All Too Human: A Political Education (60 page)

To secure my cooperation, he offered two incentives — one old, one new. Two months after our hallway accord, I still hadn't been invited to the weekly strategy meetings, so he tried to resell me a place in the room. It seems there was a new obstacle. “Gore's cut your balls off,” he said. According to Morris, now it was the vice president who was blocking me. Dick said that early in 1995, Gore had urged him to make peace with Harold, not me, because “George is your real enemy. He's shrewd, tactically smart, and he runs this place.” But Dick was too obsessed with Ickes to follow that advice, assuming Gore had even given it. “I have a list of twenty-three times that Harold has fucked me over,” he said. “One of the two of us will have to go, and I don't think it's going to be me.” Then he pressed me to join forces with him against Harold. “I had to destroy you so you would know that I could,” he confessed. But now he and I could be “the heart and soul of the campaign,” he continued. “My team is like the politburo. We work together, everyone has a say, and when we disagree, we submit the decision to the ultimate master of the Western world — the polls.” Sweetening the offer with a bribe, Dick later added that if I left the White House and formally joined his team, he would pay me a million-dollar fee — my cut of the ad buy.

What's true? What's spin? What's fantasy? What's pure control? What planet is this guy living on?

I didn't want Dick's money. After telling him that I thought Clinton trusted Harold (“No, it's only because Ickes has something on him”), I agreed to help him only with the budget. He accepted my partial rebuff but added that I couldn't discuss our conversations with Panetta (who complained that Morris was “a spy in our midst”). “OK,” I lied. Since Morris was a Republican mole inside our White House, I would be a double agent.

Dick would relay his conversations with Lott, and I would report back to Leon and Pat Griffin. Not that I really needed to. The fact that Morris and Lott were talking was the worst-kept secret on Capitol Hill. Lott was giving detailed debriefings on their conversations to the entire Republican leadership, which would filter back to us through Pat's network of Hill contacts. In turn, I tried to sensitize Morris to what Democrats were thinking and to help him understand the political realities behind the budget numbers that he and Lott were throwing around. For example, I explained that meeting Lott's “bottom lines” of a $200 billion tax cut and a seven-year balanced budget under the economic assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office would require almost $500 billion more in cuts than our June budget. No Democrat would vote for that, I argued; the president would be perceived as caving, and he wouldn't be protecting Medicare as we were promising in our ads.

Morris listened but didn't hear. The truth is, he didn't really care. His theory demanded a deal, so we had to get one. But he feared that once the Republicans “walked the plank” and actually voted for a final budget that included deep Medicare cuts, a subsequent Clinton veto would harden each side's position and make compromise impossible. That was fine with me. I was happy to take the issues to the 1996 election — and even lose — rather than have Clinton sign anything close to the Republican budget into law. I didn't think a good deal was possible. The gap between the two sides was too big, and the consequences of the Republican cuts — particularly for the poorest children and seniors who relied on Medicaid as well as Medicare — were too devastating to contemplate. A Democratic president just couldn't sign them into law. Even if a decent deal were possible in theory, I believed that Clinton couldn't forge it without the sledgehammer of a veto — and his party would lynch him if he tried. “If you force Clinton to make a deal before he has the veto,” I argued to Dick, “you're forcing him to commit political suicide.”

What the president would do was anyone's guess. He was talking tough in public but itching for a deal. The Morris theory merged in his mind with his natural inclination toward conciliation and a Pan-glossian faith in his ability to achieve what he willed. To nudge the process along, he supplemented the Morris-Lott back channel with his own quiet phone calls to Speaker Gingrich. We worried about these contacts, fearing that the Republicans would be smart enough to make some quick concessions and lock Clinton into an agreement that wouldn't get Democratic support. But the Republican leaders were hemmed in by hubris and their own restless troops — the freshmen elected in the revolution of 1994 who equated compromise with capitulation. They overplayed their hand and, like me sometimes, underestimated the president.

Unlike Morris, Clinton understood the implications of the budget numbers, especially in programs like Medicaid that he had administered as a governor. “I know a bit about this,” he'd say. “Poor kids are going to get screwed; that's what I feel passionately about.” While Clinton was willing to give the Republicans a balanced budget with tax cuts, he refused to accept what he called their “below the line” goal: an end to activist government, especially in health care and education. “We're going through Stockman's revenge,” he said at a September budget meeting, referring to Reagan budget director David Stockman's insight that even if supply-side economics didn't balance the budget, the deficits created by their tax cuts would create persistent resistance to all government spending. “They're using the deficit to destroy government.”

To me, this observation was a sign that we hard-liners had the president's other late-night adviser on our side. “Stockman's revenge” was a phrase I'd often heard Hillary use, and the fact that Clinton repeated it after a morning at home was surely no coincidence. Although she was less visible now, devoting large blocks of time to handwriting revisions of her book
It Takes a Village, the
first lady was still the most powerful liberal in the White House. The combative side of her that had hampered the health care effort and backfired on Whitewater in 1994 was exactly what we needed in the budget showdown of 1995.

My relationship with Hillary was going well. Her Woodward fury had passed, and I had helped myself by how I handled affirmative action. Although she was instrumental in bringing Morris back, she also sensed the need for a liberal counterweight to him inside the White House. Several times a week, she'd call to check in and buck me up — often as she exercised. “How're we doing today, George?” she'd ask, her measured breathing and the hum of the treadmill serving as background for my morning updates. If she called in the afternoon, I might be on the StairMaster in room 11 of the OEOB. The phone by the machine would signal me with its distinctive ding-dong chime, and, trying not to break stride, I'd give her my take on the budget and get hers, tell her what Democrats were saying on the Hill, pass on an interesting story from the television news. She no longer watched — too infuriating, too painful. One late-September day, however, she called to console me on
my
latest bout of bad headlines and revealed how she was coping with her own.

A few nights earlier, I had been arrested in Georgetown. The charge was “hit and run”; the truth was that I couldn't maneuver my car out of a tight parking spot on M Street. When I scraped the bumper ahead of me, an excitable police officer who happened by recognized me and made a scene — patting me down as a crowd gathered around. More bad luck, I had carelessly let my license expire. He cuffed my hands behind my back and called in four cars to take me to the station. Although my car never left the curb, I was cited for leaving the scene of an accident. Several hours later, I was released with an apology from the station chief, and the charges were dropped. But the damage was done: Video footage of my arrest was all over the morning news.

“I'm glad to see you've overcome your problems with the police, George.” Hillary laughed. “You know, I've been thinking about what happened to you” (and herself). Both of us got plenty of ink for things we didn't do (like throw a lamp at her husband); both of us made even better copy when we really did screw up (like throwing a temper tantrum at a treasury official). We bonded again — two liberals, two lightning rods, Boy George and Saint Hillary — commiserating about the press and our other shared enemies, musing about how being caricatured drives you crazy and the futility of trying to fight it. Whimsical and bitter, wistful and shrewd, she signed off with praise for how I had left the station house — head held high, a calm smile on my face. “That's what I've learned how to do,” she explained. “Whenever I go out and fight I get vilified, so I have just learned to smile and take it. I go out there and say, ‘Please, please, kick me again, insult me some more.’ You have to be much craftier behind the scenes, but just smile.”

It was a lesson we both had learned from her husband — the master of the public smile that masks private rage. That fall, one man was increasingly the source of Clinton's foul moods. His book was a bestseller, his poll numbers were soaring, and his potential presidential run had pundits swooning. General Colin Powell was pissing the president off.

“The press is going to give him a pass.” Clinton scowled from behind his desk as he scanned one more fawning clip about his presumed rival.

“I don't think so,” I replied. Though I was equally anxious about Powell, I believed that if he ran for president, the press would do its job. “Once he gets into the race, despite the fact that they love him and despite the fact that they may want him to win — and I agree with you, Mr. President, they do want him in the race — they will feel compelled to cover him like any other candidate.”

I should have stopped there. Whatever I was saying wasn't working. The president was standing now, staring down at me, unsmiling, both hands pressed on his desk. But since I fancied myself an expert on the media and I had a captive audience, I continued my lecture. “The structure of campaign coverage will override their personal feelings, which I grant, you're right, they like him more than they like you. …”

His right forefinger flew off the desktop, heading straight for my face: “You're wrong! You're wrong! You're wrong! They'll give him a ride, even though he wouldn't do half the things I've done as president. They're just going to give him a free ride.”

The president tried to hide his frustration. Everywhere he went, he was asked about Powell, and he responded with the requisite pablum (“I've worked with him and like him. … He's a very appealing man … got a very compelling life story”). But his public remarks also hinted at private resentment (“… he's gotten a lot of favorable publicity,
much
of it well deserved”). Sooner or later the bile would come spilling out, and I was particularly worried that it would happen at the annual dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus in late September. This was the heart of Clinton's political base, but Powell was family, and he was being honored. C-Span was televising the event live, and our press corps was buzzing because it would be the first head-to-head matchup between the two potential rivals since Powell's presidential boomlet began.

Early that Saturday evening, I went up to the residence to work on the speech with Clinton. Sitting in the second-floor den, surrounded by family photos and his collection of ceramic frogs — with a cigar in his mouth, bifocals perched on the tip of his nose, and papers spread on the card table before him — the president was happy. But he still wanted to take “a little dig” at Powell.

At the Arkansas dinners where Clinton learned his trade, taking “a little dig” at opponents was what you did. But in Washington, a president is permitted to poke fun only at himself. Before ritual roasts like the White House Correspondents dinner, we usually struggled with Clinton's sarcastic side to get him to deliver the self-deprecating jokes in his script. Tonight, he wanted to score a direct hit. Apparently he had heard somewhere that Powell had criticized the Black Caucus for losing “their vision and their way.”

“I want to take him on, tell them they've never lost their way,” he said, a formulation that would manage to merge a pander and a put-down in a single sound bite.

“Mr. President, if you say one word that looks in any way, shape, or form like criticism, everyone is going to say that you're afraid and obsessed, and they're going to jump on it,” I replied. “It will be a huge story. Just be generous, be gracious.”

“You're right, I know,” he said. “But this draft says too many good things about Colin. We have to shorten it down.”

“Fine, shorten it down.”

I could tell right then that the dinner would be fine. By the time Clinton got to the podium, he'd be adding praise. It was getting late, though; he had to leave. As Clinton fiddled with the text, we discussed the upcoming Million Man March (“You can praise the values behind the March if you want,” I said, “but keep Farrakhan out of it”), and I used my privileged position that night to push my pet project (“If you want to dig Colin, the best way to do it at the Black Caucus is to whack the Republican budget”). The words were new, but the routine was familiar. Just like early mornings during the campaign, with me sitting on a twin bed in a small motel room, reading headlines and reviewing the day's events as the candidate cooled down from his jog.

Except the candidate was president, I was his senior adviser, and we were in the White House. The navy valets who served every president were laying out a fresh tux in the master bedroom. The doorway framed a portrait of Alice Roosevelt, and Lincoln's bedroom was down the hall. Even now, I could be startled by the setting if I stopped for a second to think about it. While the president shaved (using a plastic razor and no foam on his light beard), he started singing scales to loosen his diaphragm and told me that before a big speech John Kennedy “used to go into the bathroom and bark like a dog.” Then he barked. Clinton was conscious of being in a stream of presidents. I was conscious of being in a stream of presidential assistants who had listened to their bosses and done their jobs while leaning against that bathroom door.

As I left, I felt like I'd done a good day's work. Clinton was psyched. Confident. He'd left his demons in the locker room and was about to do what nobody — not even Colin Powell — did better: feel a crowd, feed their hope. “I'm gonna give a hell of a speech,” he said. “They may take me down, but they're going to say, ‘He's not going down without a fight.’”