No process is more collaborative than the one that puts a person in the White House. For more than a year, hundreds of people worked to bring about Bill Clinton’s remarkable victory in 1992. From the charismatic candidate himself to Democratic Party chief Ron Brown, this Great Group included Clinton’s able and committed wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton; political strategists; fund-raisers; pollsters; and, in Paul Begala, a gifted and nimble speechwriter who wrote moving, even soaring, lines for Clinton in a campaign that was marked by more rancor and mudslinging than any other in recent times. Clinton’s very decision to run was collaborative, the result of an over-the-pillow conversation with his wife in the summer of 1991.
Bill Clinton is a man of unusual intelligence, a former Rhodes scholar who still remembers the phone numbers of his college friends. He is a large, handsome man, who seems to supercharge any room he enters. But he was far from a shoo-in for president. The Republicans had dominated presidential politics for almost twenty-five years when Clinton began his bid for the White House. Clinton was young, only forty-five when the race began, and known, if he was known at all, as the governor of the relatively poor, relatively obscure state of Arkansas. The race was an especially tough one. He first had to win his party’s nomination in a crowded field of six. He then faced an incumbent president, George Bush, who, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, was viewed favorably by a staggering 91 percent of the populace. Ross Perot, the third-party candidate with big ears, a big ego, and a big budget, presented an additional complication. Perot would spend $60 million on advertising—much of it his own money—in the course of his seriocomic run for the highest office in the land.
Some observers say Bill Clinton had been preparing for the presidency his entire life. They point to such formative experiences as his meeting, as a sixteen-year-old student politician, with his hero, President John E Kennedy, on the White House lawn. But Clinton’s run for the presidency really began to take shape in the mid-1980s, when he helped found the Democratic Leadership Council. Made up of many of the party’s best and brightest, the council was seeking a way to break the Republican lock on the White House. And the council was also redefining what it meant to be a Democrat, a member of a party that had once embodied the belief that government could be a force for good in people’s lives but that seemed to have lost its way since the glory days of FDR and the thousand days of Kennedy’s Camelot.
A new centrism was the defining characteristic of the party reinvented by the Democratic Leadership Council. In May of 1991, Clinton, a former chair of the group, created a buzz at its annual convention in Cleveland with an address that seemed to sum up the new hopefulness of this activist wing of the party. “His text amounted to a manifesto for a postmodern Democratic politics, beyond the stale old contention between liberal and conservative,” write the authors of Quest for the Presidency 1992. “The choice that counted was between yesterday and tomorrow, he argued, and the party’s future lay in getting on the right side of the equation.”
In many ways, Clinton is a child of his times. He loves rock n’ roll (his staff called him by the code name Elvis during the campaign). He also shares many of the other values of his post-World War II baby-boom generation. One of these is respect for collective action, gained in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when indignant students, working together, closed down their campuses to protest what they regarded as an immoral war. In a very real sense, Clinton is the first “Big Chill” president, the first to have seriously considered communal living, the first to have been steeped in the post-1960s process of learning and making decisions in groups. As his commitment to an annual group think-fest, the Renaissance Weekend, suggests, Clinton is highly collaborative. By temperament and training, he was prepared to put together a Great Group to help him win the presidency. An inveterate networker, Clinton has religiously cultivated his Rolodex since his student days at Georgetown University, Yale, and Oxford. He knew he would need first-rate professionals if he wanted to win this election, and he knew where to find them.
There is a certain kind of leader who recruits only people like himself or herself. There is another, better kind of leader who realizes you can only accomplish extraordinary things by involving excellent people who can do things that you cannot. Clinton surrounded himself with a critical mass of people with complementary virtues, often with talents very different from his own. Like most successful leaders, Clinton was unthreatened by his staffers, however competent, supremely confident that he had the vision that would win the race and that they had the skills. Unlike Ross Perot, who second-guessed and eventually dismissed his chief political strategist, Ed Rollins, Clinton constantly tapped the expertise of the team he had assembled. Like Walt Disney with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Clinton carried the vision in his head. It was the staffs job to do each of the tasks necessary to make that vision a reality. As Clinton’s chief political strategist, James Carville, recalls, Clinton told his staff he had the ideas necessary to win. “What I need most of all from you guys is focus, is clarity.”
Several of Clinton s campaign staffers became celebrities in their own rights, notably the colorful Carville. But most of the members of Clinton’s Great Group labored in obscurity, known only to the omnipresent media. For instance, one of Clinton’s most important early moves was to raise a huge war chest. Clinton was initially burdened with a do-nothing fund-raiser, but quickly replaced him with a young whiz named Rahm Emanuel. Called Rahmbo at campaign headquarters because of his gung-ho style, Emanuel kick-started the campaigns fund-raising operation. Not a single Clinton fund-raiser had been scheduled during November 1991. With Emanuel in charge, twenty-seven money-raising events were held in December. By the end of 1991, the Clinton campaign had more than $3.3 million in the till, more than any other Democratic candidate had, giving Clinton a decided edge in the high-priced world of electronic campaigning.
There is no question that Clinton was the leader of the Great Group that effected his victory. But if the 1992 Clinton campaign had a star, it was not the candidate, but James Carville, the self-described Ragin’ Cajun. Eccentric and outspoken, the Louisiana native was also a brilliant political strategist—the best in U.S. history, in the view of partner Paul Begala. Other people probably played equally important roles in the victory, including Begala and Clinton’s soft-spoken director of communications, George Stephanopoulos. But Carville captured the public’s imagination. And why not? Here was a man who looked, in the view of Fox News executive and Republican political consultant Roger Ailes, “like a fish who’s swum too close to a nuclear reactor.” Strange of visage, Carville was also single-minded of purpose. In Carville, Clinton got a True Believer in what Democratic politics could be and a political bulldog who would do anything, short of backing a racist or a Republican, to win.
Carville brought a street fighter’s sensibility to the campaign. All’s Fair, the joint memoir of the campaign Carville wrote with Republican rival, now his wife, Mary Matalin, opens with a quote that summarizes Carville’s approach to politics: “When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.” Carville could be counted on not only to spin any controversy Clinton’s way, but also to catch the media’s attention. Reporters want good, colorful copy more than anything. Master of the striking Southern image, Carville had some of the same eccentric appeal for reporters as did Ross Perot.
Leaders of Great Groups find the right niche for each excellent contributor. The congenitally pugnacious Carville ran what Hillary Rodham Clinton dubbed the War Room, which became the title of a documentary film about the campaign that won a 1993 Academy Award. The War Room was the nerve center of the campaign, Carville writes, and in many ways it was typical of the strictly functional quarters that Great Groups so often find for themselves. Located in commercial space in downtown Little Rock, the War Room was as isolated in its fashion as was Los Alamos.
Great Groups tend to be insular societies, cut off from big-city distractions. Carville Liked the fact that there were no direct flights from Washington, D.C., to Little Rock. It made it that much harder for the Washington press corps to drop in and snoop. And if there was nothing much nearby to lure the War Room staff away from total immersion in a Clinton victory, that was fine with Carville, too. Carville expected his mostly young staff to work nonstop for Clinton’s election. Winning was to be their vocation. Personally, Carville was so committed to the candidate that he put his long-term relationship with Matalin, deputy manager of Bush’s reelection campaign, on hold for the duration. (The political odd couple spoke on the phone every morning and every night, but. they insist, only about what they were wearing and other noncampaign matters). Members of Great Groups are famous for having no lives outside the project. Who has time for real life, when you are making history?
In lieu of inviting decor, the War Room had the latest technology. Carville saw the campaign as a lightning war. The War Room responded :o every attack on Clinton, every perceived threat, every opponent’s stumble, and did so instantly. The War Room might be far from the Beltway in miles, but it was linked, as completely as modern technology would allow, to the rest of its own universe. That universe included Clinton and his entourage on the road, the media covering the campaign (referred to in the War Room as the Beast), and the inner circles of the other primary candidates and of Bush and Perot. No previous campaign so fully exploited the achievements of computing’s Great Groups. The War Room was packed with computers, fax machines, and other equipment that facilitated instant analysis and allowed the group to get information or send it in a nanosecond. TV screens were everywhere. If the group had had a mantra, Carville suggests in All’s Fair, it would have been “This ... is CNN,” intoned by James Earl Jones. The all-news network was ontwenty-four hours a day.
“You create a campaign culture,” Carville writes, “and ours was based on speed.” T-shirts were the uniform of this Great Group much of time, just as they were of the Macintosh group. Carville favored one that read, “Speed kills . . . Bush.” If you were a grunt in Carville’s War Room, you ran to and from the copy machine—you didn’t walk. Like an actual military campaign, the operation never slept. An overnight crew tracked everything that Bush and his significant campaign others did and said and had briefing papers ready for Carville and Stephanopoulos when they sat down for their 7 A.M. meeting. Carville bossed and barked and bullied in the best tradition of the sergeants he had known in the marines. Nothing was to be done later than now. Thus when Bush spelled out his economic plan during the Republican convention in Houston, the War Room dispatched briefing papers on why it wouldn’t work to the TV anchor booths before Bush finished the speech.
Many of Clinton’s closest advisors were young. Stephanopoulos turned thirty-one as New Hampshire voters cast their primary ballots. Press liaison Dee Dee Myers was only twenty-nine. In actual years, Carville was one of the Great Group’s elders: he was forty-eight when he signed on in 1991. But in demeanor, the Ragin’ Cajun was decidedly adolescent. He dressed like a willful teenager, favoring jeans so tattered you could see his boxer shorts through them. He was capable of remarkable insights and obsessional focus, but he also had a childish tendency to get bored in meetings. The staff would provide him with toys to amuse himself with when his attention began to wander.
More than anyone else involved in the campaign, Carville was able to create the sense of high drama that characterizes so many Great Groups. Carville was aware that ad hoc organizations such as his need “rituals and moments” that become part of a common history In-tragroup rituals build cohesiveness, offer a welcome respite from long hours and high pressure, and imbue the enterprise with meaning. Carville established a tradition of recognizing the War Room employee of the week. The winner got a bottle of barbecue sauce and that most time-honored reward of childhood, a gold star. On one occasion, Carville decided that the best way to lessen the tension that had built up in the War Room was to crack eggs over a staffer’s head.
Great Groups almost always have this quality of youthful brio. One reason may be that only the young or the somewhat deluded have both the energy and the inclination to spend it as profligately as these heroic efforts require. But there is more to it than that. Groups that change the world have an original vision, one that is as likely to be rooted in dreams as in experience. They see the world afresh, not necessarily the way others believe it to be. In a recent interview, Steve Jobs speaks of what is known in Zen as a “beginners mind.” Members of Great Groups often recall after their projects are over that they accomplished something remarkable because they didn’t know they couldn’t. Time and experience can undermine the godlike confidence—the creative chutzpah—that charges Great Groups. Jobs is a case in point. Now over forty, he no longer believes that technology will put a dent in the universe. “It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your twenties—that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.” It is not clear that todays more mature and reasonable Steve Jobs could have goaded the Macintosh team into greatness as the wild-eyed twenty-four-year-old did.
In many ways, every campaign is a Children’s Crusade, a self-sacrificial effort on the part of thousands of volunteers willing to stuff envelopes until they drop. Carville was the head cheerleader of the Clinton campaign, its charismatic Mahdi, who could whip his soldiers into a frenzy and lead them into holy war. Carville had the charismatic leader’s defining gift of being able to enlist others in his cause. He inevitably did so by casting Clinton’s struggle for the presidency as a fight between Good and Evil, in which Clinton and his supporters were the virtuous underdogs.
Much of the energy of Great Groups seems to be generated by going up against a larger-than-life enemy. (In the electronics industry today, Microsoft’s Bill Gates appears to be the Satan of choice). In The War Room, Carville is shown inspiring local volunteers on the eve of one of the crucial primaries. He rants against “the whole sleazy little cabal” of Republicans in power, from President Bush to Washington socialite Georgette Mosbacher. The speech doesn’t quite scan word for word, especially in casting Mosbacher as the Devil Incarnate, but it rings emotionally true. Carville’s is a passionate call to overthrow the status quo—to make sure that Georgette and all her overprivileged coconspirators are cut off forever from their fur coats and Lambor-ghinis. Carville has said he turns every campaign into a contest about class. Clinton’s supporters were the noble little people, who would not only win this election but make the future safe from all the fat cats who would break the backs of ordinary citizens. Think about that “when your knuckles get tired and your feet get cold,” Carville urges. “Don’t forget who the real enemy is in here and don’t forget who we are really campaigning against.”
Finding the right message for Clinton was an essential element in his ultimate success. Carville believed the message had to be a simple one, and he knew what it should be. It hung on a sign in the War Room: “The economy, stupid.” But equally important to the Clinton effort was the emphasis on change. As Clinton and his advisors realized long before Bush and his spinmeisters did, the American people had lost faidi in government by 1991. “Change vs. more of the same” was another of the simple messages Carville had posted in the War Room. (“Don’t forget health care” was the third.) In the demonology that Carville promulgated with such relish, Bush was yesterday. As shown in The War Room, Carville once denounced Bush and his conservative politics with the sort of loathing usually reserved for child molesters. “He reeks of yesterday,” Carville sneered. “The stench of yesterday. He is so yesterday if I think of yesterday I think of an old calendar with George Bush’s face on it.”
Carville’s rhetoric is a reminder of just how powerful the underappreciated art of persuasion continues to be in collective action of all kinds. People are not necessarily swayed by reason. “The head has never beaten the gut in a political argument yet, and I doubt if it ever will,” Carville writes in All’s Fair. The Clinton staff developed a genius for tapping into the emotions and aspirations of a winning number of voters. That emotional appeal is not necessarily bad, although it obviously becomes so when put to evil use. But used responsibly, emotional resonance is the appeal of every speaker who is eloquent rather than simply articulate. Clinton campaigners found words and images that appealed to a deep-seated and widespread desire for change and for a renewal of hope. Within the group, charismatic individuals such as Carville were able to keep their staffs energized and focused by emotional appeals to campaign workers’ desires to change the world and to defer personal interests to a worthy cause.
Great Groups coalesce around a genuine challenge, a problem perceived as worthy of a gifted person’s best efforts. Much of the joy typical of Great Groups seems to reflect the profound pleasure humans take in solving difficult problems. The drive to problem-solve is as close to the heart of our species as is language—indeed, language itself may have evolved because of its utility in solving problems. Clintons team was both driven by what it saw as a high purpose and sometimes giddy with the pleasure of outfoxing its opponents.
By the spring of 1992 it was clear that Clinton would get his party’s nomination. He had pulled ahead of both saintly Paul Tsongas and otherworldly Jerry Brown, who remained a sour, chiding presence even during the Democratic convention. But it was not at all clear that Clinton could win the election. Perot, whose bid for the presidency was unexpectedly effective, forced Clinton to fight on a second front. Now he had both an incumbent opponent and a populist one who was making the change issue his own. Clinton also had two personal strikes against him as he went into the home stretch toward the July Democratic convention. First was the question of character that had been raised by Gennifer Flowers’s detailed allegation that she had been his long-time lover (Flowers was the “smoking bimbo” Clinton’s staff had long feared might surface). Later, Clinton’s account of how he avoided military service during the war in Vietnam, which he opposed, exacerbated public doubts. Also looming over him was the widespread perception that he was. just another politician. That perception could prove fatal in a contest whose hero of the moment was Perot, the billionaire underdog who stood for nothing so much as the end of politics as usual.
Clinton’s staff knew their man had a huge problem to overcome, and they went about solving it in classic Great Group fashion—with imagination, with technological sophistication, with obsessional commitment, and, most important, collectively. Great Groups are contagious. They inspire other Great Groups. Thus Clinton media consultant Mandy Grunwald, once described as the Democrats’ “Lee Atwater in a Chanel suit,” came up with the perfect name for the top-secret operation to resurrect Clintons candidacy. She called it the Manhattan Project. “Like the quest for the atom bomb for which it was named, it sought the means to victory in the arcana of science—in this case, the dimly understood complexities of opinion research rather than the know-able laws governing nuclear fission. And like the encampment of physicists, chemists, and engineers in the New Mexico desert half a century earlier, Clinton’s strategists were racing against time,” write the authors of Quest for the Presidency 1992. Like the people who made the bomb, the Clinton team understood that loose lips sink more than ships. The Manhattan Project was their insiders’ name for the hush-hush project, officially given the attention-deflecting title the General Election Project.
The scientific side of this collaborative enterprise was the bailiwick of Stan Greenberg, an academic turned political consultant. Greenberg used focus groups and a related, more precise technique called dial groups to find out what people really thought of Clinton. The result was the unhappy discovery that focus-group participants thought of Clinton just as his political enemies had portrayed him, as “Slick Willie,” an evasive man of less than unimpeachable character. One focus-group member complained, “If you asked his favorite color, he’d say, ‘Plaid.’ “ The focus groups also confirmed what the team had long feared: many people thought of Clinton as a political insider and thus barely distinguishable from Bush. Greenberg wrote a memo summarizing the findings. Neither Gennifer Flowers nor the draft was Clinton’s major problem, and nobody much cared whether he had inhaled His biggest hurdle, Greenberg advised, was the belief that Bill Clinton is “the ultimate politician.”
Now that the team knew exactly what people thought, they systematically tested what kinds of information improved Clinton’s image. Often working with Grunwald, Greenberg found that telling dial group members a carefully edited version of Clinton’s life history, emphasizing such appealing facts as his having been raised in a small town by a widowed mother, his confronting his abusive stepfather, and his refusal to use his office as governor to keep his brother out of prison on a drug charge greatly enhanced his appeal. Many were amazed to learn that Clinton v/as not a child of wealth, but a working-class kid. Many knew little or nothing about Clinton’s personal history, including the fact that he and Hillary had a child, Chelsea. In the dial groups, which allowed people to register their degree of agreement or approval by turning up a dial, their displeasure by turning it down, Clinton’s positive scores soared whenever his life was the subject. Greenberg and the others theorized that once Clinton was humanized and “depoliticized,” voters would begin to hear his message.
Fine-tuning the message was also part of the Clinton Manhattan Project. In retrospect, it is evident that one of the reasons for Bush’s defeat was that he never articulated a clear, positive, and compelling message. (It is not clear that any message could have overcome the presidency-ending image of a baffled Bush looking at a supermarket scanner as if it had just dropped from a distant planet. He might as well have muttered, “Let them eat cake.”) Clinton s Great Group realized that the right message or messages would be critical to his winning the hearts and minds of the American voters. Car-ville’s notion of a winning message is summed up in Quest for the Presidency 1992: “It had to be clear, it had to be real, it had to have a villain, and above all, in Carville s rules of war, it had to be optimistic.”
Carville understood instinctively that leaders are purveyors of hope, not of despair. (Indeed, before Clinton and his wife went on 60 Minutes to deal with the Flowers story, Carville wrote in the briefing memo, “Remember what Confucius said: ‘A leader must be a dealer in hope.’ “) Carville told his campaign colleagues: “We have to explain to people that somethings wrong with the country, but in everything that Bill Clinton exudes, he smiles. He’s an optimistic guy. People just have to sense we can turn this country around. We can get back on our feet. There is an answer.” In Carville’s schema, the villains were all the people, including Bush and Perot, who had made the system work for only a few. Clinton would make the country work for the people again. It was a simple, optimistic message (in Leading Minds Howard Gardner writes that successful political messages are pitched to the five-year-old mind). That Clinton happened to grow up in the small town of Hope, Arkansas, was almost too good to be true. He would brilliantly exploit that happy accident of history at the close of his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic convention when he told the cheering crowd, “I still believe in a place called Hope.” Like the rest of the campaign process, the speech was a collaboration. The “place called Hope” line was from Hillary Rodham Clinton, paraphrasing the script of a film about the Clintons made by TV producer and friend, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.
Originality is a defining characteristic of Great Groups. Political image-burnishing usually involves avoiding risks, but Grunwald successfully argued that it was important to get the candidate onto the nontraditional media circuit to deliver his message. Clinton began appearing on TV shows no presidential candidate had ever considered doing before. On the Arsenio Hall Show he played “Heartbreak Hotel” on his sax. Earlier in the campaign, Clinton’s handlers had nixed the gaudy ties he favored and put him in more dignified, more presidential neckwear. But for the hip, unconventional Arsenio Hall appearance, Dee Dee Myers and others cultivated Hall’s wardrobe staff, who let them choose a flamboyant tie from Arsenio’s private stash. Clinton worried that the Ray-Bans might be over the top, but decided to wear them anyway. As Carville liked to say, quoting Disraeli, “A good leader knows himself and the times.”
Obsessive attention to detail is typical of Great Groups. Clinton’s was as compulsive as any. Every TV spot and statement was vetted for nuance. Staff members took pleasure in making sure the product they were creating was perfect. Before the 60 Minutes appearance, for instance, Grunwald reminded that Steve Kroft would be conducting the interview instead of Mike Wallace or one of the show’s other veterans. Grunwald counseled that Kroft might try to establish himself as a big leaguer by asking tougher-than-normal questions. (The staff had not been able to get 60 Minutes to agree to an unedited interview.) So Grunwald wisely suggested that the Clintons might maximize their chances of getting particularly useful sound bites into the edited broadcast by saying “Steve” in the same breath and letting Kroft’s ego work on their behalf.
A presidency is not made the way a bomb or a movie or a computer is made. But Clinton’s successful run for the office was no less the work of a Great Group. The campaign had some of the same characteristics as the remarkable group effort that brought home the stranded astronauts of Apollo 13. As recounted by flight commander Jim Lovell in his book, Lost Moon, a mysterious in-flight explosion put the Apollo 13’s three-man crew in mortal danger for five days in 1970. The men were able to return safely to earth only because hundreds of people, including the astronauts and their NASA support team on the ground, were able to analyze and solve a series of complex technical problems—quickly, intelligently, calmly, and collaboratively. In Ron Howard’s movie Apollo 13, based on Lovell’s book, the scene in which NASA engineers figure out how to repair the spaceship s damaged air-cleaning system, using only materials on board, then talk the imperiled crew through the process of making the repairs, is absolutely thrilling—a powerful dramatization of the extraordinary achievement of a Great Group and of the exhilaration its members experience.
In the case of Apollo 13, three lives literally depended on the ability of the group to make and execute complex decisions quickly (the crew faced imminent suffocation, among other dangers). What is it about groups that allows them routinely to make better overall decisions than individuals do? We can speculate as to why: more options are thrown into the hopper, deadend hypotheses are abandoned more quickly, another thinker may see a way to improve an idea he or she could not necessarily originate, intramural competition may spur the production of ideas, and the group may benefit from the fact that no one person has to bear all the responsibility for the results—a condition that is known to inhibit performance. (To paraphrase singer Tom Petty, sometimes it’s good not to be king.) For all these reasons, groups are especially well adapted to solving complex problems in relatively short periods of time.
Great Groups tend to be less bureaucratic than ordinary ones. Terribly talented people often have little tolerance for less talented middle managers. Great Groups tend to be structured, not according to title, but according to role. The person who is best able to do some essential task does it. But Great Groups are rarely true democracies. They almost always have strong leaders. Someone must keep the project’s music playing, must keep it on course. Clinton had an unusual and difficult role vis-a-vis his team in that one of his jobs was to make what fellow Southerner Dolly Parton calls “hurtin’ decisions” that involved himself and his family. Clinton listened to what his advisors had to say even when he didn’t want to hear it. As a result, he got good information, not just happy talk.
A presidential candidate is both an idea in the public mind and a real human being. Clinton’s group was fortunate in its leader, despite his flaws. Clinton is a person who listens and learns. When he unexpectedly lost his second gubernatorial race in 1980, his response was to get in his car and travel the state of Arkansas, finding out why he had been thrown out of office. He not only listened to the harsh judgments of many of his former constituents, he did something much harder: he changed his behavior. He cut his hair, for instance, and he also stopped opposing the death penalty. When the Clintons learned that voters responded negatively to Hillary’s using her maiden name, she chose to be called Mrs. Clinton at public gatherings.
During the 1992 campaign, Clinton accepted, albeit with difficulty, his strategists’ advice that Hillary Rodham Clinton was perceived negatively and should become less visible for a time. Despite his reluctance to make public disclosures about private matters, Clinton also went along with the counsel that he tell his own story, including a certain amount about his violent stepfather. A person who loves to explore ideas in all their complexity, Clinton even accepted the wisdom of keeping campaign messages singular and simple.
Clinton made another major contribution to his own election by recruiting Al Gore to his Great Group. Clinton had considered everyone from Mario Cuomo to Bill Moyers and John Sculley as his running mate (Sculley was rejected when the staff learned that he had been married three times). But Clinton settled on Gore, the statesmanlike senator from Tennessee. Tapping Gore bucked the conventional wisdom that the vice presidential candidate should balance the ticket by being as unlike the presidential candidate as possible. Gore was a Southerner, close in age and values to Clinton himself. A fellow New Democrat, Gore shared the Clinton vision. But the choice of Gore did something far more important for the campaign. By choosing a running mate of the quality of Gore—a person who arguably would make a better president than Clinton himself—Clinton was widely perceived as too confident or principled to choose a second rater for the job. It was a brilliant move, and one that gave Clinton instant stature—presidential stature──in the minds of many previous doubters.
As a campaigner, Gore was notoriously stiff (he effectively mocked that quality throughout the 1996 campaign with jokes about his dancing the macarena). But Gore acquitted himself well in his televised debate with Bush running mate Dan Quayle and Ross Perot’s second, the heroic, scholarly, but untelegenic Admiral James Stockdale. Bush’s advisors had urged him to dump Quayle in ‘92, but Bush stuck with his vice president, despite Quayle’s reputation as an extreme conservative with few intellectual gifts (comedians had a field day when Quayle publicly added a final e to the word potato). In the last analysis, it may have been the choice of Gore that tipped the election in Clinton’s favor.
As a team, Clinton and Gore showed real rapport—another factor in the desired humanization of the candidate—during the innovative First Thousand Miles bus tour that marked the final weeks of the campaign. (Like every other aspect of the effort, the bus tour was a collaboration. The idea was proposed by campaign manager David Wilhelm. Throughout the campaign, the Clintons often relied on the counsel of their many media-sawy show-business friends and supporters. The bus tour was organized by one of them, Hollywood producer Mort Engelberg.) On the bus, Clinton, Gore, and their families went where no presidential-office seeker had gone for years—into what the Quest writers called “the heart of small-town America.” People gathered by the thousands to see the man who promised to give the country back to them. Here was a prospective president who seemed as youthful as Kennedy had—a man who played hearts on the bus with his wife, who liked the music of Bonnie Raitt, and who not only hoisted babies, but didn’t seem unduly distressed when they threw up on his expensive blue suits. For his part, Clinton seemed invigorated during the grueling last weeks of the fight by the very people who found hope in him. “You look at their faces,” he said during the trek, “and they’re allowing themselves to do something they haven’t done for a long time: believe again.”
In an interview, John Emerson, a White House staffer who ran Clinton’s California campaigns in both 1992 and 1996, points out that if you focus too narrowly on The War Room and its stars, you overlook other major factors in Clinton’s 1992 victory. According to Emerson, Clinton had first-rate operations in most of the states. The candidate, his War Room advisors, and the others who made up his national campaign team always determined the message of the day. But, Emerson says, it was up to the states to make sure the message was delivered effectively. Attempting to control the message, so the media was more or less forced to report on what the candidate wanted reported, was a lesson Clinton learned from the Republicans. “Reagan did this very well in 1984,” Emerson says, but Clinton’s run for office in 1992 “was the first Democratic campaign where the message was king.”
Once the states knew the message of the day, they could reinforce it as they saw fit. Emerson recalls that California was able to exploit Dan Quayle s attack on Murphy Brown, the sitcom TV personality and single mom played by Candice Bergen, by organizing pro-Murphy Brown parties throughout the state. Camera crews from The Today Show attended several, turning what could have been a successful Republican assault on liberal values into a plus for Clinton. “We were always looking for those kinds of opportunities,” Emerson says. “The campaign was centralized, but it was also decentralized, and I think that was also part of the magic of it.”
Emerson cites several other factors in Clinton’s success in 1992 that have tended to be undervalued. One was the role of Mickey Kantor, who was national chairman of the campaign but was strictly a bit player in The War Room. In fact, Emerson says, Kantor made crucial contributions, including fund-raising. Kantor was also responsible for negotiating formats for the televised debates that favored Clinton. The most effective, Emerson says, was the debate that was ‘more like a Phil Donahue Show, where Bill Clinton could talk and George Bush was sitting there saying ‘I don’t get it’ to the one woman and looking at his watch.”
Emerson also cites the resource-allocation strategy developed by Eli Segal (campaign chief of staff) and David Wilhelm. “In the past, campaigns would buy national TV spots, so no matter where you lived, you saw the TV ad,” Emerson explains. “This campaign bought regionally. So if we were fifteen points ahead in California, we didn’t need to spend the additional marginal cost of having our TV spots aired in California. They should only air them in the states that were the true battleground states at that point. By the same token, if Texas was lost, why waste the time and money doing that?”
Finally, Emerson says, you can’t underestimate the importance of what was happening on the candidate’s press-packed plane. If the candidate “went off message” or handled some matter poorly, that became the story of the day, no matter what national headquarters had decided. The War Room was clearly “the focal point of the campaign,” Emerson says, “but it was only one of about five significant components.”
One of the attractions of a Great Group is its intensity. Carville and other members of the Clinton team speak of the almost sexual excitement of a presidential campaign. Campaign headquarters thrum with passion, fear, and other powerful emotions. Occasionally, there is actual sex as well, although rarely so much that it distracts the members from their grail-like goal. For the months of the campaign, the ordinary world seems very far away. (We will never know how many members of Great Groups remain in them as a way to avoid more traditional, less intense involvements and responsibilities, including caring for their children and interacting with their spouses.) When they look back, former members of Great Groups can typically recall the experience in minute detail and talk about it almost as if it had been a brief but wonderful love affair. “It was a summer romance,” Tom West said of his leadership of the Data General computer project chronicled in The Soul of a New Machine. “But that’s all right. Summer romances are some of the best things that ever happen.” What happens in a Great Group is always in Technicolor. Life afterwards may seem as drab as a black-and-white movie.
Clinton’s 1992 campaign resulted in the first Democratic presidency since that of Jimmy Carter and in a renewed, if not necessarily sustainable, national optimism. When Stephanopoulos looked back on the struggle, he remembered only its pleasures, not its constant tensions and sixteen-hour days. On the night of the victory, Stephanopoulos thanked Clinton and told him, “It was the best thing I ever did.” Carville was moved to tears by Clinton’s triumph and by the performance of his own crack young warriors. They had achieved something great, he told the members of his staff. “We changed the way campaigns are run,” he said, before emotion overcame him. Ever eloquent in his down-home way, Carville finally found the perfect words to transubstantiate the protracted drudgery of the campaign into something glorious. “There’s a simple doctrine,” he said. “Outside of a person’s love, the most sacred thing they can give is their labor.”
Although Clinton’s 1992 election was a historic triumph, as well as a superb example of creative collaboration, the first years of his presidency went less well. Much as fellow-Southern-governor-become-president Jimmy Carter had been, Clinton and many of the campaign staffers who followed him to the White House were perceived as Washington naifs, unskilled in its unique ways and insensitive to its time-honored rituals and prerogatives. The failure of Clinton’s health-care-reform plan and other setbacks caused one Ivy League political scientist to characterize the first half of Clinton’s first term as “two years of amateur hour.” The Republican sweep of the congressional races in 1994 was widely perceived as a repudiation of the new president as well.
“Bill Clinton is the first president in history to have never had a honeymoon,” says Emerson, in Clinton’s defense. Republicans in Congress, used to having a lock on the White House, began attacking Clinton at once. Moreover, in Emerson’s view, Clinton lacked the support of some lawmakers of his own party who may have simply envied his attaining the nation’s highest office and of some who felt his positions were too moderate. A first-time president also needs some time on the job to master it, “to get your sea legs,” Emerson says. It’s a fair point. A study of hospital administrators found that it took individuals eighteen months before they felt comfortable in that far less demanding role. As Marshal Foch once observed, “It takes 18,000 casualties to make one general.”
Emerson concedes that the new Clinton administration sometimes failed to communicate effectively. A major blunder, in his view, was miscalculating how the powerful Washington press corps would respond to its losing free access to certain areas of the White House. Emerson also believes Clinton was ill-advised to tackle the issue of gays in the military as the first item on his agenda (Emerson suggests that the Republicans led the media into pressing Clinton on the subject, which caused the new president to be seen as a “liberal in sheep’s clothing”).
Perhaps the problem was simply that Clinton, having raised expectations so high during the campaign, was less able in managing them once he was in office and had to deliver. Governing a nation is very different from winning an election. As former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once said, “Campaigning is poetry. Governing is prose.” Governing not only requires very different skills, it may also require different personnel. The very people who thrive on the electricity of a War Room may be ill equipped to handle the relentless routine that governing entails. Moreover, the intensity of a campaign may burn out those most involved in it.
In his 1996 reelection bid Clinton faced a very different challenge from the one he met so splendidly in 1992. As the incumbent, he could hardly call for sweeping change—to do so would be to repudiate his own administration. And he could no longer present himself as a political outsider. On the bright side, Clinton faced no opposition from within his party, making him the first candidate since FDR to enjoy that luxury. Moreover, the Republican candidates had thoroughly trashed each other before Bob Dole, a candidate with little charisma, emerged as the chosen. Dole entered the race with too little money and burdened both by fears that he, at 73, was too old for the office and by his association with Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich. He advanced his cause mightily, however, just as Clinton had in 1992, by his wise choice of a running mate. Dole tapped Jack Kemp, the popular, able, and vigorous former secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Long associated with supply-side economics, Kemp was able to reinforce Dole’s major campaign theme of reducing taxes. A former National Football League quarterback, Kemp took to throwing footballs during his campaign appearances, causing one Dole staffer to observe that it was a good thing Kemp’s sport hadn’t been the javelin.
As the election approached, even the strengthening U.S. economy, in the words of a British journalist, seemed to be “rooting for Mr. Clinton.” But, once again, Clinton was no shoo-in. The investigation into possible financial wrongdoing by the president or his wife in the Whitewater land deal refused to go away. In 1996, Clinton was determined to avoid the mistakes Bush had made as an incumbent candidate in 1992. (“It’s the incumbency, stupid!” was a popular slogan among campaign insiders.) Unlike Bush, Clinton knew that a run for the presidency is never ‘just a two-month sprint.” He began preparing for the campaign early. By mid-1995 the president was meeting one evening a week in the family quarters of the White House to talk strategy with his top advisors. Throughout 1995 and into 1996, Clinton increasingly positioned himself as a centrist, albeit in a field shifted much to the right by conservative Republicans and their Contract with America. In the minds of some, Clinton moved too far right. Former speechwriter Paul Begala said so publicly and was shut out of the 1996 reelection effort.
According to Doyle McManus, chief of the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times, Clinton went into the 1996 campaign not as a reformer, but as an accommodator. He declared in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government was over.” Reversing his previous stance, he backed a balanced budget. In the months before the election, Clinton seemed to have arrogated much of the Republican agenda, including its emphasis on family values. Some supporters saw the president’s shift away from issues such as health care to the rhetoric of the right as an act of political brilliance. Others saw the same positions, particularly his decision to cut federal programs for the poor, as a repudiation of the heart and soul of Democratic politics.
Despite the success of his 1992 team, Clinton assembled a very different group for 1996. George Stephanop-oulos remained, but he failed in his effort to persuade the president to attack the Republican agenda as Harry S. Truman had in his 1948 “give ‘em hell” campaign. Greenberg was no longer the chief oollster, reportedly because the president believed Greenberg had failed to prepare him for the Republican congressional rout of 1994. Greenberg was replaced by pollsters Mark Penn and Douglas Schoen. Henry Sheinkopf replaced Mandy Grunwald as media consultant and was replaced, in turn, by Bob Squier.
By the summer of 1996 the group of advisors gathering weekly in the Yellow Oval Room had grown to two dozen. The vice president was a key member of this campaign council, as were White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Deputy Chief Harold Ickes. James Carville, who had been so prominent in 1992, did not attend. By far the most controversial advisor at these sessions was Dick Morris, an outside consultant who had started his political life as a Democrat but who had more recently advised Republican candidates.
Morris had helped make a much younger Clinton the comeback kid in the 1982 Arkansas gubernatorial race, when he won back the office he had lost in 1980. But Clinton and Morris had had a stormy relationship. Clinton had dismissed Morris more than once and was even said to have hauled off and slugged him on one occasion. But in the months before the Democratic convention, the president turned to Morris more and more regularly, to the dismay of Clinton’s liberal advisors. Morris helped the president craft his new triangulation strategy, calculated to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters, including conservatives.
Even Morris’s critics lauded his genius for turning polling data into effective political stands. But many observers were disturbed by his willingness to change parties. And some Clinton supporters, including White House insiders, were chagrined by charges that as recently as 1994, Morris had bad-mouthed both the president’s policies and his character in the course of soliciting work from Republican candidates. Even worse in the view of some liberal Democrats was Morris’s alleged willingness to do anything, including exploit racial tensions, to win elections, as Morris was said to have done when advising North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms (Morris denied both allegations). One insider compared Morris to Rasputin.
Unlike the highly visible Carville, with his tattered jeans and memorable sound bites, the neatly suited Morris drew little attention to himself. He was a court politician, working inside, answering only to the president and perhaps to Mrs. Clinton. Morris’s low profile, and his role in the campaign, ended abruptly August 29, 1996, as the president prepared to accept the Democratic nomination in Chicago. Morris resigned following allegations that he, a married man and the consultant responsible for the president’s new family friendliness, had had a year-long affair with a prostitute. Most shocking was the charge that Morris had allowed her to eavesdrop on conversations with the White House. Morris neither confirmed nor denied the story, which had been pursued by the Star, a supermarket tabloid. Morris’s resignation seemed to have no impact on Clinton’s speech that evening, in which he asked voters to allow him to be “the bridge to the twenty-first century,” a phrase he repeated throughout the campaign. Morris immediately began putting the best possible spin on his predicament. A week after he resigned he announced a $2.5 million book deal.
Although Clinton’s 1996 team triumphed, it had few of the characteristics—the energy, the sense of being winning underdogs, the disheveled but highly functional War Room, the youthful optimism, the belief that this was a collective enterprise that would change the world—that made Clinton’s 1992 campaigners a classic Great Group. The kind of people who engage in creative collaboration want to do the next thing, not repeat the last one. Even before voters cast their ballots in 1996, media consultant Bob Squier and others had begun working on a fresh new project that promised the kind of original challenges no reelection campaign could. The task—getting Gore elected president in 2000.