All Too Human: A Political Education (27 page)

Counting votes was something I knew how to do. When the day began, my five-column tally sheet (Yes/Lean Yes/Undecided/Lean No/No) showed us 30 votes short. Getting to 218 would take a lot of hand-holding and hard dealing. The Democratic leaders — Speaker Tom Foley, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, and Majority Whip David Bonior — did their part with Howard Paster up on the Hill. Bob Rubin, Lloyd Bentsen, and Mack McLarty called everyone they knew too. But Clinton would have to get the final few votes himself. In the end, this was his plan and his presidency. He was commander and crew.

I was the coxswain. My official function was to get the right people on the phone, to record the deals and ensure they got done, to pass bulletins back to the Hill and relay the responses back to Clinton. But I also served as coach and companion, prompting the president during his calls with handwritten notes, gingerly urging him to do a little less listening and a little more demanding, helping him decipher the hidden meanings in a member's words: “I'll be there if you need me. … Don't worry about me. … I won't let you down. … I won't let it die.” With the Republican attack — “Biggest tax increase in the history of the universe” — already ringing in their ears, the final holdouts repeated variations on a theme: “I've been thinking of my own protection.” They didn't want to say no to the president, but they couldn't bring themselves to say yes; so they stalled for time, hoping the president would get enough votes without them. Some solved the dilemma by simply disappearing: Congressman Bill Brewster spent the afternoon tooling around Washington in his car, with his cell phone turned off.

By early evening, we'd hit a wall. Two hundred eight hard yesses, ten short. We had to decide: Do we call the roll and count on party loyalty and personal honor to carry us over? Or do we pull it? No meeting had to be called, and there was no real debate. If we postponed the vote, it would take months of negotiation to build a new coalition based on new compromises. Delay was the functional equivalent of defeat. But all of the main players — Gore, Bentsen, Rubin, Panetta — came to the Oval anyway, the way everyone gravitates toward the kitchen at family reunions. It's the place to be when there's nothing left to do — except worry. They paced around the president's desk and chomped on cookies. Clinton's nerves showed on the shredded butt end of the unlit cigar he'd been chewing all afternoon. My bloodred cuticles betrayed me.

But for the first time in our entire relationship, I was more optimistic than my boss. Usually, I was the dark one; he was Mr. Lucky. Now our roles were reversed. Maybe it was because I knew the House and its rhythms, knew that the body needed a victory even if its members didn't want to vote for it. Maybe it was the fact that Bonior, Foley, and Gephardt were taking early credit by calling the president with their vote counts. Maybe I'm more of a mood balancer than a true pessimist. Or maybe I was just fooling myself. But the more Clinton fretted over the final vote, the more I was convinced we were going to win.

We watched the roll call in Clinton's study off the Oval — a room even smaller than my office and packed with stuff. Clinton's collection of wood-shafted golf clubs leaned up against one corner, surrounded by sleeves of golf balls with the presidential seal. A rough-hewn rocking chair of light pine anchored the other corner. Kenny G. and Barbra Streisand CDs were stacked on the table under the window, next to the wall of books. A soft-focus black-and-white portrait of Hillary and Chelsea hung above the desk. To its right was the tiny Sony that commanded all our attention.

I was sitting in the leather desk chair. Clinton stood directly behind me, cigar clenched in his teeth, steadying himself like a captain on the bridge with his left hand on Mack and his right hand on me. All his tension seemed to be pulsing into me through the knot of my left clavicle. I focused my energy on the little screen, trying to will the yeas up to 218. With no time left on the clock, we were one vote behind, 211–212. I still thought we were OK, but the hand on my shoulder was growing heavy. The leadership wouldn't close the vote until there was no hope left, and I was on an open line to my old colleagues in the House cloakroom, who said we had a couple of safe votes holding back. One came in: 212–212.

Then Dave McCurdy voted no.
Bastard. He still can't stand the fact that Clinton's president while he's just another member of Congress. Trying to bring us down
. We were in the danger zone now: 212–213. We'd either win by two or lose by twenty. Close votes in the House follow the laws of political physics. You have all those guys hanging back who said they'd “be there if you need me.” But they're desperate not to be needed, and everybody is watching everybody else. By voting no with six votes to go, McCurdy was trying to start the dominoes tumbling down at the last moment, so a member could reasonably say, “I was ready to vote yes, but you weren't going to win anyway.” McCurdy was hoping the final holdouts would follow his lead and give him a seat at the table in the follow-up negotiations. I was certain it was an act of treachery.

Our guys hung in there: 213–213, 216–214. Two votes ahead, with four votes to go. No one remaining wanted to vote yes; the “no” column is almost always the safest place to be in a political storm. Ray Thornton of Arkansas should have volunteered first.
For godsakes, he's the president's congressman. Even if he hates every line in the bill, he should follow the lead of his constituent in chief. Coward
. When we saw another “no” flash on the screen and I told Clinton who it was, he was more incredulous than angry: “I made him president of Arkansas State. I can't believe he's doing this to me.”

But Thornton did, so it took two small profiles in courage to save the day: Pat Williams, a loyal Democrat whose home was Montana, where the gas tax would really bite; and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a freshman Democrat from Philadelphia's Republican Main Line. Her wealthy constituents would surely remember who raised their taxes. Both had a lot to lose by voting yes; neither would return to the next Congress — because they turned in their green voting cards, and the Speaker's gavel came hammering down. The final vote was 218–216. Not a vote to spare.

The president's study erupted in a riot of hugs that soon subsided into sober relief. Clinton wasn't ready to celebrate. We had lived to fight another day but learned another painful lesson in the limits of presidential power. After all of the threats and promises, after all of the carefully crafted compromises and absurdly trivial deals (“I'd really like to play golf with the president”), all we could do was watch on TV with the other C-Span junkies. Our fate, in the end, was out of our hands.

Tomorrow, it would be in Bob Kerrey's.

A little after eight, Clinton walked into the Oval dripping wet from his morning run in a driving rain. This was usually my favorite part of the day. The monitor behind my desk that displayed the Secret Service's tracking of the president's whereabouts would beep and flash “
POTUS
—
OVAL OFFICE
” in tiny green letters, which was my cue to head for Betty's desk. I knew the president's morning routine as well as I knew my own: After stretching on the patio, Clinton would walk through to the pantry for a bottle of water and a cup of coffee, then cool down by puttering around his desk or flipping through the newspapers on Betty's credenza. We staffers from his personal office would hover around him with a little light business: Betty would show him his call sheets from the night before; Nancy might hand him a stray piece of paperwork that couldn't wait, or ask him again whom he wanted to sit next to at the formal dinner that night; I would deliver my patter on the morning papers, serve up a piece of political gossip, and fill him in on the morning staff meeting. The heavy work could wait until after he showered.

That Friday morning, Gergen and Mack joined our little group. After yesterday morning's explosive phone call, they had met Kerrey for a prematinee lunch and feather-smoothing session. Now they wanted to brief the president before his final meeting with Kerrey. “Don't make it personal,” Gergen said. “Talk about your shared principles.” I knew it was the right advice, but I also seethed for Clinton's sake.
Spare me another Kerrey speech on principled sacrifice. Yes, he's a war hero and always will be. But he's also getting pounded on taxes back in Nebraska. That's what's going on here: He wants credit with the voters back home for no new taxes and credit with Capitol pundits for having the “courage” to stick it to the middle class even more. Give me a break
.

Clinton just nodded — “I'll be all right” — and went home to change. I returned to my office to find Howard Paster on the phone, trying to convince Kerrey not to back out of the meeting with the president. Howard and Kerrey both knew that it would be harder to vote no after a visit to the White House. Kerrey came, of course, and spent an uncomfortable but calm ninety minutes with Clinton on the Truman Balcony. But in the end, the meeting didn't really matter. Kerrey would vote for the bill because he had to, even if he didn't know it yet. Like Clinton, he couldn't afford to make it personal.

Even if Kerrey didn't respect Clinton, even if a side of him still sought revenge for 1992, or even if Kerrey sincerely believed that the bill wasn't good enough, he couldn't vote no. He may have held Clinton's fate in his hands, but he didn't fully control his own. It was too late. If his conscience truly called him to vote no, he should have said so — clearly, unequivocally, publicly — before the Democrats in the House walked the plank the night before.
Kerrey may be a little flaky, but he's not crazy. There'll be a lynch mob in his office if he votes no. He'll be finished as a Democrat
. Once the House hit 218, Kerrey's decision was made for him. A “no” vote after that wouldn't just be a blow to Clinton, it would betray the bulk of the House Democrats. They'd have the worst of both worlds: a damaging vote on taxes and nothing substantive to show for it.

But there was still a chance, however slim, that Kerrey could pull a Gadhafi, commit a senseless, irrational, self-destructive act. Thank goodness for Liz Moynihan. She and her husband, Senator Pat, were Kerrey's close friends and early campaign supporters. Like the Cuomos, the Moynihans kept their politics in house. Liz ran all of her husband's campaigns and was his chief political strategist. That Friday, she convinced Kerrey that loyalty to both the Democratic Party and his own future ambition to be a Democratic president demanded that he vote yes.

That did the trick. But the drama had to play itself out, and talk of high principle gave way to hard bargaining. In return for his vote, Kerrey wanted Clinton to make him chairman of a new Presidential Commission on Budget Discipline. While this horse-trading seemed more high-minded than the deals cut by other senators (Deconcini traded his vote for a mention in the president's Oval Office speech, fund-raising help, and a job for a longtime aide), it still required bare-knuckle negotiating.

I didn't like the idea because I feared that a commission could lock us into a long-term strategy of cutting even more government benefits for people who needed them. But I also knew Kerrey had us over a barrel. The vice president was apoplectic at the thought of Kerrey's trampling on his turf. He thought the commission would overshadow the Reinventing Government initiative he was scheduled to launch in the fall, so his chief of staff, Jack Quinn, and I were deputized to edit Kerrey's draft in a way that would reduce the potential conflict with Gore. In the end, we managed to weaken Kerrey's mandate by expanding it, renaming the group the White House Commission on Economic Priorities. A commission that broad would inevitably become nothing more than a debating society.

But Kerrey didn't budge, and the negotiations shifted to Majority Leader George Mitchell's office in the Capitol. We followed the faux debate on C-Span (every senator already knew how every other senator was voting) and waited for Kerrey to announce that he'd made up his mind. The call finally came to the Oval at 8:20
P.M.

Clinton was silent. He just chewed his lip and nodded his head to the rhythm of the upright thumb he was pumping in my direction. It would be OK. Less than a minute later, the phone was back on the desk, and Clinton was dumbstruck from yet another strange encounter with Cosmic Bob. After forty-eight hours filled with screams, threats, promises, and demands, Kerrey had just called to tell the president, “This one's for free.”

Free, my ass
. Kerrey went to the floor and delivered a broadside against Clinton, calling him “green and inexperienced,” and followed up with a few self-righteous shots about how “my heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote yes for a bill which challenges Americans too little.” Not five minutes later, Kerrey was in Mitchell's office, closing the deal on his commission, but for appearance's sake, he didn't want it announced until a decent interval had passed.

Howard called me from the majority leader's office to let me know that Kerrey was still negotiating, and I relayed the message to the president up in the residence. I also told him about Kerrey's speech, which irritated him, but he didn't let it spoil the victory. He and Hillary were having too much fun. “You know what my wife just said, George?” He chuckled. “‘Every woman in the Congress voted for you. They've got more balls than the men.’”

So we won — and our plan did work. The Republican party line that Clinton's plan would be a “job-killing poison” for the economy was flat wrong. At the time, we couldn't have imagined how right we were, but we did know that we'd be in a world of hurt if we lost. A failed vote would mean a failed presidency. Winning meant redemption, and a second chance.
Forget about Zoe, Kimba, Lani, Waco, Haircut, Travelgate, Gays in the Military; we passed our economic plan — did what we were elected to do. The economy, stupid. Remember?

But we didn't just dodge a bullet; we did some good. An überwonk with a heart as pure as you'll find in politics, Gene Sperling gave a speech to the staff in the Roosevelt Room that put the whole ordeal into perspective. “People say I'm too obsessed with numbers,” he said while glancing down at a sweaty scrap of paper. “Well, let me tell you some numbers — one hundred thousand poor mothers and their babies will be healthier because of the child nutrition program; one hundred thousand more poor kids will get to go to Head Start; fifteen million working families will get a tax cut with our earned-income tax credit; and twenty million more young people will get student loans at better rates.” Reducing the deficit was what we had to do, but we also did a little of what we wanted to do — what we cared about when we started.