All Too Human: A Political Education (46 page)

The opening tableau of the House hearings wasn't pretty: a long table of mostly youthful White House staffers, all with right hands in the air, like a well-dressed version of the Little Rascals in a police lineup. At first, we were nervous; none of us had testified to Congress before on a matter of policy, much less as witnesses before an investigating committee. But the hearing turned out to be a partisan political food fight. Halfway through, Barney Frank sent me a note: “Relax, we're beating the shit out of them.” He was right. The hearing didn't help us, but it didn't do any more damage.

The Senate was a different story. To me, the House was home, but I had never worked in the Senate and didn't have the same feel for it. Everything about it seemed imperious — from the senators to their staffers to the setup of the hearing room. I knew D'Amato was out to get me, and the Democratic senators weren't as encouraging as my old friends in the House. Our legislative liaison, Pat Griffin, called me up to his office for a cup of coffee and confided that the Democrats were worried that I would be “arrogant” at the hearing and fail to show the committee proper respect. “You gotta be humble, George,” he said. “I know it's hard for you, but you have to.” Pat and I had become close friends over the course of countless car rides back and forth to Capitol Hill; I knew he was giving me good advice. But I also wondered what was happening to me.
“Before we got here, we thought of ourselves as good people.” Have I changed? Am I as bad as they say? A punk?
I promised Pat that I'd do my best.

But I also didn't want to be pushed around, or give the Republicans the satisfaction of making me look like a criminal again. My job was to defend myself without demonstrating contempt for the process. I consulted with Clinton's speech coach, Michael Sheehan, who advised me to: 1) look studious by jotting notes at the witness table; 2) start out every sentence with phrases like “As I've said before …” and “The facts are …”; 3) above all, “Be boring. No vivid language.” I thought about my appearance for days, but only the night before did I realize what the crucial moment of the hearing would be. Sitting at my kitchen counter in front of a carton of moo shu chicken, I tried to think like a Republican.
What would I do to me if I were them? Of course! The
diary.
They'll make me incriminate
myself
.

If you're a Senate staffer preparing for a hearing like this, your job is to get your boss on television. The best way to do that is to develop a camera-ready prop, and the most embarrassing prop for me was a blowup of Josh's diary. Have the senator hold it toward the cameras and order me to read the damning words: guaranteed sound bite on the evening news. I was determined not to give it to them. Under no circumstances was I going to read that diary on national television. Once I figured it out, I would have been almost disappointed if they hadn't asked.

No need to worry. Senator Orrin Hatch followed exactly the script I had imagined. Halfway through my questioning, he held up a laminated poster.

Senator Hatch: “I would like you to read from page two of the Steiner diary transcript where it begins ‘after Howell Raines.’”

Mr. Stephanopoulos: “Sir, it's not my diary.”

Senator Hatch: “It's not your diary, but I'd like you to read it. ‘After Howell Raines’ and just read down through the sentence which ends with ‘stupid and improper,’ because this is what he says.”

Mr. Stephanopoulos: “It's not my diary. I'm not going to read it.”

Senator Hatch: “I just want to see if we can refresh your recollection with this. If you can't say you don't …”

Mr. Stephanopoulos: “I'm looking at it, I've heard it several times. I'm not going to read it.”

The chairman: “Senator Hatch, I don't know that he should be expected to read somebody else's diary. I think he can read it off a piece of paper to himself or you can state it to him.”

Chairman Riegle had awarded me a tiny moral victory, but I couldn't fool myself into thinking that this gamesmanship in the hearing room was good news. Being sworn in at a witness table made me look like a defendant, and every hour spent sparring with Republican senators was an hour stolen from what I was supposed to be doing. Just being up there made me a problem to be handled rather than a person handling a problem.

At eight the next morning, I saw the president. He waxed on about how well Bernie Nussbaum had done before the committee but didn't even ask how I had done, which made me even more paranoid. And in a final Kafkaesque twist, a three-judge Federal Appeals Court panel announced that afternoon that it was replacing Special Counsel Fiske with a new independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, who would reopen the entire investigation. Chief Judge David Sentelle's opinion argued that Fiske had a conflict of interest because he had been appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno — a decision he reached after lunching with Republican senators Lauch Faircloth and Jesse Helms. We thought this decision was outrageous, but unwisely (in retrospect) failed to challenge it. So just when it looked as if Whitewater were finally over, it was starting all over again.

A week later, as Starr geared up his inquiry into Clinton's supposed crimes, our crime bill fell apart — a defeat I memorialized with a midnight note to myself:

So it's Thursday, August 11, and I guess today we had our first big legislative loss. I felt like kind of an idiot because for the last two weeks I've been walking around saying I'm sure we're going to win. Rahm's been gloomy. Usually it's the other way around.

He had a bad feeling about it all along. Felt the Southern Ds couldn't shake NRA on this one, and it turns out he was right. But even as we went to the vote, I thought we would win. I set up TV in P's study and prepared to sit through routine ritual: watch the vote, know it's a nail-biter, see it come out over the top. I got P just before Speaker Foley's closing speech. He sat in his chair; I sat in mine, with open line to the cloakroom.

We got six Republicans right from start; good sign. I told P that we have to make sure we thank the Republicans when we win this thing. “Thank them? We'll build monuments to them.” Democrats were holding too, but P barking out negative thoughts. “Looks like we're going to lose. Looks like they've got us beat.” Right at the end of vote, clear things weren't going to break our way. The “nos” hit 200, then 206, and then it tumbled out of control. Finally hit 225 — the exact number I'd predicted the day before, except I thought they'd be “yesses.”

In 1993, we'd won the big votes by cobbling together a bare majority with begs, bribes, belligerence, and appeals to conscience. But by the time we got to the crime bill — with the president's approval ratings in the tank and an election less than three months away — we couldn't make good on our threats, and we had nothing left to promise. Normally loyal Black Caucus members abandoned us over our decision to delete a section of the crime bill that would enable death row convicts to challenge their sentences with statistical evidence of racial prejudice. We didn't have a choice; in a rabidly pro-death penalty Congress, the “Racial Justice Act” was a poison pill. But neither did they: Voting no, they felt, was the only form of protest they had left. Meanwhile, conservative Democrats, mostly from the South, opposed the bill for being too tough on guns. The National Rifle Association was still smarting from its 1993 loss on the Brady Bill and vowed not to get beat on the crime bill's ban on assault weapons. The gun lobby's grassroots network flooded congressional offices with postcards and phone calls, which did the trick. Southern Democrats had already defied populist sentiment in their districts by supporting the president's policies on taxes and trade; an antigun vote, they feared, would be their third strike.

Despite these understandable desertions, we could have made up the difference with the votes of moderate Republicans who supported the assault weapons ban. But the NRA had devised a clever advertising strategy that never mentioned the word
guns
. Instead, the campaign called the bill a $30 billion barrel of “pork” and highlighted its funds for inner-city programs like “midnight basketball.” The fact that the NRA refused to mention what it cared most about revealed an underlying weakness and predicted future defeats; but at the time, this fiscally conservative stance with a racist subtext played well even in suburban districts that favored the assault weapons ban. Unfortunately, our congressional leadership played right into the NRA's hands. They approved a “rule” governing floor consideration of the bill that protected the pet projects of powerful committee chairmen like Jack Brooks of Texas. (The chairman had slipped $10 million into the bill for a “crime institute” in his district named after, you guessed it, Jack Brooks.) This heavy-handed tactic was the last straw. Doing exactly what we would have done in their shoes, the Republican leadership publicized the offensive provision and secured moderate Republican votes against the rule by appealing to their resentment at being an oppressed minority in an institution corrupted by forty years of Democratic control.

With liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, and conservative Democrats all against us, there was no center left to hold. The defeat itself was anticlimactic. We sat in the president's study for a few minutes, silently shaking our heads. But within minutes, the crime bill's collapse began to feel oddly liberating. Leon and Pat went up to the Hill to confer with the Democratic leadership on legislative strategy, and Mark Gearan called a meeting at the White House to prepare a communications plan. I was a conduit between these two worlds and the president, and for the first time, I truly understood the difference between president and prime minister.

Up until then, I really believed that passing legislation was the measure of our success. It was what I had been waiting to do for twelve years, and I was usually the first to argue for cutting the deal that would get us the votes.
You can't do any good if you don't get anything done
. But when Leon and Pat called in from the Hill with a recommendation from the Democratic leaders in Congress — to drop the assault weapons ban so the rest of the crime bill could pass — I rebelled against my past. I knew that was where the deal was (once the assault weapons ban was gone, conservative Democrats would vote yes, and we'd have a majority again), but I didn't want to do it. Yes, the ban was largely symbolic, but it was a valuable symbol. And I couldn't bear the thought of caving to the NRA — especially when pundits were always accusing Clinton of expedience. Better, I thought, to keep the assault weapons ban and let the deal go. We could put together a new coalition and woo back moderate Republicans by dropping some of the pork and picking a principled fight with the gun lobby. Even if we lost, we'd make a point. Rahm agreed, and we came up with a plan to have the president fly to Minneapolis with Republican Rudy Giuliani for a fighting speech before a national convention of police.

The president was with us. He was tired of being “lashed to the Congress” and frustrated by the fact that we hadn't made common cause with moderate Republicans more often. He was also furious at the NRA. All through his career, they had tried to defeat him. He loved to tell the story about how he almost got into a fistfight with the NRA's Arkansas lobbyist on the steps of the state capitol in Little Rock. But he had never backed down before, and he wasn't about to start now. Clinton signed off on our campaign plan and went to the briefing room to rail against “a procedural trick orchestrated by the NRA.” Although the correspondents' commentary focused on our devastating defeat, it was exhilarating to see all three network news broadcasts (a “roadblock” in the parlance of spin) show Clinton fighting again after months of taking licks on Whitewater. That night, I closed my note in a mostly hopeful mood:

We're at a turning point, because it seems like there's nowhere to go but up from here. I do feel good tonight. I was working out at around ten when the president called after talking to Jim Ramstad [Republican congressman from Minnesota who had agreed to host Clinton the next day]. Trying to figure out why I feel so lighthearted inside. Don't know what it is. Maybe it's just that losing turned out to be better for us than winning in some way. I also do feel that we're going to pull this off — that we're going to come back, the pendulum will swing, and the president will achieve a great deal for the American people. Unfortunately, I know that's not what the papers are going to say tomorrow morning.

I was wrong about “nowhere to go but up.” After two weeks of negotiations with the moderate Republicans, the crime bill eventually passed. But that was time and political capital that needed to be devoted to our health care effort, which was languishing after a series of summer setbacks: Memorial Day came and went without a bill from Moynihan's Finance Committee, and Chairman Rostenkowski's indictment for abusing his congressional accounts cost us an ally with the heft to forge a deal. With every day that passed, Republican opposition hardened. No amount of compromise could save us now. The few potential allies we had, like Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, lost influence as their more partisan colleagues realized that defeating health care was their ticket to victory in November.

As defeat seemed inevitable, all of us were disheartened. But Hillary soldiered on and tried to keep our spirits up. Seeing that I was fluey from fatigue, Hillary sent me some preventive care, a carton of homeopathic cures accompanied by a note: “We need you healthy for health care! H.” The message was even more important than the medicine: Although her anger about Woodward would occasionally flare, I was still part of her team.

But Hillary's echinacea and goldenseal wouldn't cure the severe case of insomnia I had developed. Ten to twelve times a night, I'd wake up to check the clock.
Phew, it's only two
. At 5:55, I'd beat out of bed before the alarm, alert but unrested. My eyes were red, and the underside of my skin felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool. Once I got to work, the morning papers brought my first adrenaline fix of the day, and I would be cruising by the time I finished our staff meeting and a second cup of coffee. But as my exhaustion deepened, I finally went to see a doctor. She couldn't really help either. My problems weren't physical.