First In His Class (69 page)

This first inaugural, for the friends of Clinton and Rodham, had the aura of a generational rite. From all sections of the country they made the pilgrimage to gray, freezing Little Rock. They were there to witness the coming of age of one of their own, the first in their class to reach such prominence on the political stage. Matter and Tommy Caplan represented the Georgetown crowd. Betsey Wright, who had worked with Clinton and Rodham during the McGovern campaign in Texas, came out from Washington. Fred Kammer and Alston Johnson, who first encountered Clinton when they were pro-civil rights senators at Boys Nation, arrived from Louisiana. From the Yale Law School group came Carolyn Ellis from Mississippi and Steven Cohen and Greg Craig from Washington. Carolyn Yeldell, Clinton's high school friend, returned from Indiana to sing Verdi and Mozart arias in the Capitol rotunda. She was Carolyn Staley now, married to an art teacher, and ready to move home, believing that “
this was
a good time for the family to be aligned with the Clinton administration.”

Along with these generational cohorts, the inaugural congregation included a colorful mix of elders. Don Tyson strutted down to the state capital to host a pre-inaugural bash at the Camelot Hotel. From Washington came Sara Ehrman, Rodham's landlady during her stay in Washington for the Watergate inquiry, who five years earlier had warned that moving to provincial Arkansas would be a grave mistake.
Arriving by
private jet from Norton, Virginia, were Carl McAfee and Charlie Daniels, the gung-ho lawyer and patriotic plumber who had encountered Clinton during his journey to Moscow eight years earlier when they were seeking the release of American POWs from North Vietnam. McAfee kept teasing Rodham about not changing her name. Daniels, a University of Tennessee football fanatic who owned an orange limousine that he would ride to Volunteer football games, showed up at the Diamonds and Denim ball in his bright orange tuxedo, an outfit that delighted Clinton's mother.

All of them traveled to Little Rock with the notion that the rise of Clinton and Rodham transcended that time and place. At a party the night before the swearing in, Clinton strolled up to Steven Cohen and asked, “Well,
what do
you think?” Cohen was an idealist, going back to his days in the antiwar movement and the McCarthy campaign, but his idealism dissolved into disillusionment when people he believed in let him down or when he thought the country was losing its way. He came to Little Rock in a dispirited mood, worn down by the controversies surrounding his job in the human rights office at the State Department and by the increasing disarray of the Carter administration. But none of that weary cynicism seemed evident in Clinton's Arkansas. “I'll tell you what I think,” Cohen said to Clinton. “I feel two emotions in this room that I hadn't experienced in a long time—pride and hope.”

The next day, Cohen and Greg Craig, now an attorney at the Williams & Connally law firm in Washington, stood side by side listening to Clinton's inaugural address, and were transfixed by the rhythmic cadence with which he laid out the credo of their generation. “
For as
long as I can remember,” Clinton said, “I have believed passionately in the cause of equal opportunity, and I will do what I can to advance it. For as long as I can remember, I have deplored the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by those in authority, and I will do what I can to prevent it…. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air and water of Arkansas, and I will do what I can to protect them. For as long as I can remember, I have
wished to ease the burdens of life for those who, through no fault of their own, are old or weak or needy, and I will try to help them.” Cohen then heard his own words come back to him. “Last evening, after our Gala, a friend of mine from Washington who travels this country and speaks to many groups in many places, said that he felt in that crowd two emotions which are not found in other places today. Pride and hope. Pride and hope. With those two qualities, we can go a long way….” At that moment, it seemed to Cohen and Craig that their old Yale Law friend deserved his status as a generational leader.

Craig returned
to Washington “absolutely euphoric.” Later he would say that he could not think of a political event that had excited him more than Clinton's first inaugural.

T
HE
young governor arrived with an ambitious agenda. An in-house study showed that he had made fifty-three specific promises before he took office.
Two promises
were unmet on the first day. He was so eager to get going that he promised that he would have a budget summary book on the desk of every legislator for the opening day of the General Assembly and that he would have all his bills drafted by that day as well. Both were late. When the budget summary did appear, it was so thick that some legislators joked they would strain their backs lifting it. Clinton assumed, because of his overwhelming numerical victory in the election, that he had a mandate to transform the state. Creating new departments in energy and economic development, revamping the rural health care system, reorganizing school districts, reordering the education system—he wanted to do it all in two years. His state of the state address was so detailed that it contained a section on the length of time landlords could hold security deposits from renters. Old-line legislators looked at the legislative package with glazed eyes.

Clinton and his top assistants bubbled over with ideas that they had been collecting from progressive policy thinkers around the nation, from preschool programs to solar energy projects. It was what one adviser called “a pent-up idealistic agenda.” But the young governor was also conscious of the need to be perceived as a cautious spender. Most of the programs were crammed into the first budget as demonstration projects,with little money behind them. With his new fascination for polls,
Clinton asked
Dick Morris to survey Arkansas voters on the dozens of ideas that he had put into the budget, and then rank them in popularity and construct an overall theme. Morris conducted the poll, but could not find a theme. “He was left with a program that was thoroughly admirable but indescribable,” Morris recalled. “There was a bit of everything. Like a kid in a candy store, he wanted to do it all.”

Along with his diffuse experimentation, Clinton chose one larger issue to define himself: roads. He used as his impetus a legislative report that had declared the state highway system a disaster in need of $3.3 billion worth of improvements. Better roads were essential to the economic future of the state, Clinton said. In private, he also expressed the belief that a major roads program would show that this Yale Law grad and Oxonian understood rural Arkansas. Before presenting his highway proposal,
Clinton directed
Morris to conduct polls on the acceptability of various taxes to fund it. His revenue specialists told him that the quickest way to raise large sums was to increase the annual car license fees. His program people told him that the largest burden of the road improvements should be placed on eighteen-wheel trucks, which were causing most of the road damage. Morris's polling showed that 53 percent of the people would support an increase in the car license fees to build better roads, while 37 percent opposed such a tax. Clinton thought the poll meant a majority would support him if he raised the fees.

The administration
drafted a proposal that placed most of the tax burden on heavy trucks but also raised car license fees, basing the rate of increase on the value of each car. The plan immediately encountered intense opposition from two powerful lobbies, the trucking industry and
the poultry
industry, a major user of trucks, both already upset at Clinton for backing away from a campaign promise to increase the weight allowed for trucks driving in Arkansas from 73,000 pounds to 80,000 pounds, the weight allowed in several neighboring states. Several trucking firms threatened to leave Arkansas. The poultry industry, which had its operatives as far inside the legislative process as possible—its paid lobbyists were elected members of the legislature—stymied the administration bill in committee. Determined to find middle ground, Clinton signed off on a compromise that angered all sides. The major tax burden was shifted from trucks to cars and pickups, but the trucking and poultry industries remained upset that they were hit with higher taxes and hammered at Clinton for the rest of the term trying to get him to push for repeal. Meanwhile, the car license increase was altered so that it was based on weight rather than value. Owners of new, smaller, lighter, and more expensive cars would be asked to pay less to renew their licenses than poorer citizens who drove around in heavy old clunkers. This was not a politically wise concept in a rural state full of jalopies and old pickups.

O
N
his first official trip in office, Clinton took a chartered flight to northwest Arkansas for a series of appearances in Fort Smith, the conservative military town, where most voters regarded him skeptically.
When he
arrived at the terminal, he turned to his travel aide, Randy White, and asked,
“What are we doing? What's the story?” White, who had secured a job in the governor's office after serving as student manager for the Arkansas basketball team coached by Clinton's friend, Eddie Sutton, pulled out a schedule. “I know the schedule,” Clinton snapped. “Where's the briefing book?” White was at a loss. There was no briefing book. Clinton's face reddened and he slammed his fist on the counter. “God damn it!” he fumed. “When we go somewhere, you've got to know who we're meeting with and what's going on and what grants the county is getting!”

As Clinton
“pounded like crazy” on the counter, White thought to himself, “Oh, shit!” This was the first test of his job and he had flubbed it. Clinton wanted to know everything and White knew next to nothing. Terrified, he found a telephone and placed a call back to his boss, Rudy Moore, Jr., the aide in charge of day-to-day administration of the governor's office. Calm down, Moore told him: things would get straightened out, and in any case the mess-up was not the travel aide's responsibility. White feared that Clinton would remain mad at him all day, but as soon as they left the air terminal, the anger vanished, replaced by a compulsive urge to mingle and tell stories. “
Whenever we'd
pass something, he'd have a story,” White recalled later. “We'd drive through a precinct and he'd say, 'Oh, I lost this box 48 to 175, and then go on to explain why he'd lost it. Then we'd pass by a store and he'd say, ‘Oh, stop here' for Miss so-and-so, ‘I've known her forever.' He'd go in and drink a Coke and stay. It went all day like this. Good Lord, we were off schedule. Way off.” Finally, late in the day, White called back to Little Rock again. Now Moore was mad. Several questions had come up back at the office that needed Clinton's consideration, Moore said. In the future, they should never go that long without checking in. It was White's first trip, and he “caught it from both ends.”

Randy White's predicament on that initial trip to Fort Smith came to symbolize much of the frustration and confusion in the governor's office during Clinton's first term. Catching it from both ends was all too common for a staff whose boss was both extremely demanding and exceedingly lax, and who could seem, at the same time, obsessively in touch and yet remote. To the outside world, it often appeared that the governor's aides during that first term were getting him in trouble and letting him down. But the staffs mistakes in large measure reflected Clinton's loose, free-ranging management style, his conflicted personality, and his urge to be all things to all people.

A few months into his tenure, Clinton gained a reputation that seemed contrary to his political nature. Legislators, lobbyists, and citizens began voicing complaints that they were having difficulty getting through to him. How could this be? How could this obsessively gregarious politician suddenly become isolated? Most attributed it to an overprotective staff. At
Clinton's urging, visitors from other parts of the state showed up at the governor's office only to be turned away by aides. Powerful state senators fumed at a letter in which Rudy Moore said that they should see him if they wanted to deal with Clinton.
Labor leader
J. Bill Becker groused that
Clinton was
“insulated by staff people.” But most of these problems resulted from a classic Clinton paradox: his eagerness to please people often ended up angering them; wanting to be open, he ended up appearing closed.

“Clinton was so friendly, people would come up to him on the road and say, ‘I've got a problem and I need to talk to you,' and Clinton would say, ‘Well, if you'll be in Little Rock next week, come by my office'—and they would,” Moore recalled. “Then he wouldn't be in or he'd have someone else scheduled or he'd tell us to handle it. So expectations would be raised and people would be disappointed.” The worse the problem became, the harder it was for Clinton to appreciate that he was the principal cause of it. His solution was to beef up his scheduling staff and complain more about his overcrowded schedule. Not long after Randy White was moved to scheduling, he received a note from Clinton saying that too many people were getting through the system to see him.

“
I have
no time to be governor!” Clinton lamented. White responded with a two-page memo that began: “Grab this week's schedule and let's review it.” Every person on the schedule, White noted, was someone with whom Clinton had agreed to meet. “Anyone who could get through and whine to him, he'd let them through,” White said later. “And then he'd blame it on me.”

One reason many people could not reach Clinton at the governor's office was that he was not there when he was expected to be. His tendency to straggle and talk to anyone who wanted to talk to him had reached the point by 1979 that hi
s staff
operated by what they called Clinton time. They would often lie to him about when he was due somewhere, giving him an earlier time than the actual one, hoping that might keep him on schedule, but by the end of a day he could still be an hour or two behind. Some appointments were more important not to be late for than others, but Clinton was egalitarian in that regard: he could be as late for a meeting with high-rolling corporate executives as for one with poor farmers. Once, when the state's powerful poultry barons were upset about a tax proposal, Clinton's staff arranged a summit meeting in the governor's office. The hostility that they brought with them to Little Rock only increased once they reached Room 250 and were asked to wait in the lobby until Clinton returned. He finally arrived two hours late.