Their pleasure was premature, but while it lasted, it was white-knuckle time again in Clinton’s war room in Little Rock. The Democrat’s lead had bungee-jumped from double digits to five points in his own polling and to one point in the most alarming public sounding. The bottom was not yet in sight, and a campaign then still being taxed in the press for its overconfidence found itself at the edge of panic.
“How scared are you?” George Stephanopoulos asked James Carville one evening.
“How scared?” Carville repeated. “I’m this scared: if we lose, I won’t commit suicide, but I’ll seriously contemplate it.”
It was, ironically, Ross Perot who had set off their latest angst attack with his own performance in the last debate. Its most obvious result had been to bracket Clinton with Bush as twins separated at birth, the look-alike progeny of a discredited political establishment; as the generals in the war room had feared all along, Perot was stealing their thunder as the real agent of change. Within days, he was bumping 20 percent in the polls, triple his standing when he first re-entered the race, and had both his big-league rivals looking over their shoulders. In Little Rock the guess was that 20 for Perot spelled danger for Clinton and 25 could be death. In Washington, one worried Bush strategist tracked Perot’s trend line and guessed that the president might finish lower than any major-party candidate since John W. Davis polled 29 percent against Calvin Coolidge in 1924.
But Perot’s rise had a second, more worrisome subtext for Clinton’s people: it showed how successfully Bush had reopened their man’s wounds. As usual at critical moments, the campaign had resorted to its favored oracle-focus groups-and Clinton’s people had come back alarmed by what they had heard. It wasn’t just the spillage of their target voters to Perot that troubled them, though it was heavy. It was instead the echo of Bush’s attack themes in their reasons for deserting, the suspicion that Clinton was a bit too smooth-“a polished bullshitter,” one man called him-and that his arithmetic didn’t add up without new taxes. They liked Bush even less, but as one of the pollsters, Celinda Lake, reported in a memo, their personal distrust of Clinton came up disturbingly often. “Our remaining problems,” she wrote, “are rooted in ourselves.”
Their immediate concern was that the debates might in fact have rehabilitated Perot as serious competition for the anti-Bush votes they needed to win. His point-a-day rise worried Bill Clinton some and Hillary even more; she agitated within the campaign for taking Perot down, fast, by any licit means necessary. The war-room crew played with some attack themes, shying away from anything personal and focusing instead on the Perot plan-or, as they preferred in light of the vice presidential debate, the Perot-Stockdale plan. But when they went back to their focus groups to try out their lines, none of them worked.
“People don’t want any bullshit about Perot,” Stephanopoulos brooded. “All they want to know is who we are, what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.”
Perot in the end took care of himself; having seized the wheel of his campaign from the pros, he proceeded to steer it over a cliff. His stripped-down staff had computer-modeled a strategy for him, a target list of 21 states with enough electoral votes among them to get him over the top. But he had neither the time nor the will to travel even to half of them; he relied instead almost wholly on paid television, and his record $1.3 million-a-day media campaign fell victim to the amateurism and the antipolitical mind-set at the top.
It had started well enough, with Perot’s two chart talks on how bad a pickle America was in and how he proposed to fix it. But he and his shrunken war council decided, after some argument, that next they needed to dress up the image of Ross the Man in order to undo the damage done in his abortive first campaign. They were wrong; it was Ross the Messenger who captured the debates with his straight talk. His negative ratings plummeted and Perot started upward in the polls. His good fortune caught the campaign unprepared. They had bought up huge blocks of prime network time and, till the last days, had nothing new on issues to fill it with; they were stuck instead with a series of five half-hour segments glorifying Perot as husband, father, businessman, benefactor an all-round fine fellow.
Whatever good the mini-series did him was undone in a single appearance on “60 Minutes” nine days before the election-a return engagement of the candidate as Inspector Perot in a world infested by plotters, wiretappers and saboteurs. Perot had walked into a mouse trap; he began by cooperating off-camera with producers in what he thought would be a more general story about Republican dirty tricks, warning them flatly he couldn’t prove his allegations. They pressured him to take the story on-camera, and after the final debate, he agreed. It wasn’t till midway through the interview that he realized that he was in the bull’s-eye, not the Republicans; at that point, he ripped off his lapel mike in a fury and had to be coaxed into staying.
He would have been better advised, if he had had advisers, to keep walking; the show, its assurances to the contrary, didn’t have enough to put on the air without him. What he gave the producers was his own story of why he had liquidated his first campaign-not for the good-government reasons he had announced but to protect one of his daughters from real or imagined dirty tricksters. His evidence was slight, his detail lurid: the plan, certain “friends” had told him, was to embarrass her by leaking a faked lewd photo to the tabloids at the eve of her imminent wedding and then to disrupt the ceremony itself. All he had had were “red flares,” not facts, he conceded, but he had felt he could not accept the risk that his mysterious tipsters were right; instead of postponing the wedding, he had aborted his candidacy.
The interview alone was wounding enough, the portrait of a would-be president so credulous as to take drastic action on unsubstantiated rumors. “The son of a bitch is a psychiatric case,” George Bush fumed after the show. In fact, the charges alone set off a sharp overnight dip in the president’s polls. But Marlin Fitzwater was propelled forward the next day to call Perot “paranoid,” and Perot himself seemed almost to be trying to sustain that impression in a fractious press briefing the next morning, informing reporters that the evidence for his suspicions was none of their business. In plain Beltway talk, the candidate had strayed “off message” and stayed off for days; the story drowned out his campaign, and he had to struggle to Election Day just to make up the ground he had lost.
His fall coincided with an abrupt tightening of the real race-a three-day tic in the polls in which Bush appeared to be catching up with Clinton. Before the final debate, the president had complained to aides, “I’m the one son of a bitch around here who thinks I can win.” But even he had begun waxing philosophical about the possibility of losing-life would go on, he told a friend-and the gloom all around him was palpable. His son, George W., was saying it looked pretty grim out there. One of his senior operatives placed his chances at one in 10. His staffers, studying their reddening battle maps, saw in them the shade of Barry Goldwater-the loser of a 44-state landslide in 1964-and indiscreetly said so.
“Stop that Goldwater talk!” Bob Teeter commanded them one day.
The talk stopped. The thought didn’t; in Teeter’s own analogy, one week out, Bush was a pool player who needed to drop 14 balls with two shots.
One shot might have done, if it were devastating enough, and the quest for a magic bullet continued to the last weeks of the campaign. The most tantalizing lead was an old story that Clinton, during his European travels, had told a high-school chum that he might indeed renounce his citizenship to avoid the draft. The source, now a marine colonel, had more recently been denying the tale, but the pursuit continued; at one point, P. X. Kelley, the retired commandant of the corps and a close friend of Bush’s, was drafted to see if he could shake loose an affidavit, marine to marine. The colonel agreed to a meeting with Kelley, then canceled, saying he had been warned off by someone he wouldn’t name. One more bullet turned out to be a blank.
The shots they did have were the ones that had been there from the beginning. TRUST AND TAXES, STUPID, somebody wrote on a conference-room blackboard on 15th Street, flattering James Carville by imitation of his similar sign in Little Rock, and for a time in the last 10 days it looked as if they might be the silver bullets after all. You couldn’t trust Clinton’s word, Bush argued everywhere, on taxes or anything else; he called it a pattern, a habit of deceit, and it seemed at last to be clicking.
The first sign of hope came when, six days before the end, Fred Steeper smiled. He had been Dr. Gloom & Doom for a year, but when he showed up at a command meeting a week out, his tracking poll showed Clinton’s lead down from 10 to seven points overnight and shrinking fast. The steady drumbeat had been working. The inchmeal rise in Clinton’s negatives had been a prelude to a narrowing of the race.
“I think we could win this thing,” he said. “We’ve had a major shift.”
“I guess it is over if you’re smiling,” a colleague said.
Bush himself seemed unsurprised by the turn in his fortunes. He had come out of the debates on a nearly manic high, hammering away at Clinton with his message, if not his syntax, under tight control at last. For days, the only mark of progress had been his own relish for the game, on display for the first time all year. The syndrome was a common one; Fritz Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 had ridden out on similar rushes of crowd noise and adrenaline, two losers who mistook cheers for votes. When someone brought Bush the news that the gap was down to five, he slammed one knee with his fist and said, “I knew it. I’ve known it all along.”
His people were at pains to keep him pumped up. They did not speak to him about the nearly impossible task of retinting the computer maps blue for Bush, or at least those 29 states thought necessary for him to win; the day Steeper smiled, the president was still trailing in 14 of them and was leading by as much as five points in only two. His handlers cheered him instead with the polls. “Here’s how it’s going to go the rest of the way,” Jim Baker told him one day, when the gap had hit three in one public survey. He sketched a line zigzagging daily from plus one to minus two to plus three to minus one and so on to the end.
“On Tuesday,” he said, “it’s going to be one up.”
Bush’s high soared higher. He traveled the country at a frenetic up tempo, railing at Clinton and Gore as the Waffle Man and Ozone and, one unbridled day, as “those two bozos.” Barbara thought this last a bit over the top, and his managers chided him for it. “Jeez, you guys, lighten up,” Bush told them. “I was just being funny.” The last days of his last campaign were in fact a declaration of independence of sorts, a deliverance from the corner men telling him what to do. At the end, he even resisted advice to let his hair grow out a little-they thought it looked better on TV a little shaggy-and to lose a loud red, white and blue rep necktie that only he could love.
“You’re in full-throttle handler revolt,” Mary Matalin, his favorite handler, told him one day. “You’re still wearing that horrible tie.”
“That’s right, Matalin,” Bush said, “and I also got my hair cut last night.”
The mood in Little Rock darkened as Bush’s grew brighter. They had successfully made the race a referendum on the president, Mandy Grunwald fretted, but now he had turned it back on them; a referendum on Clinton’s character was not the ground they wanted to fight on. Stan Greenberg’s numbers were holding up nicely-he never believed there had been a Bush surge-and so was his calm demeanor interpreting them to his more agitated colleagues; for a time, they were the main props to the campaign’s morale. “I don’t know if our pollster’s right,” Carville said, “but he’s ballsy. He’s telling everyone not to panic, and we’re panicking.”
What spooked them was the sheer, scorched-earth ferocity of Bush’s assault. Its epiphany was the president’s closing attack ad, picturing Arkansas as a wasteland while a narrator did a savage recital of Clinton’s record there; the closing shot showed a buzzard perched on a barren tree. They called the spot “Vulture” on 15th Street, for its deadly effect, and for a day or two it rattled Clinton, knocking him off his own message and onto the president’s strongest ground. “Every time Bush talks about trust, it makes chills run up and down my spine,” he shouted at a rally in Louisville. “. . . The way he’s trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system.”
Clinton had thus made trust the issue, not the economy; it was a game he couldn’t win, and while he attacked a quickie dinner afterward in a holding room offstage, Paul Begala told him the reporters outside were asking why he was doing it.
“Tell them I got a bellyful of it,” Clinton growled. “Tell them my trusted aides restrained me long enough. The real truth is I’m sick of it, and I think George Bush is a threat to the republic if he gets re-elected.”
HE HAD ONLY PARTLY COOLED OFF when his team reopened the subject next morning. He wanted an ad responding to the Arkansas attack. His people were unanimously against it. If they were going to attack Bush’s trustworthiness, it couldn’t be because he had said mean things about Clinton; it had to be because he had broken his word to America about the economy.
“It goes against everything I believe,” Clinton said. Still, in the end, he yielded; the main response ad talked about Bush’s failed promises, and Clinton recovered his own footing on the stump. “Go out and scare the hell out of them about four more years of George Bush economics,” Begala said, warming him up for a speech in Detroit. Clinton did, from that point on. He had almost worried himself sick letting Bush’s ad hominem attacks go unanswered, he would confess later. But he had his own way of answering them, scare for scare; imagine waking up on Wednesday morning, he told his last rallies, to headlines reading FOUR MORE YEARS.
The question framed the election the way Clinton wanted it, and in the final days the polls returned to the basic equilibrium that had governed them all year; the race had become a referendum on Bush again, and the verdict, beneath all the jiggles in the daily EKG readings, was roughly 60 percent no. Whatever momentum the president had generated died the day a silver bullet finally materialized, with his name on it. It came in the form of a court filing in the Iran-contra case, an in-the-room memo suggesting that Bush had not only known about but favored swapping arms for American hostages. The news called his own credibility into question, since he had denied having known what was up, and so compromised the trust half of his T&T attack on Clinton. The governor grinned widely when an aide brought him the AP story of the disclosure. The president’s men were near despair; it was, one said bleakly, the last straw that broke our back.
His mini-surge had stopped dead; Clinton’s lead, in Bush’s own polling, started up again and by the weekend was back in double digits. In something near desperation, Dan Quayle lobbied hard for Bush to open a tougher, more personal line of attack on Clinton-to suggest that he be subjected to the same tests of character that the Democrats had used to block the nomination of former senator John Tower for secretary of defense. The disqualifiers had included womanizing, among other weaknesses of the flesh. But when Jim Baker carried the idea forward to Bush, the answer was no, he wasn’t going to touch it; sex remained, for him, practically the only taboo point of attack. For Quayle, taboos were for the faint of heart. “This,” he told an aide, “is why we’re going to lose.”
Clinton, by then, had given himself up to the pinch-me feeling that he was going to win. It hit him at a weekend campaign rally, a love bath in a packed high-school football stadium outside Atlanta, and when he sat down with his team that night to vet a rough cut of his half-hour windup TV ad that evening, his mood toward Bush had grown suddenly charitable; some news footage of the president’s unkept promises looked to him like piling on, and he ordered it excised. His own voice by then was a hoarse croak, so nearly gone that he could barely get out his closing appeal. His doctors had told him it would help if he hummed to warm up his vocal cords, and he did. His song of choice was “Amazing Grace.” The sounds, by then, were all sweet for Clinton.
He still found ways of tormenting himself. He was in his limo in Philadelphia, the first stop of his last, masochistic 28-hour road trip, when Begala slipped in beside him with the latest numbers.
“Governor, Stan’s poll is at seven,” Begala said.
“Why are all the other polls moving and ours isn’t?” Clinton demanded.
“Governor, it’s a solid seven,” Begala said. “It’s the day before the election. The day before the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan was up two in one poll and down two in another. This is a winner.”
Clinton brooded on that for a moment, then smiled and nodded. The presidency was one day away.
So was George Bush’s forced retirement, after what he would call “certainly probably the most unpleasant year of my life.” He had finished with his own frantic dash across the country in the last hours, still mauling Clinton as a “taxophone” artist whose word was too slippery to be trusted. But he couldn’t match his rival’s half-hour closing TV special-the money went instead for more commercials in his target states-nor could he escape the tide running against him. On Election Day, he joined some staffers for breakfast in the atrium at his hotel, the Houstonian, ordering a Belgian waffle for himself. It was a widely held view that they had failed him-even Jim Baker’s high-gloss reputation had taken some nicks and scratches-but he resisted whatever temptation he might have felt to join the blame game.
“What do you guys hear?” he asked.
The good news was scanty. The bad was too painful to tell him, and too obvious.
“Well,” he said, “the polls don’t look good, but who knows?”
His people did, or soon would; their final guess, faxed to Teeter and Malek in midafternoon, was that the president would lose the popular vote by nine points, and the state maps were still blood red. It fell to Baker to deliver the numbers to Bush’s suite at the Houstonian. The two old chums didn’t leap to the obvious conclusion nor need to; they danced around its edges instead, facing up to the need for a concession speech. “Keep it short,” Bush said, and so it would be-short, halting and gracious. His mood otherwise seemed matter-of-fact; he felt he had given the race his best shot, he would tell friends, but if the people wanted change, what could he do?
He spoke in his valedictory of the regrettable smoke and fire of a campaign, as if he had not willingly been part of it. His attack strategy had in fact damaged Clinton; the governor’s reading on a 1-to-100 thermometer scale dipped in Stan Greenberg’s last survey to 50, a surprisingly tepid level for a man on the edge of an overwhelming victory. But Greenberg felt that Bush had hurt himself far more with his one-note bozo-bashing, and perhaps his party as well; its parting message, after a quarter-century’s domination of presidential politics, was that it disapproved of Bill Clinton. The governor had himself been party to the slanging match but, to his team’s relief, had got off it in the last days. His return to his positive themes in the final hours, on the tarmac and in the air, bathed him in the glow of youth, hope and change. Coincidentally or not, his lead over Bush exploded from victory to rout.
“I think,” Greenberg said, contemplating its scale, “this happened in the last day.”
What had happened was a seismic change in American politics, a shift of power between parties, generations and mind-sets. Its vessel was imperfect and its future course uncertain, but its scale made plain that something had happened; as night fell in Little Rock, the boys in the war room were calling it a bleeping landslide, even if it didn’t quite reach the conventional measures. Clinton himself affected unsurprise as aides brought him word of some of his more surprising state victories. “Oh, I expected that,” he said, forgetting how rattled he had been only a few days before. In fact, visitors to the governor’s mansion described his mood and Hillary’s as giddy.
But as his victory and his presidency became real to him, he seemed seized by a wave of emotion, even awe; it was Hillary who took charge of orchestrating their rite of passage while he fell to work redoing a staff draft of his speech. He was alone with his family when the networks awarded him the victory; moments afterward, first Bush and then Quayle called to congratulate him. When his limousine finally arrived at the Old Statehouse, where he had declared for president, he lingered a while more over his speech, then stepped out to meet his future. He saw Dee Dee Myers and hugged her. Tears welled in his eyes.
The birth of a new presidency is a kind of rebirth, a moment of hope and renewal. Its air of promise was heightened in 1992 by the youth of the winners; the generation that fought World War II had at last given way to the baby boomers-“the children,” as Al Gore put it in his victory speech, “of modern America.” But the Clinton presidency was coming into being under a cloud of civic anxiety and personal doubt. The voters, Fred Steeper thought, had not so much rewarded Clinton as punished Bush for their discontents of the recent past. He had been borne to the threshold of the White House not so much by faith as by a wave of anger at the way things were. He had four years to prove himself its master-or to join George Bush among its victims.
