The fall of 1994 was a disquieting time for President Clinton. He felt isolated, lonely and angry. The first two years of his presidency had been grueling, leaving him off balance. He had not yet conquered the presidency.
Though he offered many explanations for his situation as president, Clinton frequently railed against people in his own inner circle who he felt had betrayed him and presented the media with a false portrait of him and the way he made decisions. “Traitors on my staff,” he called them to more than one intimate. Polls showed his approval ratings had dipped dangerously low, jeopardizing his reelection. Clinton reached outside for help.
He turned to Dick Morris, a Connecticut-based political consultant he had first used 17 years earlier in his initial run for governor of Arkansas but who now worked almost exclusively for Republican candidates. Clinton had talked intermittently with Morris throughout his presidency, but now the conversations became more frequent.
Clinton and Morris had shared a stormy, on-again and off-again relationship for much of the past two decades. Morris, 47, represented a side of Clinton that the president disliked in himself—the pragmatist who knew that a candidate needed to jockey and reposition himself to gain approval and win elections. But Clinton was always eager to be liked, and the attraction between Clinton and Morris was almost magnetic.
They knew and understood each other so well they could finish each other’s sentences.
The coming 1994 congressional elections will be a calamity for you, Morris told Clinton. He expected the Democrats were going to suffer huge losses. Even on the phone Morris conveyed his intensity, his voice like a spring about to pop in your ear. He spoke aggressively and with total confidence, in a clipped New York accent.
The reason for the trouble was simple and powerful, Morris said. The public did not identify Clinton with any clear, visible accomplishment. Clinton’s biggest achievement had been to substantially reduce the federal deficit, but Morris said he had conducted some polls that showed most voters didn’t believe it. Deficit reduction was a Republican issue, and voters just didn’t believe a Democrat like Clinton would really reduce the debt. They did believe that Clinton had increased taxes as part of the deficit reduction package, because Democrats did raise taxes. Likewise they didn’t believe Clinton had led the charge on the crime bill, again a traditionally Republican issue. Clinton’s accomplishments kind of fell into a black hole, Morris said.
At the same time, voters did give Clinton credit for the family and medical leave legislation that guaranteed workers time off for childbirth and illness. Though small, it was believable. Morris said people were distrustful of large claims. They were in the mood to receive news of small accomplishments.
Morris also reminded Clinton that the 1994 congressional races were not his fight. Clinton should minimize his role in the various Senate and House races. His popularity was down, so he wouldn’t be able to help the Democratic candidates, much less himself.
The Republicans were trying to nationalize the elections, particularly through the so-called Contract With America that the House Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, had put forth in September promising a new conservative agenda. Morris said the Republicans were trying to run under one banner. Don’t let them, he advised. If Clinton was dragged into the debate, they would make him out to be the pro-government liberal. Morris told the president he not only thought the Democrats would surely lose the Senate, as many expected, but that the Democrats were in such trouble they would also lose control of the House.
Clinton disagreed vehemently that the results would be that bad, especially in the House, which the Democrats had controlled for 40 years, including most of Eisenhower’s presidency and all of Reagan’s and Bush’s.
Get out of the way, Mr. President, Morris implored. Be less visible. The Republican wave is coming, he insisted.
Clinton mentioned that he was planning a four-day trip to the Middle East to sign the Middle East Peace Treaty at the end of October.
The peace was a Promethean accomplishment, Morris said, a huge accomplishment. Though by no means solely attributable to Clinton, the treaty was being signed on his watch. He should not take himself down from that pedestal to campaign. The Middle East peace was important, a giant symbol. A president could have no bigger role than that of peacemaker. Retain control of the large symbols, Morris advised.
Clinton’s sense of loneliness, the feeling that the presidency was a solitary undertaking, had grown as he observed the behavior of those in his inner circle. Even many closest to him seemed to chafe at the way he spent so much time making decisions, consulting and weighing alternatives, going back and forth. His thinking and debating had been taken for indecisiveness. Many of those close to him had rebelled and turned him in, providing the media with unflattering accounts of his decision making. In front of staff and cabinet members, Hillary, though sympathetic to her husband, had decried the administration’s failure to think and plan strategically to sell its economic program in 1993. “Mechanic-in-chief,” she had called the president. When asked for advice about how to get the budget plan passed, Vice President Gore had said tersely to Clinton one day in the Oval Office, “You can get with the goddamn program!” His first Treasury Secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, had criticized Clinton to his face for not delegating properly and not separating the important decisions from the unimportant ones.
It was one thing for this advice to be given in private. It was quite another for it to appear in print, as these unflattering accounts and too many others had. In fact, the most severe and authoritative critique of his administration had often been provided not by his opponents or the Republicans. It had come from the inner circle, even his wife and vice president at times. Clinton told a friend he was paying a terrible price because of the frustration of others who had their own ideas about how to do his job. Who could he trust? Who could he depend on? he asked friends with increasing regularity. Clinton was speaking about trust more and more, and wondering aloud where he could find it.
He was confident he was a new kind of Democrat, that he could fashion a new governing philosophy. Yes, it incorporated some normally traditional Republican ideas—free trade, deficit reduction, an eye toward the bond market to get consumer interest rates down, a small and more efficient government, lower taxes for the middle class. It also incorporated some traditional Democratic ideas—spending for education and worker training, a strong safety net of social programs for the truly needy and a government with a heart, not a handout.
George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s 33-year-old senior White House political aide and one of the chief strategists and spokesmen for the 1992 campaign, had identified these warring factions within Clinton as the “unbridgeable chasm.”
Clinton was determined to fashion that bridge.
At the end of October 1994, Clinton made the high-profile trip to the Middle East. Upon his return he found he had been scheduled on a whirlwind tour of non-stop campaigning. Clinton half-maintained to Morris that these trips were contrary to his wishes. But the upcoming elections were where the action was. He loved campaigning, and being out of Washington. He knew he was a master campaigner.
Morris argued again that interjecting himself in the local campaigns was a mistake. It would backfire if he tried to assist Democrats in key states. “If you want to help in Pennsylvania,” he urged Clinton, “go back to the Middle East.”
But Clinton began stumping the country for Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, New York, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Washington State and Delaware. In addition, he made 17 radio and television appearances in the local markets and was interviewed extensively about the elections on the Black Entertainment Television network and by CNN’s Larry King.
On Tuesday, November 8, 1994, midterm election day, President Clinton was up, dressed, and in the Oval Office by 7:12 A.M. He hated the early mornings, but he wanted to complete a final round of three short radio interviews to wrap up his effort. First up was John Gambling’s Rambling with Gambling on WOR Radio in New York City.
“A lot of our candidates asked me to get out there and campaign,” Clinton said, “including Governor Cuomo, so I tried to do all I could to make the best argument for why we’re moving our country in the right direction and we don’t want to go back to the policies that failed us in the 1980s.”
But the president had never offered a fully satisfactory argument that laid out the positive reasons why his party should retain control of both the House and Senate.
“We don’t want to go back,” he repeated to Philadelphia radio station WWDB that morning. He went through a laundry list of legislative accomplishments, but he still sounded no compelling theme, nor did he give a clear definition of what was next for his presidency.
Clinton sensed the emptiness. Though he could muster the passion and emotional engagement for the fight, he knew this was nothing like 1992 when he had won the presidency on his pledge to fix the economy.
Election days mean waiting, and Clinton had extra time on his hands. He and his foreign policy advisers met with the president of Iceland. Clinton was charming, mentioning a TV documentary he had recently seen about Iceland and a stopover he had made there as a student. But his mind was clearly on the future of his presidency.
“Reagan really understood the symbolic importance of the presidency,” Clinton said later to several members of his staff. “We’ve got to do better.”
At an afternoon reception on the South Lawn for the volunteers who worked at the White House, Clinton again referred to the midterm elections. “There are clear choices between going forward and going back,” he said.
He finally returned to the White House residency, where he and Hillary stayed for most of the rest of the day as early exit polling began to forecast an unthinkable disaster for Democrats. Incredibly the Republicans seemed to be winning control of both the Senate and the House. Most of the Democrats that Clinton had campaigned for were losing. It would soon be clear that not a single Republican incumbent in any race for the Senate, House or governor had lost. It was apparently an historic rout.
Clinton and Hillary raced through various responses. What could Clinton say? How could he get on top of this? He finally decided to say nothing publicly that night. As the night wore on, he retreated into himself. His White House staff saw it as a kind of withdrawal into an isolation chamber. Some took it personally. But Clinton and his wife were contemplating what was happening. To what extent was it a referendum on him? That was inevitable because he was the president, they agreed, but unfair. Why was he getting so little credit for the positive things he had done? Why was there no reward for their hard work? Was Dick Morris right? What had been the mistakes?
Clinton said that he probably had spent too much of his time as president in the legislative trenches. He had done what he knew from Arkansas, worked with the legislature passing laws, doing what he knew how to do best. Working with Congress had inevitably led to compromise and had prevented him from setting a definite direction.
Hillary was sympathetic. The health care reform task force she had headed had been shredded by the Congress, and she herself subjected to pounding attacks.
“I was a prime minister,” Clinton said, “not a president. I got caught up in the parliamentary aspect of the presidency and missed the leadership, bully pulpit function which is so critical.”
Hillary could see he was worried that the public was telling him he was not cutting it as president.
As the list of big Democrats who had been defeated grew, the shock increased. Mario Cuomo, the New York governor, was going down. So was Ann Richards, the governor of Texas. In the last 40 years, the party of a sitting president on average lost one Senate seat and about a dozen House seats in the off years. Now the Democrats were losing eight Senate seats and an incredible 52 House seats at a time of peace and economic growth.
Clinton finally became angry that night. One of his targets was himself. He had let the agenda get out of control, he had blown it. Then he got angry at the White House staff. They had misdirected him, misunderstood him, wasted his time. Next, he turned to the Republicans. They were at fault, not giving him a single vote on his economic plan, savaging them both on health care. No, he said, the congressional Democrats were at fault, the ones who persisted in their conventional liberalism. They had trapped him, let their internal differences prolong debate in a way that had hurt him—allowing the crime bill, for example, to be hijacked and disparaged, tagging on pork barrel and social projects that looked totally ridiculous in the face of violent crime.
Clinton spoke with Vice President Gore, who also was astounded at the election. Tennessee politics were being turned upside down. Republicans were taking both Senate seats, including the one Gore had held until 1992. It had been a kind of family seat since his father, Albert Gore, Sr., had held it before him. The Democratic governor was being replaced by a Republican, and the Tennessee congressional delegation lost two House Democratic seats, leaving the state 5–4 Republican. That was incredible and depressing, but the national dimensions were a genuine body blow.
After hours of talk, fury, disappointment and systematic consideration of the alternative villains, Clinton settled down to feel sorry for himself. But he was accustomed to converting bad news to good, and he eventually began talking about the loss of the Congress differently. Could it be an opportunity? Free him of the restraints? Give him a foil?
“Possibly liberating,” Clinton finally declared amidst the despair and pain. He got very little sleep that night.
The next afternoon, the president appeared at a press conference in the East Room of the White House. He pledged cooperation with the new Republican Congress and its leaders.
“With the Democrats in control of both the White House and the Congress, we were held accountable yesterday,” he said. “I accept my share of the responsibility in the result of the elections,” he added. Voters had selected change in 1992 by electing him, and now in 1994 they were seeking more change. His fault, he said, was that there had not been enough change. Of the voters, Clinton said, “They looked at us, and they said, ‘We want some more changes, and we’re going to try this and see if this works.’
“And what I think they told us was, ‘Look, two years ago we made one change, now we made another change. We want you to keep on moving this country forward, and we want you to accelerate the pace of change.’” Clinton separated himself from the Democrats, as if he were a non-partisan agent of change hovering over the process. Reporters asked him if that was what he really meant. “Are you essentially saying that the electorate yesterday was agreeing with you?” one incredulous reporter inquired.
“I think they were agreeing with me,” he said, “but they don’t think we produced them. In other words—let me say it in another way. I’m saying that I agree with much of what the electorate said yesterday.”
It was a stunning but little noted performance because the media spotlights had instantly shifted to Newt Gingrich, the likely new House Speaker, and the new Republican Congress.
Gore was sympathetic. Clinton’s comments did not reflect a complete internal analysis, but a president often had to give answers to the public before he had worked them out in his own mind.
In the days that followed Clinton talked with many people, conducting a kind of running seminar for himself. His emotions ran from shock to denial. He wondered how he might capitalize on the situation. And he had one basic question. What the hell did that earthquake mean?
Privately, the president complained that he had not meant to let the voting become a referendum on himself. For a while, he was a combination of depressed and defensive. The seminar phase of his inquiry continued, and he turned to the more important question: What was to be done? There were more phone calls, more meetings, more talk and endless late-night rehashes with Hillary, Gore and close friends. Clinton loved politics. It was his entire life, the single thread that connected each stage, from Arkansas to Washington. Politics was all he had, professionally. The defeat was a wound.
He seemed to take a kind of perverse delight in talking about his latest wound. It was at once a huge analytical problem and a problem in practical politics. He was, after all, still president and only 48 years old, presumably at the height of his personal powers. But the questions persisted. What had he failed to do both as president and as leader of the party? What had others failed to do? Who had let him down? What was the source of the miscalculation? Had he not listened? The calls and meetings continued with Dick Morris. He was the one who had been right about 1994.
Morris claimed that once, when he had been fired by Governor Clinton in 1980, Clinton had said to him, “You are an assault to my vanity. Politics is what I do best and you do it as well as I do.” Clinton had lost his 1980 bid for reelection. But Morris was later rehired and had helped lay the foundation for Clinton’s comeback to the governorship in 1982 by persuading him to apologize to the voters.
As president, Clinton was not looking for a new route of contrition. Clinton valued Morris not just for their long personal history together, or for Morris’s tactical acumen or his notorious willingness to do just about anything to win. Morris was a Republican consultant. He had worked almost exclusively for the other side in recent years, and Clinton now had to understand the enemy better than ever. At the same time, he knew Morris was frequently wrong, misguided or even crazy. His ideas and proposals needed filtering; but Clinton could do that himself and act as the necessary check.
Clinton asked Morris to make an assessment, help reposition the administration and develop a message that would enable him to win reelection in 1996.
Morris told the president first that there had been too much people-pleasing and pandering in the Clinton White House—acquiescence to positions a cabinet officer or a powerful White House staff member was pushing. Second, Clinton had drawn too many ideas and staff from the orthodox wing of the Democratic Party. Third, the political consultants and young staffers like George Stephanopoulos seemed to regard Clinton as the Dauphin, a child king, and the administration as a regency government that had to be held together by the court—his staff.
“Your allies have become your jailers,” Morris told the president.
In further discussions with Hillary and Gore, Clinton concluded he had three problems. He agreed with Morris that he had been marching too much in lockstep with some Democrats who had pushed him too far to the left. Rather than leading his party in the direction of the New Democrats, he had allowed the congressional Democrats to dictate.
Clinton also agreed that on the social and cultural issues his administration looked too leftish. The symbolism of the young, hip, inexperienced staff, embodied by Stephanopoulos, had been a public relations fiasco, particularly at the beginning of the administration.
But Clinton added an important third consideration. He had been too much out of touch with the middle class, especially on real wages, which were still declining—an issue he had identified and made much of in 1992. He had discovered the middle class in his presidential campaign and forsaken them as president. These were the swing voters. He needed to address their declining standard of living and honor their more traditional values.
Because Morris’s presence could cause an uproar, Clinton was having him work outside the White House staff as a consultant. Only Hillary and Gore knew the full extent of Morris’s charter. Gore supported the Republican adviser, but with apprehension. In his formal but still largely secret role, Morris expanded on his theories and worked on repositioning Clinton.
Lots of names would be applied to Morris’s strategy. The most common was “triangulation,” an alternative to the rigid orthodoxy of either conservatism or liberalism. The political spectrum was conventionally thought of as a line running from left to right, and political figures fell somewhere along that straight line. Morris argued that an innovative leader had to move out of the linear dimension to a point at the center but also above the conventional spectrum. That point then formed a triangle with the left and right.
The idea appealed to Clinton, who had always thought of himself as above orthodoxy. He was a New Democrat, incorporating some liberal elements and some conservative elements.
Clinton sought a deeper understanding of the core issues that had been successful for Republicans over the years. Success was what counted. What worked? As outlined by Morris, Republicans from Reagan to Gingrich had essentially four issues that resonated with voters: taxes, crime, welfare and the federal budget.
Clinton had to take these issues off the table, neutralize them by diminishing the differences between himself and the Republicans. Then, Morris said, Clinton could run and win on his issues—education, the environment, maybe even abortion, and some other social issues that reflected traditional Democratic humanitarianism and compassion.
Clinton and Morris agreed they needed new blood in the White House to help.
In late November, Clinton phoned William E. Curry, Jr., who two weeks earlier had lost his bid to become governor of Connecticut. Clinton and Hillary had met Curry in the 1992 campaign and had been very impressed with him. Curry, an articulate and verbose 42-year-old state comptroller, had been so taken with the Clintons that his friends thought he had acted as if he had joined a cult. Now Curry was licking his wounds after his defeat.
Clinton said he wanted Curry to come work in the White House on domestic policy and communications. He asked him to meet with Morris. Over a three-hour lunch in Waterbury, Connecticut, Morris and Curry discussed how they would engineer a remake of the Clinton administration.
Later, Morris made his pitch to Clinton about the importance of television advertising. Since a campaign was a communications exercise, Clinton, even as president, would need to raise money for massive TV advertising buys to get his message out, he argued. Advertising changed and molded attitudes. Advertising moved poll numbers. Most voters lived their lives outside the realm of political discourse, but prime-time television was part of their daily fare and it could be used to pierce their world.