the lucky ones have it happen at a time most suited to their talents, and the sense of frustrated ambition fueling the country's desire for change in 1992 was something James understood in his bones. He was smart enough to know that the stars would never line up like this for him again. This was his one big chance, and he ran our War Room with a combination of intuitive genius, intensity, and eccentricity — as if Machiavelli, a marine drill sergeant, and an extra from the movie
Deliverance
had been morphed into a single Cajun creature.

After the morning meeting, James and I would retreat to my office with a handful of other staffers for a conference call with our counterparts on the road. Clinton would then get on the line to make sure that we weren't making strategy without him. He knew how easily a candidate could get out of the loop of his own campaign. We would brief him on the polls, our new commercials, and what Bush was doing, then get braced for the morning outburst about his grueling schedule, or our flaccid speeches (“Words, words, words — all you write is words — they don't mean anything”), or the fact that Chelsea had seen a blistering Bush attack on Arkansas television without a response from our side. Mostly he was just letting off steam and letting us know he was watching our every move. If the yelling got real bad, I would disconnect the speaker-phone by picking up the receiver. No reason for the rest of the campaign to hear the candidate melt down — and even getting yelled at can be a power play. While he talked, I'd pretend to slap myself on the face.

I spent the rest of the morning gathering intelligence, swapping information, and trying to shape the news, concentrating on our beat reporters, the journalists on President Bush's plane, and my old contacts on Capitol Hill. After lunch at my desk, I'd check in with the producers at the national networks. In the afternoon, we'd meet with the other consultants to review the research, draft ads, look over the long-term schedule, and bullshit about the race. Sometimes I'd grab a quick nap on Carville's couch. Then we'd enter the chute toward news time.

If either side had drawn blood during the day, I'd spend the late afternoon chatting up the networks and trying to get our licks in, beeping the Bush reporters one last time, and checking in with our team on the road. In the end, a political campaign boils down to talk, talk, and more talk. What are they saying? What are we saying? What are they saying about what we're saying in response to your question? And on, and on, and on. The official War Room day ended with our evening meeting following the top of the network news. James went for a run, and I stayed around another hour to make sure the next day was set before heading off for my evening bout with the StairMaster.

Around 9:30, we'd have a late dinner, usually at Doe's. A spartan steak house with Formica tables and linoleum floors, Doe's was where the reporters wanted to eat when they came to town, which made our back-room table the campaign equivalent of the cool corner at the high school cafeteria. We always invited journalists to eat with us, partly because it was our job, partly because it was fun, and partly because they paid for dinner. Nothing made Paul and Dee Dee madder than to call the War Room and be told that James and I were at Doe's. We worked long hours, but their day was even longer. While we devoured rare rib eyes washed down with Heinekens, they were calling from a holding room in some anonymous hotel, waiting for Clinton to leave a fund-raiser so they could return to the plane to fly half the night on a moldy sandwich for the privilege of getting up three hours later to start another day. I sometimes envied their place at the center of the action, but not when I was at Doe's.

My day ended around eleven. I'd fall asleep on a full stomach within minutes of getting home. About six hours later, I'd beat the alarm by a minute and get up to do it all again.

The War Room's best moment was the Republican convention in Houston. Working with a SWAT team who had sneaked into the Astrodome, we countered every Republican attack and managed to write and release an annotated response to Bush's acceptance speech even before the president reached the podium. Our tactical triumph was picked up by the press and made us feel like winners. But nothing we did helped us more than what the Republicans did to themselves. By turning their convention over to Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and the rest of their right-wing base, they turned off the rest of the country — and gave me a chance to be Hillary's public defender.

When the campaign started, it didn't look as if Hillary would need to be defended. She was an unqualified political asset — her husband's chief adviser and candidate in her own parallel campaign. Clinton would cite her work on education and children as a reason to vote for him and refer to her in every speech: “My wife, Hillary, gave me a book that says, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’” We circulated “Buy One/Get One Free” buttons, and progressive primary audiences, especially women, loved the modern-marriage pitch. The fact that Clinton was with such a strong, smart, and successful woman made people like him even more.

I liked most of what I saw in private too. They really were complete partners, businesslike in meetings, often childlike with each other. Hillary adored him despite herself, giving him a Nancy Rea-ganesque gaze when he tightened his tie and talked nonstop about his upcoming speech, or later, when he loosened it with his arm around her and laughed about the evening's events. She could soothe him too. One night, after a particularly useless debate prep during which Clinton was hoarse and cranky, I went up to their suite with the next day's schedule to find her on the couch with him, legs laid over his lap, feeding him lemon slices dipped in honey. In playful moments, Clinton called for her in baby talk:
“Hee-a-ree, Hee-a-ree
.”

Of course, they fought too, and it wasn't fun to watch. She lit into him when she thought he wasn't being tough enough on himself or the people around him, particularly the “boys” like Paul or me, or the more encompassing “kids on the plane,” a term that included Dee Dee. One morning during the New York primary all I saw as I walked in their door was her standing over him at the dining-room table, finger in his face, as he shoveled cereal into his mouth, his head bent close to the bowl. I backed up without turning around and quietly shut the door.

The Hillary backlash began with
60 Minutes
. Tammy Wynette took offense at Hillary's derisive-sounding reference to “Stand by Your Man” and publicly demanded an apology. Most viewers were happy with Hillary's defense of her husband; it made them think his affairs were the Clintons' private business. But the undercurrent we couldn't eradicate was the notion that their partnership was less a marriage fired by love than an arrangement based on ambition. Hillary's prominent public role also made her a more legitimate political target. If voters were being promised two presidents for the price of one, the press and our opponents figured that we ought to expect twice the scrutiny. They examined Hillary's private law practice and whether she did business with the state while Clinton was governor. The
New York Times
started to ask about one of the Clintons' joint investments, a resort development project called Whitewater.

Hillary's litigator instincts made her hunker down. Whitewater and Rose Law Firm questions were directed to her friend and fellow lawyer Susan Thomases. A pattern began of revealing as little as possible as slowly as possible, which was stupid, because the underlying information — about Hillary's investments and legal practice — was embarrassing but not scandalous. The early stories were too convoluted to do any real political harm, but the Hillary controversy reached a fever pitch during the Illinois primary.

In a Sunday-night debate, Jerry Brown charged that Hillary was profiting from Rose Law Firm business with the state of Arkansas. Anticipating the attack at the predebate prep, we had urged Clinton to hit back hard. Anger in defense of his wife would play well; it was a form of chivalry — and the least he could do after Hillary had stood up for him during Gennifer and the draft. Standing on a chair at the dining-room table, I got carried away: “The minute you hear the word
Hillary,
rip his head off. Don't let him finish the sentence.” Clinton didn't. The counterpunch was perfect, leaving Brown looking petty and confused on the facts.

But Sunday night's planned confrontation gave rise to an unscripted moment Monday morning. At the Busy Bee coffee shop in Chicago, Clinton was bantering with reporters when they asked to speak to Hillary.

“Sure,” he said, catching her off guard. Andrea Mitchell of NBC News asked Hillary whether it was ethical for the governor's wife to be a partner in a law firm doing business with the state. The question struck a nerve. Hillary prided herself on her integrity and resented the fact that it was being challenged, especially since she had refused her share of Rose Law's profits from Arkansas state business. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” she replied. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

From her mouth to the nation's ears. There are few things more unnerving to a staffer than the buzz created when a press corps that's heard the same speech six days in a row captures a spontaneous gaffe that's guaranteed to lead the news. Hillary's sound bite sent them scurrying for the phones. We knew immediately we had a problem. “Tea and cookies” was so rich and resonant a phrase that it could be the subject of a graduate seminar on semiotics. It also seemed to reveal what many voters most feared about Hillary, that deep down she wasn't really a “traditional” woman. Most of the reporters shared her progressive side and kind of liked her sarcastic sense of humor. So did I, but the Republicans would have a field day if Hillary didn't clean this up before the close of the news cycle. We had to make her take it back.

Right. That'll happen. Too bad Mandy's not around
. Hillary might be more open to the advice if it came from Grunwald rather than a couple of guys like Paul and me who didn't intuitively understand the struggles women faced. Paul took the lead and convinced Hillary to appear before the cameras again. She did, explaining that she had the greatest respect for women who chose to stay home with their children and that one goal of her husband's campaign was to make sure more women had more choices. But the damage was done. “Tea and cookies” was all over the evening news — and it stuck.

A month later we were reviewing campaign research with Clinton at a Holiday Inn in Charleston, West Virginia. Part of the presentation was the videotape of a “dial group,” where a roomful of voters are hooked up to handheld meters and asked to respond to news reports, TV spots, and tapes of speeches to gauge what works and what doesn't. The results are superimposed on the screen in real time, so you have an instant analysis of voter response.

When a shot of Hillary speaking was played, the line on the screen dropped like a downhill ski run.

“Oh, man,” said Clinton, demonstrating both husbandly concern and his capacity for denial, “they don't like her hair.”

Nobody said a word, but James — who was sitting next to me on the couch across from Clinton — started grinding his fist into my thigh. That pressure and the laughter building up inside me made me double over until James mumbled something and burst out of the room. I was right behind him. We collapsed in hysterics the second we hit the corridor. From then on, whenever I wanted to make James laugh, all I had to say was “They don't like her hair.” To him, it was the single most memorable line of the campaign. To me, it was just a sweet moment.

But the Republicans remembered “tea and cookies.” Frustrated by their inability to close the gap before their convention opened, they tried to make Hillary a major issue. Party chairman Rich Bond opened the attack. In a gross distortion of views that Hillary had expressed in a 1973 journal article on the rights of abused children, Bond charged that if Clinton became president, he would be advised by “that champion of the family Hillary Clinton, who believes kids should be able to sue their parents rather than helping with the chores as they are asked to do. She has likened marriage and the family to slavery.”

Big mistake. “Tea and cookies” hurt Hillary because her words seemed to reveal a secret, somewhat scary, side of her. Bond's broadside helped her by transforming her from a radical feminist with a secret agenda into a political victim of the Republican right. The attack was a willful misreading of Hillary's text, and we saw it as an opportunity to defend her and return the fire. Hillary was controversial, but people liked the fact that she was a children's advocate, and hated political attacks that were perceived as personal. What could be more personal than attacking a candidate's wife? We accused them of trying to turn Hillary into Willie Horton.