All Too Human: A Political Education (56 page)

The rest of the day we had the usual struggle over the text. But since the networks had allotted us only five minutes and the thrust of the speech was set, there wasn't much to fight about. I focused on reducing gratuitous insults to Democrats, but Morris was triangulating with a vengeance. It wasn't enough for the president to balance the budget; Dick wanted to make our friends howl. He insisted, for example, that the president contrast his plan to the “congressional” rather than the “Republican” budgets; and his draft praised the civility of Speaker Gingrich — acid words to our allies who were campaigning against the Republican budgets and had been burned for years by Newt's scorched-earth crusade against the “corrupt” congressional Democrats.

I lost both fights. As the president reviewed the final draft at the small desk in his study, Dick stood in the doorway and stared at him. Clinton didn't look up; Morris didn't shut up. He was back in machine mode, repeating his rationale in the rat-a-tat-tat of an old stock ticker. Whenever the president touched his pen to the text, Dick would fuss — “No … don't … not that” — leaning in until his head was hovering over Clinton's left hand. Only after Clinton swatted the air and barked, “Dick!” did Morris back off.

Resigned, jealous, a little amused, I watched them work from the high-backed rocking chair in the corner.
Is that how I acted when I was Clinton's guy? Probably. Nah, couldn't have been that bad, could I?
Shortly before airtime, I left the room to take a call from Lisa Caputo, Hillary's press secretary. “I have an important message to you from Hillary,” she said. “She's depending on you to make sure the speech gives something to the Democrats.”

A little late for that, isn't it?
“I'm doing my best,” I replied, enjoying the slightly adulterous pleasure of conspiring against the president. I explained to her that Morris saw each of my edits as part of some partisan (Democrat) plot and suggested instead that the first lady call the president herself. Knowing full well that Hillary had a longer memory than her husband for Newt's attacks (not to mention that of Newt's mom, who had referred to the first lady as a “bitch” in a television interview earlier that year), I made special mention of the reference to Speaker Gingrich. But by now, even Hillary could do only so much. After her call, the president agreed to beef up the health care sections of the speech, referring specifically to “breast cancer and AIDS research,” but the only other concession he'd make was to drop Newt's surname. The final text praised the “Speaker.”

The speech was fine. Watching it on the television in my office, I had to concede that the logic of the argument was compelling. I was still concerned about the policy consequences of the cuts, but Morris was absolutely right about the political power of calling for a balanced budget. It preserved our critique of the “extreme” Republican (uh, congressional) budgets, while denying them the same charge against us. Supporting a balanced budget said that Clinton wasn't a “tax and spend” liberal. Senator Dole's haggard and hackneyed response to Clinton relieved me even more. Instead of accepting Clinton's olive branch, declaring victory, and asking for an early summit where the president would be forced to make further concessions, Dole and his fellow Republican leaders stayed on the attack, saving us from ourselves. Because they insisted on all or nothing, we still had a chance to reunify our troops for the ultimate budget showdown later that fall.

The Democrats, however, were enraged by the speech, which was exactly as Morris intended. A group including Morris, Gene Sperling, and me was with the president in his private dining room when the first reactions came in. Slightly flushed from the stress of speaking to an audience of sixty million, Clinton pulled a chair up to the credenza that concealed a small television. His knees were nearly touching the screen, and his eyes were fixed on CNN's Bill Schneider, who was describing the president's move as a blow to Democrats that left them hurt, angry, and confused.

“That's right,” Clinton muttered, sipping his Diet Coke, feeling sorry for them and even sorrier for himself because they were mad at him. “No president was ever rewarded for doing deficit reduction.”

“This is just the pangs of the childbirth of transition,” Morris assured him from across the small room. But Clinton was silent, drifting into the state of “buyer's remorse” he so often observed in others. Morris was losing him. More agitated now, his postvictory euphoria fading fast, Dick bounced on the balls of his feet and tried to lure Clinton back. “Remember the theory. Remember the theory,” he chanted, his voice rising with every syllable. “We have the Perot voters out there, lying in wait. This is the moment to strike — and watch the poll numbers go-o
UP!”
On that last phrase, Morris threw his hands high above his head while wiggling his fingers and standing on the tips of his toes — a political shaman casting a spell, enraptured by his own ecstatic dance.

But it wasn't working. The more Dick talked, the angrier Clinton got. His grip tightened, denting the soft metal can in his hand. His jaw muscles pulsed. His flush became a flare. Ashamed at hearing these private incantations invoked in public, surely embarrassed for the rest of us, Clinton lashed out: “I did this because it's the right thing to do, Dick. I did this because it's the right thing to do.”

I wanted to believe him.

Our congressional allies sure didn't, especially after they read Dick's background quote in the
Post
that called the speech Clinton's “declaration of independence” from the Democrats. Pat Griffin and I attended the next day's House Caucus to hear them pile on. “This isn't leadership; it's bullshit,” said Black Caucus chairman Donald Payne, summing up the general sentiment. But it wasn't just Clinton's tone and tactics, or even the substance of the budget, that bothered them; in June of 1995, everything we Democrats cared about seemed to be imperiled.

That summer threatened to be the season that swept away the Great Society. In the historic legislative sessions of 1964 and 1965, self-confident Democrats had created Medicare and Medic-aid, outlawed racial discrimination and segregation, opened America's doors to millions of new immigrants, and declared a war on poverty. In 1995, resurgent Republicans were bent on reversing their thirty-year-old defeats. Medicare would be privatized, Medicaid sent to the states, immigration blocked, and the federal battle against poverty abandoned because, they said, “poverty won.” On top of all this, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans had already restricted the reach of the Voting Rights Act, and on the day before Clinton's budget speech, the Court's decision in
Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena
raised the specter that federal affirmative action programs would be found unconstitutional.

Democrats were scared. They didn't know where their president stood. Would Clinton fold or fight? If he fought in 1995, would he lose in 1996? What then?

The question was most acute on the issue that rubbed emotions most raw — race. From January on, Republicans had mounted a crusade against affirmative action. In their early appeals for campaign cash and conservative support, all of their leading presidential contenders attacked what they called “racial preferences.” Legislation was drafted in both the House and the Senate to strike down affirmative action programs mandated or managed by the federal government. Activists in California prepared a 1996 ballot initiative that would do the same in their state, including a total rollback of race-conscious admissions in the state university system. Conservative strategists like Bill Kristol (who had mapped out the successful assault on our health care plan) briskly predicted that the “wedge” issue of affirmative action would blow the Democratic coalition “completely apart.”

We feared they were right, but we didn't know what to do. Discrimination against women and minorities was still a fact of life, and Clinton had always supported affirmative action, but reforming its excesses and eliminating some flawed programs seemed essential. Our opponents were already circulating killer anecdotes, like the story of the “minority tax certificate” administered by the Federal Communications Commission that amounted to a no-risk, multimillion-dollar windfall for a group of affluent African American lawyers fronting for white billionaire Sumner Redstone of Viacom. Try defending
that
in a legislative or presidential debate. Early in the year, Senator Dole had asked the Congressional Research Service to compile a list of all affirmative action efforts administered by the federal government, and we suspected it would uncover other programs that were functioning more like illegal quotas than legitimate equal opportunity outreach. Our challenge was to find a way to neutralize the Republican threat without abandoning our core principles, defending indefensible programs, or dividing the Democratic Party.

I wrote a memo to Leon volunteering for the job. Although it smacked of a no-win situation — another gays in the military that would end with everyone on all sides upset — I felt that I had nothing to lose. With my services as a general strategist to the president no longer in high demand, I needed something to do, and I still had enough self-assurance to believe that I was the person best equipped in the White House to balance the competing pressures at play. But I had another motivation too. From his Little Rock announcement speech, in which he had promised to stop the Republicans from stealing another presidential election by playing the race card; to his sermons in Memphis and Macomb County, in which he had appealed to black and white audiences alike without pandering to their prejudices; to his meditative campaign interview with Bill Moyers, in which he had vowed that race was the one issue that he would never compromise for political gain, Bill Clinton inspired me most when he spoke about race. Now his words and his principles would be put to a fierce political test. This could be a defining moment for him and our party. I had to be part of it.

Leon scrawled “Set up” across the top of my memo, so I convened a group of about twenty senior staffers from the White House and the Justice Department to begin the process of preparing a recommendation for the president. Although this was a preliminary staff meeting, the deliberations were fervid. For my African American colleagues around the oblong table in the Roosevelt Room that afternoon — Maggie Williams, the first lady's chief of staff; Alexis Herman, director of public liaison; Thurgood Marshall Jr., senior adviser to the vice president; and Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights — this wasn't just another exercise in abstract policy making or political damage control. Each one of them had personally confronted prejudice and experienced affirmative action — both its benefits and its burdens. Affirmative action had opened doors of opportunity for them, and they were determined to use their influence to open other doors for millions more. A righteous presidential defense of affirmative action, they argued, was a political and moral imperative.

Just as passionate, however, were the “New Democrats” — Bill Galston, deputy domestic policy adviser; Joel Klein, deputy counsel; and John Schmidt, Webb Hubbell's replacement as associate attorney general. They argued that affirmative action was a good idea that had gone bad over time: Implemented in a rigid and inflexible manner, it was becoming just another form of discrimination, with severe moral and political costs. Being honest meant that we had to address the legitimate resentments of whites who felt punished for past wrongs that they didn't condone and hadn't committed. Presidential leadership, they insisted, required straight talk about where affirmative action had failed and how it needed to be fixed.

Sympathetic to both sides, I was torn, which made me an appropriate proxy for Clinton. That first meeting was unsettling. The surface debate was charged with suppressed suspicion and hostility, but it was still a relatively mild version of what the president would have to confront in our party and across the country. It was also exhilarating, combining moral urgency and the intellectual energy of a graduate seminar with the intense risk of a high-stakes poker table. We didn't know when, and we didn't know exactly how, but I think we all believed that our deliberations would set the stage for a presidential decision that would matter and be remembered.

All we agreed on that afternoon was the need for a major Clinton speech grounded in his “lifelong commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity.” We just couldn't reach consensus on what else to say. My notepad was filled with far more questions than conclusions: “What constitutes affirmative action now? Where has it worked? Where has it failed? What is the evidence? Have any forms of affirmative action done more harm than good? To whites? To minorities? If there are to be modifications, how should they be done?” Without answers, Clinton would never agree to give a speech; I also knew that getting accurate data from the cabinet departments managing the programs was a Sisyphean task. In my single best decision of the process, I recruited Chris Edley to do the job.

A tenured Harvard Law professor and associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, Chris was a brilliant policy analyst who liked to say he “grooved” on complexity and knew how to shake facts free from the bureaucracy. Though not close friends, we'd met during the Dukakis campaign and had worked well together when our paths had crossed at the White House. That he prided himself on facing hard choices head-on and that he was a black man with a sterling civil rights pedigree (his father, Christopher Edley Sr., had served as president of the United Negro College Fund) made him perfect for the job. Any Clinton recommendation for affirmative action reform, no matter how minor, would inevitably raise suspicions, if not provoke an outcry, in the African American community. Edley's presence would ensure and demonstrate that the process wasn't rigged.

Chris was wary of being used but unable to resist the challenge. Legal pad in hand, he prodded our group to ignore the politics, examine first principles, and ground our deliberations in “values and vision.” By now, that wasn't my natural inclination. Conditioned in a way I wasn't always proud of, I saw policy debates as political time bombs. My job was to disarm them before they destroyed us; it didn't much matter how. But Edley's academic rigor blew the dust off neglected parts of my brain, and I soon understood that, paradoxically, Chris's wonky idealism was also the most pragmatic approach. The two wings of the Democratic Party were flying in different directions, with Jesse Jackson threatening a primary challenge if Clinton didn't “stand firm” on affirmative action, and Senator Joe Lieber-man of the Democratic Leadership Committee declaring that racial preferences were “patently unfair.” Whatever the president decided, friends and allies would feel alienated, and critics and enemies would be armed with fresh ammunition. We had to make a plausible case to all sides that Clinton was acting for the right reasons. Affirmative action would be perceived as a test of the president's political character. To pass it he would need to prove that he was being true to the beliefs he had articulated and acted on all his life, and that his conclusions were based not on crass calculation but on principled analysis.