All Too Human: A Political Education (15 page)

Nightline
scheduled a whole show on the issue, and after studying Hillary's writings, I volunteered to argue our side. Having Hillary defend herself was too big a risk; it would send the message that the charge was substantive rather than a nasty symptom of political desperation. It would also subtly reinforce the Republican subtext — that Hillary couldn't wait to advance her extreme agenda on the national stage. Hillary knew this, and I was relieved that she agreed to have me be her surrogate. To prepare me for the show, we reversed roles: She was the staffer and I the principal. On a phone from the road, she pelted me with the toughest attacks she could make on herself and asked what a nice boy like me was doing defending a radical feminist like her. Although she doesn't show it much in public, self-deprecating humor comes a bit more easily to her than it does to her husband. She also likes a good political rumble.

From my perspective, the show couldn't have gone better. The Bush campaign didn't even send an official representative; instead I got to debate Phyllis Schlafly. If anyone was going to attack Hillary, who better than a far-right old-timer with a beehive hairdo? Of course, I could also imagine the other side thinking they could do worse than opposing a liberal punk with a mop top. The pictures were probably a wash. What turned the debate was Ted Koppel's using his anchorman's authority to subtly suggest that the attacks on Hillary were misleading. All I had to do was fall in behind and remind viewers that the Republicans were up to their old tricks.

After the show, Hillary called with thanks for “defending my honor.” Good thing too. Her best friend, Susan Thomases, was constantly looking to replace me with a “serious, gray-haired” talking head, like their friend Arkansas attorney Jim Blair, or Don Fowler, who would later run the Democratic National Committee. She and Hillary were suspicious of how much I enjoyed the spotlight and rightly worried that I simply looked too young to be serious. My response to this was passive aggression: agree in principle, ignore it in practice. I appreciated the argument but also resented it. Didn't the fact that I had effectively defended the Clintons in difficult situations for most of the last year count for something? Of course it did, but my vanity and arrogance were also creeping in. Both would later come back to haunt me. But that night, and for the rest of the campaign, Hillary's blessing brought me all of the job security I needed.

When Hillary was angry, you didn't always know it right away — a calculated chill would descend over time. Clinton's anger was a more impersonal physical force, like a tornado. The tantrum would form in an instant and exhaust itself in a violent rush. Whoever happened to be in the way would have to deal with it; more often than not, that person was me. I guess Clinton figured that I could fix whatever problem was causing his frustration, and he must have sensed that I didn't take his temper personally. The trick was to have a kind of thin skin — to understand that Clinton didn't really yell
at
you; he yelled
through
you, as the rage passed through him. My job was to absorb the anger and address its cause.

One function of our daily morning phone calls was to give Clinton a chance to take out his frustrations on us so that they wouldn't come out in public. We also tried to provoke him in prep sessions before press conferences and debates, which created a kind of perverse pleasure. You got to put your boss on the spot while telling yourself that it was for his own good: “Governor Clinton, electing a president is ultimately a matter of trust, and polls show that the American people just don't trust you. What's your response?” Silence. His eyes would become slits, and his lips would disappear. “So what do you want me to say,” he would finally reply in a voice muted by contempt. You could almost hear the next word: “smartass.”

Clinton's anger was often well placed. Once, in rural Georgia late in 1992, we needed a good picture to highlight a Medicare event, which meant that a hundred senior citizens had to sit for hours under a baking sun. Clinton was steaming. He got on the phone and screamed at us for “grinding these peoples' faces in the dirt. You're treating them like props.” He was right.

But we all have limits to how much we can take, and mine came on a late night in early October. I was asleep in Little Rock when my beeper went off at about one
A.M.
with a message to call Clinton in Milwaukee. My telephone was broken, or maybe I hadn't paid the bill, so I called him back on my cell phone. Clinton was upset about a foreign-policy speech he was scheduled to give in the morning, and Bruce handed him the phone in midrant. He wanted to cancel.

I tried my usual technique: listen for a spell, concede a point or two, then remind him of the underlying facts — that we had invited ethnic leaders from all over the country to the event, that we needed one more foreign-policy speech before the debates to establish his credentials as commander in chief, that the press was primed and the speech was solid. Nothing worked; he was overtired and anxious. Then the battery died on my cell phone, which left me with a real dilemma. At 1:30 in the morning, should I get dressed, get in my car, and drive a mile or two to find a working pay phone for the privilege of being yelled at again about a situation we couldn't change?

The answer to that would be no.

Three months earlier, when I was less secure in my new role, I would have done it. Three months later, when Clinton was president, not calling back would never cross my mind. But now, I took a stand and went to bed.
Go yell at somebody else. Try California, where people are still awake
.

It's true that no man can be a hero to his valet. But every day Clinton also showed how extraordinary he was. Like when he spent his downtime stroking the hand of a little girl, bald and yellow with cancer, and looked into her eyes until she believed she'd grow up to be a movie star. Or when you would prep him for a late-night car-ride-to-the-airport interview after sixteen hours of nonstop campaigning. His eyes would float, the lids fluttering with fatigue, but once the reporter ducked into the backseat, Clinton would repeat the briefing word for word and add six points we missed. We called him Secretariat, the ultimate political Thoroughbred. Most of the time I was just happy to be his stablemate, the little goat by his side who usually knew what to say and had a knack for keeping him calm.

By the fall, the rest of the country was starting to believe that Clinton was one of a kind too. As his bus rolled across the Midwest and down through the South, he promised hope and personified change, which was exactly what people were looking for after eight years of Reagan and four more of Bush. In late September, Stan Greenberg conducted a national poll that tested all the charges the Bush campaign could throw at us and every rebuttal we would give. Nothing the Republicans could try would work. On paper, at least, the election was ours.

Of course, we were usually way too superstitious to say so out loud. That would be like mentioning a no-hitter in the bottom of the eighth. But on the first Sunday in October at the Washington Hilton, we were revising a speech on the North American Free Trade Agreement that Clinton would give later that afternoon. Clinton had decided to endorse the treaty if it included provisions to protect labor rights and the environment, but getting the wording right in a way that didn't enrage our labor base was tough. The prep wasn't going well. Clinton cut it off and called me into the bedroom.

He was lying on the bed in jeans and a T-shirt, propped up on pillows, with his speech draft and reading glasses lying untouched beside him. As I walked in, he launched into his ritual complaint about how nobody on his staff could write a speech. But I could tell that his heart wasn't in it. He gestured toward a chair by the bed, and when I sat down he just stared at me. Then he said it.

“You think we're going to win, don't you?”

He rarely asked me a direct question. We always seemed to be in the middle of a conversation, speaking in sentence fragments with a familiar tone. His more deliberate approach that morning was as significant as the fact that he was reading my mind. I hadn't said it to anyone and had barely acknowledged it to myself, but even I, the prince of pessimism, was optimistic. If he was asking, I had to answer.

“Yes, sir,” I said with some solemnity. “I think we will.”

“I do too.”

His words seemed to hang there in the space between us. Maybe he hadn't intended to issue a kind of encyclical, but he knew that I knew this wasn't a random comment either. We had known each other for just over a year, and every moment had been dedicated to transforming this man from governor of Arkansas to president of the United States. When he said he expected to win, I felt it had to be true.

Only years later did I realize that Clinton's unconvincing anger earlier that morning was somehow connected to growing awareness of his impending responsibilities — that his uneasiness was the product of hope and fear and God knows what else a man feels when it dawns on him that he might actually achieve the goal of a lifetime and become the most powerful single person on the planet. You say a lot of things in campaigns that you never really expect to be called on — you overpromise — but the closer you get to victory, the more weight every word carries. Clinton knew this, and he was starting to think more like a president than a candidate — more about how he would implement his agenda than whether he would get the chance. In the final weeks of the campaign, he salted his stump speeches with an important reminder: “We didn't get into this mess overnight; we won't get out of it overnight.”

I left Clinton's room floating on the notion of victory, tethered by its prospective burdens. But as we entered the homestretch of the race, fear of success wasn't my big problem. I was much more scared of blowing our big chance. “Buyer's remorse,” Clinton called it. At the last minute, the voters might return to the devil they knew rather than take a chance on the new guy. We had seen it happen in Britain that spring, when Neil Kinnock, the Labour challenger to Prime Minister John Major, lost a big lead in the last few days of the campaign.

The closer we got to election day, the more fearful we all became. With the press speculating openly about a Clinton landslide in public, we started to drive each other crazy in private. James stopped changing his underwear; I stopped sleeping. We were both convinced that Clinton's former chief of staff, Betsey Wright (who had joined the campaign to defend Clinton against attacks from his Arkansas past), had such a twisted relationship with Clinton that she was sabotaging the campaign by inadvertently giving damaging information to reporters under the guise of defending him. I was so on edge that at a dinner with some reporters, I lashed out at E. J. Dionne and stormed away from the table over a single adjective he used in an otherwise straight piece. Clinton, egged on by Hillary, obsessed about Perot: “I'm telling you — this guy's coming on, and it's all going to come from me.”

Our anxiety peaked on the Thursday before election day. Bush had spent Wednesday barnstorming Ohio by train, and our overnight polls there showed a drop from seventeen points up to three points down in twenty-four hours. If the same tactic worked in Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin over the weekend, we could actually lose. CNN confirmed our fears by releasing a national poll that showed our overall lead had dropped to a single point, within the margin of error. Even though we suspected that CNN was cooking the results to inject a little excitement into the race, we couldn't be sure.

As we all gathered around the speakerphone in my office for a strategy call that quickly turned into a screaming match, only Stan Greenberg was calm, maintaining the manner of a physician treating a roomful of hypochondriacs. The little box was vibrating from the force of fifteen people all talking at once. This was the last chance to change our ads before election day, and everyone wanted to win his or her own way: Hillary wanted to put up ads attacking Perot; Clinton wanted to defend Arkansas, which was now being portrayed in the Bush ads as a wasteland watched over by buzzards; the rest of us were seized by a bloodlust backed up by our research into what was working. All we wanted to do was keep our foot on Bush's neck by running “Read my lips” ads right up through election day.

Clinton finally conceded. “All right,” he said. “I'm not saying I agree, but you guys do what you think is right.” It was a vote of confidence that failed to conceal a warning:
“But if I lose this election, it'll be all your fault
.”

In my own craziness, that's how I was starting to think too.
If we lose after holding a lead like this, it will be all our fault. Democrats all over the country will hate us
. In the final days of the campaign, Carville and I spent more and more time crouched in my corner office, making dark jokes about our exile in Europe after allowing Bush the biggest comeback in presidential history. But our worries that Thursday ended when President Bush stopped his minisurge by calling Clinton and Gore “bozos” at a campaign rally in suburban Michigan. The next day, his fading hopes and our remaining fears were put to rest.

After lunch on Friday, James ran into my office with his black gloves in the air. He was jumping up and down like an underfed club fighter who had startled himself by knocking out the champ, and screaming obscenities in the singsong meter of a nursery rhyme: “He's going to have a clus-ter-fuck; he's going to have a clus-ter-fuck.” “He” was President Bush. Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh had just indicted former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and a note included in the indictment indicated that Bush had both known about and supported trading arms for hostages — a charge the president had repeatedly denied. The Weinberger note was the closest thing yet to a smoking gun. Bush's campaign was dead anyway, but this was the nail in the coffin.

That night I did a little jig on the grave. I was at the gym when Michael Waldman, our campaign's specialist on Iran-Contra and other Bush scandals, beeped me to let me know that Bush was on
Larry King Live,
challenging Larry to “ask me anything.” I jumped into my car with a cell phone and dialed Tammy Haddad, King's executive producer. “Tammy,” I started, “Larry's letting Bush off the hook. How could he not know they were trading arms for hostages?”