First In His Class (76 page)

The traveling
show of 1981 provided another chapter for Clinton's Close Calls in Cars. He and Randy White were in Fayetteville one morning for a commencement ceremony. As usual, Clinton chatted at length after the program, so that by the time he and White got back in the T-bird they were late for the next appointment, a graduation speech at the small town of Fifty-Six in north-central Arkansas. White's best-case scenario was that they could make it fifty minutes late. “Let's do it!” Clinton said. They took off, laughing and telling stories. Beer cans from a six-pack White had emptied the night before were rattling around on the floor of the car. The speedometer soon reached one hundred. Clinton was into a nap. White looked out the side and noticed that he had whooshed past a parked state trooper. He hit Clinton on the leg and said, “Uh, guess what, I just passed a state trooper!”

By the time the trooper caught up to them, Clinton and White were standing casually outside their car, parked on the shoulder of the road. “The trooper got that ‘Oh, shit' expression on his face when he saw who it was,” White later recalled. Clinton coolly gave him instructions. “We're trying to get to Fifty-Six and we need you to radio ahead and let them know we'll be late.” Then they jumped back in the car and took off. Perhaps the trooper had forgotten that Clinton was no longer governor. In any case, not only did he spare them a ticket, but he radioed ahead as ordered. By the time the Thunderbird reached the school at Fifty-Six, the whole town was waiting. A special parking place had been set aside right in front. White's engine was smoking. Clinton was pumped by the journey and the crowd. He jumped out of the car—and a few beer cans fell out with him and rolled and clanged down the hill. They loved him in Fifty-Six.

Now that Clinton needed friends wherever he could find them, his on-and-off relationship with labor was on again. He visited with Bill Becker and other state labor leaders several times, expressing regret that he had not worked more closely with them in the past.
The AFL-CIO
summer convention in Hot Springs received his denunciation of Frank White's anti-labor record with shouts and several standing ovations, and Becker followed his speech by saying, “I suspect that that goodbye is only temporary.” The labor movement contributed money to the fund that paid Betsey Wright's salary and his exploratory campaign work. The Democratic National Committee also helped him stay active by giving him a part-time mission as the head of the state and local elections effort, a job that could pay for some of his travel until he officially began his own state election campaign.

In his travels for the DNC, Clinton brought with him the lessons learned
from his loss. The main tactical lesson, he thought, concerned how to respond to negative advertising. Since his first campaign on behalf of Judge Frank Holt in the 1966 gubernatorial primary, Clinton had remembered Holt's assertion that the public expected more of its candidates than to respond in kind to mudslinging from the other side. After what Frank White did to him with the Cuban refugee ads, Clinton finally became convinced that Judge Holt's credo was noble but naive and ultimately fatal. At a DNC election workshop in Des Moines, Iowa, Clinton delineated his new policy. “
When someone
is beating you over the head with a hammer, don't sit there and take it,” he said. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.”

Doug Wallace was in the luncheon audience that day when Clinton let loose. In the years that he had worked with Clinton, first as his press secretary in the 1974 congressional race and later as executive director of the Arkansas Democratic party, Wallace had heard many colorful comments from his friend, but none quite so ferocious and bloody as that. Yes, Clinton was eager to please; yes, he was known as a conciliator; no, he had no combat experience; no, he had never shown much skill with tools or cutlery; no, he was not the brutish sort; yes, he often seemed conflict averse—and yet he had a peculiar attraction to violent figures of speech. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand,” Bill Clinton had said.

One evening later that year, when Clinton took his traveling show up to Bentonville in northwest Arkansas, Rudy Moore felt as though it was his hand and those of other former assistants that Clinton's meat cleaver was cutting off. Moore had gone to a reception for Clinton at a private home. During a question and answer period, a local banker got up and started criticizing Steve Smith and other members of Clinton's first-term staff. It did not surprise Moore that Clinton chose not to defend Smith. But Moore was disappointed to hear Clinton give a long answer about the mistakes of his first term in which it seemed that he placed most of the blame on the staff. Moore left the reception feeling that “
the rug
had been pulled out from under” him. He had done nothing but work hard and be loyal, he thought to himself. He had given up his life in Springdale for a few years to devote himself to Clinton, and now “all of a sudden I'm getting the feeling that for his own well-being the staff becomes expendable at this point.”

Moore later wrote Clinton a letter questioning whether he had sacrificed his old staff to the political gods in his bid for redemption. In his reply, Clinton argued, “Whatever you may think, I consistently defended you and your role on my staff in private meetings all over the state…. I always acknowledged that we had some serious staff problems but I tried to take full responsibility for them.”

He had been misinterpreted, Clinton claimed.

Late that summer, national political columnists
Jack Germond
and Jules Witcover wrote in their column that Clinton had hired Betsey Wright to help him lay the groundwork for his 1982 campaign for governor. Wrong, Clinton responded, when local reporters asked him about the column. His actions were being misinterpreted. Germond and Witcover had “made too many assumptions.” Although Wright was working for him at a desk out-side his law office, “her job was not politically related.” She was just helping him establish a computer filing system for his gubernatorial papers. “There is no campaign,” he said.

F
OR
a few days each month, Dick Morris had been commuting to Little Rock from New York to help plot Clinton's comeback.
It did
not start out as a pleasant task. He felt some competition with Betsey Wright, who was there doing the same thing. On first sight, they hated each other. Wright viewed Morris as a slick, negative eastern sharpie who was “trying to take this moral man and corrupt him in the evil ways of politics.” Morris viewed Wright as a “rigid left-wing ideologue who was so obsessively opposed to modern political campaigning that she would lead him back into the Stone Age politically.” Each saw the other as a mortal threat. But the animosity dissipated, until finally Wright and Morris found themselves agreeing on almost every political move. They became allies in the resurrection of Bill Clinton. Wright would compliment Morris by calling him “one of the smartest little sons of bitches” she had ever met. “Mean. But God was he good.”

Early in the fall of 1981, Morris polled Arkansas voters to gauge their feelings about Clinton. He feared that the public regarded Clinton as an alien figure, trained at Yale and Oxford, who had patronized them and had no sense of their state, and that they would feel no remorse about having got rid of him. But the poll results showed that the voters had a paternal attitude toward Clinton. Frank White had not won the election so much as Clinton had lost it.
Morris and
Wright began to construct a family parable out of the poll results. The citizens of Arkansas viewed Clinton as a prodigal son who had grown too big for his britches, who had thought that he knew everything and had tried to tell the other family members what was best for them rather than listening to their suggestions. They had voted against him to teach him a lesson, to give him a public spanking, but they had not necessarily intended for him to lose. The parable allowed for forgiveness. It meant, Wright concluded, that “a comeback was doable.”

But first Clinton had to apologize. Morris conceived the notion of a public mea culpa, a television advertisement in which Clinton announced his comeback bid by saying he was sorry. In discussing it with Wright,
Clinton, and Rodham, Morris, who was Jewish, put it in terms of the theological metaphor of Christian forgiveness. “
You have
to recognize your sins, confess to them, and promise to sin no more and then sin no more,” Morris said. “And in the act of contrition, you have to be humble. You can't be self-justified. You have to say, ‘I'm very sorry, ashamed, I know I did wrong and I'll never do it again.ߣ” Rodham and Wright immediately took to the idea. Clinton had somewhat of a hard time fully accepting it. He felt humbled, certainly, and stupid for losing to Frank White, but the part he could not get past was being restrained from trying to explain and justify what he had done. On one level, he would say, “I screwed up.” But on another level he would ask, “Which of the things that I did would I do differently? Would I not fulfill my campaign promise to build better roads?” He could justify every specific action he had taken.

It was bigger than specifics, Morris insisted. It was his attitude, his approach to governing. The voters thought he was patronizing. He had to learn how to sail into the wind, Morris said. “You don't abandon where you want to go, but you have to tack to get there. You have to one minute go right for the objective, and then at some point when you find the boat is about to tip over, you steer in another direction until the boat regains stability, then once more head toward the objective. You approach it in a series of triangular moves, instead of head-on.” The objective here was to get back in office. The triangular move was to apologize in a paid public television advertisement.

Clinton agreed to go ahead with the mea culpa, but continued to argue with Morris about the wording. The language was too apologetic, he complained.

“Well,” Morris responded, according to his later recollection, “you can't say, ‘So I robbed the store but I needed the money badly because my sister is starving.' That's a very nice justification for robbing the store, but it implies that you don't think it was all wrong to rob the store.”

“But I don't!” Clinton said.

“But you do!” Morris said.

At one point, the two men spent several hours arguing over whether the word “apology” should be in the ad. They finally agreed to the language for two spots, one a general apology for mistakes including the car tags increase, and another addressing his decision during the final days of his term to pardon scores of violent criminals whose release had been recommended by the state parole board. They went to New York, to the West 57th Street studios of media consultant Tony Schwartz, for the filming. Before the cameras went on, Clinton revealed to Morris that he had fiddled with the words one last time. Morris was in shock. “I'm not gonna tell you what I did—I just want you to see it,” Clinton said.

In the end, Clinton managed to say he that he was sorry without saying
he was sorry. He did it by using down-home Arkansas language. Morris was elated by the change. When he was growing up, Clinton said, his daddy never had to whip him twice for the same thing. If the voters gave him another chance, he said, he would never make the same mistakes again. He had learned that he could not lead without listening.

The ads
began running on three Little Rock television stations on February 8, 1982. Clinton's face filled the screen, barely leaving room for his name and the tag line identifying the commercial as paid for by the Clinton for Governor Committee. What the public saw was that Clinton was chastened. Political observers in Little Rock had never seen anything like it—someone announcing for governor via a thirty-second commercial, and doing so with an apology. But the strategy was apparent: By admitting his mistakes and seeking absolution before the first tough question of the race could be asked, Clinton was able to say that criticisms of his previous actions were irrelevant.

A
NOTHER
problem needed fixing as the comeback campaign began, this one involving Hillary Rodham and her name. Since his first race for governor in 1978, Clinton's opponents had tried to make something out of that. It was very un-Arkansan, they would imply, marking Rodham as an outsider who stubbornly resisted the traditional mores of her adopted state. This sentiment was shared by many of Clinton's friends, including his own mother. During the 1980 campaign, one powerful member of the Arkansas House offered the opinion to Representative Ray Smith, Jr., of Hot Springs that “Hillary'
s gonna
have to change her name, and shave her legs.” Rodham had ignored the issue in the past, but now, as she saw her and her husband's political ambitions on the line, she reconsidered.

Her change, in typical Rodham fashion, was more intellectual than emotional. When Carolyn Staley dropped by the Midland Avenue house the morning after a party in Little Rock, Rodham asked her a question that Staley had never heard from her before: “
What were
people wearing?” It was clear to Staley that Rodham was “making the transformation from studied feminist. She started to key in on the fact that the name was political, that what she wore was political.” Years later, when asked about the name change,
Clinton recalled
a conversation he had with his wife in which she approached him and said, “We've got to talk about this name deal.” As Clinton remembered it, Rodham told him that she did not want him to lose the election because of her last name. Clinton said he protested. Then, by his account, she placed the decision in the most pragmatic political terms: “We shouldn't run the risk. What if it's one percent of the vote? What if it's two percent?”

If Clinton protested, it was not very strenuously. In conversations when
his wife was not around, he often joked about their different names in a way that made it clear he thought it would be easier if she became Hillary Clinton. Once, while eating Mexican food with some old friends from the McGovern campaign during a visit to Austin, Clinton noted that he and his wife disagreed on an issue and then added, “Hell, I can't even get her to use my last name!”