At 9 A.M. Saturday, February 10, Dole, Reed, Lacy, Will, Coe and Synhorst met in the conference room of Dole’s Hart office. They reviewed state by state the governors, senators and congressmen who were being recruited or had pledged to endorse him. Dole liked to hear what was going on, in detail. He was convinced that support in key state organizations would be critical in the accelerated and compressed primary schedule the next year when 70 percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination would be chosen in a six-week period.
On Iowa, Synhorst said that Phil Gramm had been courting the Christian Coalition. “Gramm’s making it difficult out there throwing them all this red meat, and he’s saying the things they want to hear,” Synhorst explained. “Could we do that a little bit?”
“Aagh!” Dole snapped, “I’m not going to talk like Phil Gramm talks. I’m not going to say the things he’s saying.”
After Quayle’s withdrawal two days earlier, Synhorst reminded them, Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed had declared that the situation was “the equivalent of a jump ball at the buzzer” in a basketball game. “The question is who will jump highest to get that vote,” Ralph Reed had said.
“I’m not going to say these extreme things,” Dole repeated. He didn’t want to be in a contest with Phil Gramm to be the most conservative or shout the loudest. He didn’t like Gramm’s tone or style. It wasn’t his. Dole felt he had stayed in the mainstream.
Dole’s thoughts harkened back to 1988 when front-runner Bush had treated him like a fly to ignore. Whhhhhssstttt! he thought. Better to treat Gramm like a fly. Why make Phil Gramm the opponent?
New Hampshire was the horse that threw Dole in 1988, and the campaign decided to get him back on.
Synhorst prepared a schedule of nine town meetings, two press conferences and two speeches for Dole to do in New Hampshire over the upcoming three-day President’s Day holiday weekend. “Do you think we can get all that done?” Dole asked when he saw the schedule.
“I’m going to do it like I did Iowa,” Synhorst replied.
“Well, okay.”
In New Hampshire, the local Republican activists said the trip was a terrible idea. A holiday weekend, the weather could be bad, many potential problems.
Synhorst called Scott Reed and explained why an aggressive schedule was essential. “Don’t let this schedule be diluted one fucking bit!” Synhorst added.
“I agree,” Reed said, but he noted that the New Hampshire people were nervous the meetings would not be successful.
“They’ll be successful,” Synhorst said. “I’m doing’em. They’ll be successful.”
Reed figured the trip was a calculated risk, worth taking. It was important to show that the Dole campaign was not fucked up, and to demonstrate they had something to back up the good poll numbers, which they all knew didn’t mean anything. Reed recognized that he had about 60 to 90 days to prove himself to Dole. He understood New Hampshire was an emotional hurdle. Dole had vividly shared with Reed his memory of the day before the 1988 New Hampshire primary, driving down the road and seeing Bush signs everywhere and not having a single Dole sign out. Reed concluded they all had to get over it or Dole wouldn’t have any confidence in him or the rest of the team. He began micromanaging the whole weekend plan.
Dole wondered if they were biting off more than they could chew. No one mentioned the obvious point, that it would show Dole was vigorous and help put the age question to bed, at least for the moment.
Reed knew that Dole wanted him to be careful spending their campaign money. In 1988, seemingly millions had disappeared on big fat salaries for campaign staff and contracts months, even a year, before the first primary. Alex Castellanos, who had been the Dole media consultant in the 1988 presidential race and in 1992 for Dole’s Senate reelection, wanted a huge contract for 1996. Over the summer, Castellanos had sent Dole a 19-page memo on message strategy, arguing that Dole had to become more conservative and more of a Washington outsider. In graphic terms, he said, “Change or die.”
Reed decided to open up the media job to competitive bidding. The work would be limited in 1995 and he didn’t want to start laying down a lot of money for reels of film and pretty pictures.
Castellanos took the open bidding personally. On February 13, he wrote Dole saying that he had accepted an offer to become Phil Gramm’s media consultant.
Reed and the others wanted to hire Don Sipple, the media consultant for Pete Wilson, but Sipple said that out of loyalty he was waiting to see if Wilson would run.
Dole’s weekend in New Hampshire went off without a single significant hitch.
Monday morning in Nashua 100 people attended the leadership meeting and then hundreds more the town meeting.
“Sure is different than ’88,” Dole commented to Warren Rudman, who was accompanying him.
“Sure is,” Rudman said, joking. “I don’t think it’s you. It’s Bill Clinton.”
But by the end of the trip, Dole was complaining that the three-day schedule was too heavy, he didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time for anything.
Back in Washington the next day, Dole pulled Lacy aside after a fund-raising meeting. Dole reported that several friends and Senate colleagues had complained that his message of reining in the government was wrong.
“There’s no magic in any of this,” Lacy said. “You’ve got to have something that you’re comfortable with, that you believe, that you can say consistently.” The message just had to be coherent. It didn’t have to fit into some 20-second or 40-second sound bite, Lacy said. It also didn’t have to strike people as bold or innovative, or cause the media and intellectual establishment to stand up. That wasn’t going to happen. There wasn’t such a message and it wasn’t Dole’s style. “What you’ve got there will resonate with voters,” Lacy added. “It may not be viewed by everybody as being brilliant or anything like that, but it will work and let’s just stick to it.”
Dole was going on the CNN Larry King Live television show in two nights to make the ritual pre-announcement announcement of his candidacy, and he had to be ready.
Senator William Cohen, a moderate Maine Republican, had watched Dole closely over the last 17 years in the Senate. In one respect he thought Dole was like a shark—he had to keep moving to stay alive. Cohen was going to endorse Dole for president, but not because Dole was a man of vision. He wasn’t. However, he was a man of intuition, and his instincts were basically humane and moderate. Dole was not a man of words, either. He often just stopped in the middle of his sentences, but Cohen had come to detect what Dole generally meant. It would be in the body language or the grunts or what was unsaid. Or it would be in his eyes. Still, Cohen felt he never penetrated Dole’s screen. Dole always kept some distance, but he was basically a good man who was approachable.
Dole had said publicly that he was going to review affirmative action programs—a clear shift from his previous support. Soon after, Cohen went to see him in private.
“I don’t think you ought to get too far out on this,” Cohen cautioned. “This is a codeword for lots of people.” Ominously, Cohen said that it could be a long, hot summer if blacks felt more and more excluded.
“I only called for a review,” Dole responded, blanching. “You can’t disagree with that.”
“No, I don’t,” Cohen said, “but you ought to be careful.” It would appear as if the Republican Party didn’t want minorities or women, he added. Cohen felt that Dole understood.
Thursday mid-afternoon, February 23, the day Dole was supposed to appear on the Larry King Live show, Cohen noticed that Dole looked exhausted. He could tell when Dole was strung out, and he was.
“Why don’t you cancel out the rest of the day,” Cohen recommended, “go home and get a nap. Don’t run around. And then go do the Larry King show.”
“Well, I’ll try, I’ll try,” Dole promised, his voice trailing off. Dole went to a little hideaway office he occasionally used to take half-hour naps. He didn’t sleep, but rested for an hour and a half. The phones didn’t ring there and nobody bothered him, and he felt better.
Before the show, Reed, Lacy and Will reviewed with him the three broad themes in the message.
On the show, Dole tried six times to wade into the three points of his message. Once he actually said of his message—“whatever it is.” Later he explained himself as the one to “do a lot of these things we want to do.” When a caller asked how Dole would distinguish himself from the other Republicans, Dole said, “I decided with a message of reducing government, giving power back to people, less regulation, that somebody with experience might be the one.” He radiated tentativeness.
Cohen thought Dole’s performance was ridiculous. He told Dole the next day that he just couldn’t say things like that. Dole replied that they were still working on the message.
Lacy thought that Dole had tried but that King had moved too quickly to other subjects and cut Dole off. At least the kinder, gentler Dole had shown through. But in broader terms Lacy was reminded how very different it was to run for president than to serve as president. He thought it was a shame that Dole had to go through a process of reducing himself to some “message.” Lacy knew it ran close to being dishonest and stage-managed. To take something as complex as the presidency and say in 20 seconds what kind of a president you’re going to be—and really have that bear a whole lot of resemblance to the huge scope of the job? Lacy had concluded this would be his last campaign. He wanted out of politics.
After two years as president Clinton still felt deep, even increasing, alienation from Washington. This isolation from his environment was one of the least understood aspects of Clinton’s presidency. He expressed frequent contempt, at times even loathing, for the city’s social life. Washington seemed to the president to be dominated by a permanent elite of former government officials from both parties who stayed to practice law or lobby, media executives and reporters who had been in the city for decades and wealthy hangers-on.
Because his first year as president had been difficult and contentious, Clinton had never really been able to partake of the goodwill that Washington—even the city’s most entrenched establishment—extends to any president. He was rarely able to leverage this goodwill to his advantage and had not learned a basic truth: no group is more susceptible to presidential flattery than this Washington establishment.
“I’m not a Washington insider,” Clinton remarked in private many times. But even to those alleged Washington insiders, Clinton’s feeling of estrangement was not evident. He made occasional forays to key social events, schmoozing it up with all the people he claimed to disdain and displaying an endless penchant for talk which made him seem at home, a full and contented participant. He would stop in hallways to talk socially with people for 20 minutes or more. He was gracious, engaging and patient, masterfully making and holding eye contact. Unlike many politicians, his eyes did not dart around a room to see who else of more importance was there. He was always articulate, even gleeful. After all, he was the President of the United States bestowing his attention, and few people in the Washington establishment saw beyond that to sense his deep anger. But in private to his intimates it was “the Washington crowd” or “the fucking Washington crowd.” He made scathing and graphically obscene references to individuals he thought embodied the city.
In spite of his outward gregariousness on social occasions, Clinton functioned as outsider in his own city. Not only was he not of his time, he was not of his place.
Hillary Clinton dramatically reinforced this sense of isolation and hostility. She felt that the Washington establishment looked down on them. “The Washington Post does it all the time,” Hillary said privately to an associate. “They are so snotty about people who don’t live in Georgetown, and I don’t understand that. It’s almost unconscious in a way and anybody who wants to play in their big league has to adopt that manner. And The New York Times does it, too. It infects the atmosphere.”
For Clinton, it seemed as if an automatic cynicism was routinely applied to almost everything he or his administration did. “This cynicism is my enemy,” he said. “Cynicism” was, in part, a codeword for media criticism. He felt he was being held to an impossible standard of perfection. His decision-making process had been held up to ridicule because he allowed an openness and breadth of debate. Details of his administration’s often excruciating back and forth decisions had been reported in books and newspaper articles, making him look incompetent, he said. Of course there was debate and argument, and of course he shifted his position when stronger arguments were made and new information was presented. It was the way lots of large corporations made decisions, various chief executive officers had told him. “What do you think,” he asked, “that I go up to Mount Olympus in the morning and we figure this stuff out and I come down?”
Clinton wanted to look at himself as the champion of the working person, the broad middle class, the poor and the destitute. He argued to his staff that it would be hard to redefine the Democratic Party as the party of the working person as long as the media was so removed and out of touch with real working people—let alone the destitute.
Clinton still had no formal reelection campaign set up. No campaign manager, no campaign chairman, no outside consultants, no media adviser, no pollster at this point. He wanted it that way for now, allowing him to remain presidential and above the day-to-day urgency of electoral politics.
Ickes wanted to get a formal campaign fund-raising plan approved, and arranged to have Terry McAuliffe come to meet with Clinton in mid-February. Gore, Hillary, Ickes and some of the presidential scheduling people attended the meeting in the residence.
McAuliffe handed out copies of a ten-page plan he had drafted. He wanted to schedule a dozen presidential galas for the rest of 1995—big formal dinners around the country. The dates would have to be locked into Clinton’s schedule. The plan also said that about ten mass fund-raising mailings would be sent out.
McAuliffe called for an early start—three big fund-raisers in June. Clinton wanted to know why so early.
It was either start in June or September, McAuliffe said. You are blocked out of fund-raising in July, August and through the second week of September because nobody, at least not the big givers and donors, would be around and nobody cared during that period. Starting early would give McAuliffe all of April, May and June to put all the pieces together. If they waited until after the summer that would mean ten events in September—an impossible number in a single month for a sitting president. The other reason to start early, McAuliffe said, was that Ickes and he didn’t want to have to fool around with a possible challenger in the party. That would give people a reason to hide and not give.
Others argued that perhaps June was too early. The climate might not be right. Suppose an early effort was put together and it didn’t work out? Wouldn’t that have the opposite impact and encourage a challenger?
McAuliffe said he felt good about Clinton’s support. “From the time you give me the go, I can tie up every single major player in the country,” McAuliffe said. The implication was clear that this was possible as long as no serious challenger emerged from among the Democrats.
The plan called for the gala events to begin in New Jersey, follow on to Little Rock and then to Chicago.
Clinton wanted to know why those cities?
McAuliffe said he believed they could collect $1 million or more in each of the first three gala dinners. He had a core of committed people in New Jersey where he had kept Democratic Party fund-raising to a minimum and the people there were itching to deliver, dying to be first off the bat. Same in Little Rock and Chicago, he said. McAuliffe could remember organizing $10,000 to $15,000 fund-raisers in 1988’s presidential campaign when he had been finance chairman for Congressman Richard Gephardt. That had been 70 to 80 or more fund-raising events to raise $1 million—pathetic, no fun. It drove the schedule. But an incumbent president like Clinton could get more than 1,000 people out for a $1,000- a-plate dinner. It was all ego on the part of the givers—a presidential dinner, photograph and Christmas card were all most of them wanted.
After the three first cities, McAuliffe’s plan called for ten additional events: Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, New York, Michigan and Tennessee, and two events each in Florida and California.
Hillary had some questions about the direct mail. How many letters were going out in each of the ten mailings? McAuliffe provided initial estimates. Who did he expect would give after receiving some of these? Why would they give to that piece? He answered those questions. She turned to a detailed questioning about the first mailing, scheduled for April. It was going to be a soft appeal, a two-page letter from Clinton announcing that he was running for reelection, underscoring the importance of his agenda over the Republican Contract With America. It wasn’t even going to ask for money in a big way, only in a P.S. and in the response card.
Who would get the first mailing? Hillary asked.
They would target the Clinton-Gore donors from 1992, McAuliffe answered, plus the party base list run by the Democratic National Committee, a huge list of people that traditionally give to Democratic causes.
How many would get it?
When it was all duped out, McAuliffe said, about a million people.
Cost to print and mail it?
Perhaps $400,000.
Would people write checks on such a soft, indirect appeal? Hillary inquired.
McAuliffe said that his direct-mail consultant had said yes. “Listen, I got professionals who I hire to write these things, and they say it’s going to work.”
Hillary didn’t have any more questions.
With Clinton’s weakness in the polls and the array of naysayers, McAuliffe said he was going to make the fund-raising approach all positive. He wasn’t going to have state finance chairmen, no real hierarchy under him in tiers, for example, which was normal in such a campaign. Instead, he was personally going to recruit 200 people to be on the Clinton-Gore Finance Board. Each would have equal status and each would have to agree to raise $50,000 from others, observing the $1,000 personal limit on individual contributions. That would total $10 million overall. And he would want $25,000 of each $50,000 pledge by the end of June, hopefully adding up to $5 million. The finance board would raise at least several million, plus the three large June fund-raisers, and the first mailing should give them a record quarter by the time the June 30 report was filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Clinton said he was in sync with the plan, and told McAuliffe to go ahead. Since all the mailings would go out under his name, he wanted to approve each letter personally.
At the end of the meeting, McAuliffe collected the copies of his plan, from everyone except Clinton.
On Tuesday, February 28, Dole was on the floor of the Senate until after 7 P.M., managing the vote on the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The amendment, requiring the federal government to balance its budget beginning in seven years and every year afterward, was a showcase issue in Gingrich’s Contract With America. Clinton was strongly and vocally opposed.
But the amendment had already passed the House with 300 votes, ten more than the two-thirds vote required of constitutional amendments. The Senate had debated the amendment for more than 115 hours, and Dole had 66 votes—just one vote short of the two thirds also required in the Senate. The Senate was going to vote that night. The Washington buzz was intense: Was Dole a leader like Gingrich? Could he get it passed?
“I think we do stand at the crossroads in American history,” Dole said, waving his good arm from the lectern on the floor. “I think this vote is one of the most important many of us will have cast in decades.” He cited the polls showing that 75 to 80 percent of the public favored the amendment. He railed and assailed, especially against President Clinton, who opposed the amendment. Dole cited more numbers, and turned to quoting George Washington, “The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and alter their institutions of government.” Then Dole acknowledged that he was in search of another vote and abruptly moved to adjourn the Senate.
Senator Robert C. Byrd, the 77-year-old West Virginia Democrat who was leading the opposition, rose to denounce the delay of the vote as a sad spectacle, “a sleazy, tawdry effort” of back-room dealmaking “so that additional pressures can be made on some poor member in the effort to get this vote.”
Dole rose in anger. He was tired, his body tight, his eyes intense. “To suggest that somehow this is unprecedented, tawdry, whatever, in my view, is out of bounds.” He noted that the voters had just elected a Republican majority in both the House and Senate. “They sent us a loud and clear message last November, and as I said, nobody knows what the precise message was, but generally, it was to rein in the federal government….”
Dole refused to yield to Byrd or anyone, and the Senate was adjourned at 7:41 P.M.
In New York City, Warren Rudman watched Dole blow up on television, and he placed an immediate call to him. By 9 P.M. Dole called back. Dole had begun jokingly to refer to Rudman as “The Oracle.”
“Bob,” Rudman said, “this is one of those calls where I promised to be a pain the ass. I watched you lose your temper with Byrd. Bob, you had a right to lose your temper, get angry. I understand. I would have done the same thing. But there is one difference: you’re running for president.” It had been his first slip in months. “You really looked nasty. Your head was down and you really bored in on Byrd.” Dole had been on the edge of losing it. “Jesus, Bob!”
“You’re right,” Dole said. He wasn’t sure how the performance was going to play.
“You looked tired,” Rudman inquired.
“Yeah, I was,” Dole replied. It had been three days of almost non-stop negotiations.
“There are two ways you reduce people to ashes,” Rudman said. “One is the way you did with Byrd, or you can do it with humor.” He then noted that nobody was better with humor than Dole.
Dole didn’t feel he had been that rough, but he didn’t challenge Rudman’s warning.
The delay on the balanced budget amendment vote didn’t work and the next day Dole fell one vote short, failing to sway Senator Mark Hatfield, the Oregon Republican who chaired the Appropriations Committee, into voting for it.
Without consulting any of his political advisers—or anyone else—Dole had been floating the idea that if elected president, he might pledge to serve only one four-year term, not seek reelection. That way he could serve as president without worrying about running again. It would be a presidency, though short, without political deals. It was a sort of Ross Perot, populist idea, Dole thought. He wanted to prove that he would worry about solving the country’s problems and making the tough presidential decisions, not becoming obsessed with his job ratings.
Lacy thought the idea was at least too radical and unconventional, if not crazy. It might be nice, but there was no way to put the presidency above politics. Everyone else who heard the idea linked it to Dole’s age. Many interpreted it to be Dole’s way of acknowledging that he might not be around or might not be up to the presidency before the end of his second term, when he would be 81.
On Saturday, March 4, Dole met with Reed, Lacy and Will. He was to appear the next day on CBS Television’s Face the Nation. They went through a fairly detailed discussion of what he should try to accomplish. First, he had to put the one-term idea to bed. It just put the age issue in neon lights. Second, he had to shift the failure of the balanced budget amendment away from himself and back onto Clinton’s shoulders. Clinton was the one who opposed it.
All three pushed pretty hard, emphasizing the need to figure out what he wanted his message to be and direct the interview that way, and not let the reporters dictate the agenda. It was a key part of the message discipline they were trying to impose.
At home in Annapolis Sunday morning, Reed settled in to watch the new message-disciplined Dole.
Put on the defensive right away about his inability to get Hatfield’s vote, Dole—unprompted and unnecessarily—disclosed that Hatfield had volunteered to resign from the Senate, making it possible to win the balanced budget amendment with 66 of the 99 senators. Dole said that he had rejected Hatfield’s offer. At the end of the interview, Dole said that if he won Iowa and New Hampshire, he’d have to take a hard look at the possibility of stepping down as majority leader in order to be a full-time presidential candidate.
Reed could not imagine a worse self-inflicted wound, stepping into Hatfield, keeping the focus on the Dole-Republican failure to win. His phone lit up. He went to his sailboat.
The Hatfield disclosure was the big news story the next day.
“What happened?” Reed asked when he spoke to Dole.
“Didn’t get…there, did I?” Dole replied. He thought the one-term idea coupled with the prospect of stepping down as majority leader would have an appeal. People would see he was being honest, candid. “A double feature,” Dole called it. “A) one term; B) step down.”
Reed pondered how he could make sure this did not happen again. He turned his attention to taxes. Being anti-tax was a virtual precondition for survival in the Republican Party, and Dole had not taken a strong enough stand.
“I’m managing this one myself,” Reed told Dole. They had to be 100 percent committed to having Dole sign an anti-tax pledge. They had to do it in Dole’s formal announcement in April. And it had to be done in New Hampshire, where in 1988 Dole had refused to sign a pledge not to raise taxes. The ghost had to be put to rest. It had to be the news of the announcement, and it had to be kept secret and sprung on the news media as a surprise. Big network news would be, “Dole Signs Tax Pledge.” Had to be. “This is that important,” Reed explained to Dole, “and I’m not leaving it to anyone else.”
Dole opposed a formal across-the-board anti-tax pledge on the grounds that if the Congress closed some tax loopholes, that would technically be a tax increase for some.
Reed figured he just had to surround the problem and surround Dole. If Dole didn’t lay the issue to rest, his whole campaign could collapse. All the Dole hands were brought in to make the case. Reed had a special anti-tax pledge drafted. Perhaps Dole would sign that?
Dole said that Phil Gramm was probably going to sign something stronger, so what was the point? And Dole’s chief of staff Sheila Burke was opposed to a pledge.
Reed continued with a three-week campaign. He and Lacy had a private meeting with New Hampshire Governor Steve Merrill, the key Republican in the state, who was remaining neutral in the presidential race so far. Merrill said he was for Dole signing an anti-tax pledge, and the word was passed to Dole.
Reed felt the campaign still lacked a comfortable center or clear direction. There were daily reminders. In an issue of Newsweek on the stands in late February, columnist George Will, husband to Mari Will, published a column about Dole’s presidential candidacy headlined “Good Man…Wrong Job?” It argued strongly that Dole lacked the rhetorical skills and habits to be president. And here his wife was the chief rhetorician of the Dole campaign. Reed felt embarrassed for Mari. Was this a signal? Reinforcement for his wife? Or a warning of some sort? George Will had written of Dole, “His aversion to written texts reflects, among other things, the fact that he, like many legislators is comfortable only with the conversational, unstructured, almost cryptic discourse…. But before Dole can be president, he must be a candidate who has the steely will to stay ‘on message.’”