Dick Morris continued trying to reshape Clinton’s image. He was looking for occasions in which Clinton could show toughness in foreign affairs—another traditionally Republican strength. As Clinton was flying home from a Russian summit in early May, he had received a fax from Morris proposing a text for the president’s Saturday radio address on May 13 on Japanese trade. Morris’s draft stated bluntly that Japan would no longer get away with unfair trade practices and it threatened retaliation. Anthony Lake, the national security adviser, was shocked at Morris’s inflammatory language. The tone was slightly chilling, almost suggesting that the United States had won the war 50 years ago and now would finish the job with trade. It would be wonderful, raw-meat rhetoric for auto worker voters in Michigan, but showed no understanding of U.S. relations with Japan, trade issues, the U.S. automobile industry or the subtleties of diplomacy. If Clinton were to give the speech, he would launch a full-scale trade war.
Clinton rejected the draft. This was one of Morris’s bad ideas. In the radio address, Clinton said only that the United States was “hitting a brick wall” after 20 months of talks with the Japanese. The annual trade deficit with Japan was a record $66 billion, largely because of the closed auto market in Japan. “I am determined to open Japan’s auto market,” Clinton said in the bland address. “We don’t want a trade conflict with Japan, but we won’t hesitate to fight for a fair shake for American products.”
But Morris didn’t give up.
Before the Memorial Day weekend, Morris met with two of Clinton’s speechwriters—Donald Baer, the chief White House speechwriter, and Bob Boorstin, the speechwriter on the National Security Council staff who had been with Clinton since the 1992 campaign.
Morris said that he wanted to use the president’s Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery for a significant foreign policy statement. He began dictating to Boorstin an attack on state-sponsored terrorism, perpetuated by what he called the “rogue states” such as Iran, Iraq and Libya. In the post–Cold War era, the containment doctrine for holding off communism had to be turned on these terrorist states, Morris continued.
Boorstin dutifully started taking notes because Morris had indicated he wanted someone to take dictation.
Morris, speaking as the president, fired up the rhetoric, declaring that the terrorism of these states and their clandestine sponsorship of terrorism would no longer be tolerated. “We face no Hitler, no Stalin, but we do have enemies, enemies who share their contempt for human life and human dignity, and the rule of law.
“Our generation’s enemies are the terrorists,” Morris said. Terrorists kill children, the innocent and the peacemakers. “The threat to our security is not in an enemy silo but in the briefcase or the car bomb of a terrorist.”
Morris had dictated almost non-stop for five to ten minutes in one of his legendary creative jags.
“I’m sorry,” Boorstin said. “I can’t do this.” He had been around Clinton and his circle for four years. Management and policy making were often incredibly loose, but this was out of the question.
Morris looked at Boorstin with some dismay. “This is the kind of thing we have to do,” Morris said. “Show we are strong.”
Boorstin said the presidential speech on Memorial Day was traditionally a poem and a tribute to the war dead. The theme was sacrifice. “This is the wrong forum,” Boorstin argued. It was a cemetery and the audience was almost exclusively military, always a difficult group for Clinton, who had not served in the military. Best to get in and out, make no waves.
This was precisely what was wrong with the communications operation in the White House, Morris said. Opportunities needed to be seized. No presidential speech should be routine. Going through the old, stale motions was no longer an effective communications strategy.
“I have no permission or instructions,” Boorstin said. Tony Lake, the national security adviser, had said nothing about this. A new policy, if that was what it was, could not just be drafted by speechwriters.
Morris persisted.
In any event, Boorstin said, a saber-rattling speech that was so threatening could put Clinton in the position of not being able to follow up. It could turn out to be a problem in the 1996 campaign if there was a terrorist incident and Clinton’s deeds were not able later to match these words. “I’m not going to do this,” Boorstin said.
Morris consulted with Baer and Bill Curry, the presidential counselor who was Morris’s representative in the White House. They agreed to stick to a Memorial Day poem. On Monday, May 29, Memorial Day, Clinton did not mention terrorism or rogue states. He instead referred to Normandy, Iwo Jima, Korea and Vietnam. “At this sacred moment,” Clinton said, “we put aside all that might otherwise divide us to recall the honor that these men and women brought to their families and their communities and the glory they bestowed upon our beloved Nation.”
The next morning at Panetta’s 7:30 senior staff meeting, Lake, who was always turf-conscious, vehemently protested Morris’s effort to turn Clinton into some menacing war dog. He noted the absurdity and the hazards of allowing political consultants to back-channel on sensitive foreign policy issues. Leon had to get control, please, Lake said. This was truly dangerous.
Panetta was still fighting Morris, who continued to be a shadowy master at circumvention. He increasingly found Morris abrasive and arrogant. Panetta again put out an APB—All Points Bulletin—directing that anyone on the White House staff should immediately report to him their sightings or dealings with Morris.
The next month Clinton was in San Francisco for an address at the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Charter. Morris sent the president a one-and-a-half-page fax with his previously rejected ideas on terrorism. At the last minute Clinton went over the fax with Lake, and inserted a couple of paragraphs in the speech.
“Today,” Clinton said midway through the United Nations speech, “to be sure, we face no Hitler, no Stalin…. Our generation’s enemies are the terrorists and their outlaw nation sponsors…the briefcase or the car bomb.” He went no further, proposed no action, pledged no retaliation, and the remarks went largely unnoticed.
But for Morris, the back door still worked.
Clinton thought of himself as a deficit hawk, and could make a strong case for that belief. He had been elected in 1992 to fix the economy, and the very core of his economic plan—passed in his first year as president—had been a $500 billion reduction in the federal deficit over five years. Morris hounded Clinton on the subject of deficit politics, a central issue from both Ross Perot’s and Clinton’s campaigns in 1992, crucial to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and now in the fore with Gingrich’s latest goal of eliminating the annual federal deficit in seven years. Morris had polls showing its significance to voters. The deficit was basic to the overriding political questions of the day—the role of government and the well-being of future generations. The deficit had become an issue of values, even morals. Clinton had to have his own plan, Morris argued.
Clinton argued back that he didn’t like the deficit. But he had not received sufficient credit for what he had already done on the deficit and the economy. Laminated cards had been printed up to highlight his achievements. “The Clinton Economic Record,” a five- by seven-inch card, provided a side-by-side comparison of 15 key areas for measuring the state of the economy. The card compared the “Before” condition of what Clinton had inherited with “After 2½ Years.” The annual deficit already had been cut nearly in half. Job growth, auto production, business investment and home sales were up, while the critical yardsticks that were supposed to be down were down: unemployment, federal employment, inflation and mortgage interest rates.
Christ, he had reduced the federal deficit three years in a row—the first time in more than 40 years! The back of the laminated card, “The Clinton Economic Record: The Best since….
“Deficit: Coming down for 3 years in a row—first time since Truman was president.
“Job Growth: 7.1 million in just 30 months—better than any Republican Administration since Harding was president.”
Another dozen figures were listed, including the so-called Misery Index, the combination of unemployment (5.7 percent) and inflation (2.7 percent), which was the “lowest since 1968.”
Clinton was obsessed with the card, his press secretary Mike McCurry thought. Everybody in the White House and cabinet had to have one. McCurry had memorized it. The card was like a catechism to Clinton, the Apostles’ Creed.
Clinton wanted to run on what he had done. “The things we set in motion in 1993,” the president told his aides. “What I came here to Washington to do and started to get done here without a lot of help, without a lot of experience, without a lot of knowledge about how Washington works. What we started in motion in ‘93 was the right thing to do.”
McCurry could see that as much as looking for a message for the 1996 election, Clinton was seeking validation of the direction and course he had set. He wanted self-validation. Had he got it right? Was he doing the right thing for the American people? Watching and listening to this, McCurry was reminded that the greatest politicians have all been fraught with a certain amount of insecurity.
But as he talked more and more about the past and his first-term record, Clinton saw that no amount of jawboning would get people to recite his laundry list of achievements or see it as an argument for his reelection. That’s not what the presidency was about. “The presidency is about making an argument about where we go next,” Clinton finally said.
Precisely, everyone from Morris to McCurry agreed. Morris focused on the budget, and urged that Clinton present his own balanced budget plan with a promise to eliminate the federal deficit at a date certain in the future to compete with the Republican seven-year plan. He needed one in order to compete for voter attention on the basic questions of government and the future.
Panetta was opposed. He said that Clinton could not move too quickly to balance the budget or he would upset the delicate balance among Democrats in Congress. Though Panetta was a deficit hawk, a balanced budget by a date certain would require cuts “too painful for our people,” the chief of staff said. Make the Republicans pay and define what they would cut. It would be hard for them. Keep them out there. If Clinton proposed his own plan balancing the budget in ten or 12 years, the Republicans might just take him up on it. Get too close to the Republicans and they might embrace him and declare victory, Panetta said, throwing his arms out in a big bear hug, suggesting that Clinton might be swooped up.
Gore disagreed. He told Clinton that the administration would likely face a government shutdown in the fall because of the intensity of the philosophical disagreements with the Republicans and the likelihood of a massive miscalculation by Gingrich. “This is what is coming,” Gore said, “and we have to prepare for it now. And when the crunch comes, we have to have a position that will be seen as reasonable. And we must, and our position must be, respectful of the opposition.” The administration could not be in the position of opposing a balanced budget. “We can’t go out and say to the American people, it’s not important to balance the budget,” Gore continued. That bridge had been crossed with the 1992 election when Clinton had promised to cut the deficit in half in four years. Their 1993 economic plan was basically a deficit reduction plan to do that. Perot was saying it. The Republicans were saying it. One broad theme was that the country had lost its capacity for self-discipline. Failure to balance the budget fell under that heading. Opposing would be untenable, put the administration on the wrong side. With a date-certain plan Clinton could then stand fast on principles that divided him from the Republicans.
Clinton was listening, nodding his head.
“We have to get right on the issue of balancing the budget,” Gore said. They would get killed if the Republicans were able to present their program, saying, “We’re just trying to balance the budget.”
Clinton nodded again, indicating that he would think about it, but he did not say he agreed.
A very contentious debate followed among all of Clinton’s major advisers.
Erskine Bowles felt strongly that a specific date-certain plan would show that Clinton was serious, fiscally responsible and prudent.
Earlier in the year, Clinton had submitted a budget calling for annual deficits in the range of $200 billion a year. That spring, Dole had decided to bring the Clinton plan to the Senate floor for a vote. It had been defeated 99 to 0. Even all the Democrats had voted against it, showing that such a plan had zero support even in the president’s own party. Dole chortled that there could not be a more convincing demonstration that Clinton was way out of touch with the country, Republicans and Democrats.
The powerful repudiation stung Clinton. He told a radio interviewer in New Hampshire that he could balance the budget. “I think it can clearly be done in less than ten years. I think we can get there by a date certain.”
Panetta, Stephanopoulos and Ickes went crazy. They knew that Gore and Morris had been pushing for this for weeks. Such a plan would cause too many cuts in Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and education.
Four days later at a press conference, Clinton backtracked. “I believe that all Americans should be committed to bringing our budget into balance within a reasonable amount of time.” Seven years would not be
good policy, he said. “That would either require massive tax increases or massive budget cuts.”
“What are you going to do?” asked a reporter. “What are you going to do, sir?”
“I’m going—well, for one thing, the Republicans have to resolve the differences between themselves,” Clinton replied, and then ducked completely.
It was Morris’s turn to be beside himself. The previous month Clinton had publicly declared, “The president is relevant.” But now he was proving he was irrelevant. To be a player, a leader, Clinton needed his own plan, Morris insisted. He could not sit out on the sidelines.
Morris expanded his arguments to Clinton. First, balancing the budget was the right thing to do, government would be living within its means.
Clinton found this appealing. He had balanced his budget as Arkansas governor. He reviewed the 1992 campaign and his 1993 economic plan.
Second, Morris reminded the president that balancing the budget would be good for the economy and would reduce interest rates. Balancing the budget would be the single most reassuring thing he could do, Morris said. The action would ensure a robust economy all the way through 1996—key to reelection. Third, he said, it would preempt the most damaging attack on Clinton and congressional Democrats. For a decade the party had been labeled “tax and spend.” Well, how in the hell could you be a tax and spend liberal if you balanced the budget?
Morris also presented the issue as having a Zen quality to it: There was no way to fight the particulars of a balanced budget, even someone else’s, unless you embraced it.
Morris persisted. He just wouldn’t give up until Clinton declared himself for a balanced budget at a time specific.
The Democratic leaders in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, visited Clinton in the Oval Office and urged that he not proceed with his own balanced budget plan. Attacks on the Republicans for their plans to cut taxes for the rich in exchange for Medicare cuts for the elderly were just starting to take hold. Gore could see they were apoplectic.
On June 7 at 11:55 P.M., Clinton woke Senator Joe Lieberman out of a dead sleep. “Didn’t wake you, did I?” Clinton asked.
No.
Clinton said he was considering a pledge to balance the budget at a date certain. What did Lieberman think?
Lieberman thought about the old Hebrew saying, Don’t ask the rabbi a question unless you know the answer. Clinton seemed to be looking for fortification. Lieberman played his assigned role. He agreed strongly that it was very important, that it would take guts. Yes, Clinton should engage the Republicans on principle and national goals, with a balanced budget by a certain date. “The sooner the better,” Lieberman said. “You don’t have to present a full plan.” It would make Clinton almost “sublime” while the Republicans were still out there arguing with each other about the details.
Lieberman considered Dick Morris’s influence the best occurrence of the year in the Clinton White House. Morris was almost a New Democrat mole among the traditional liberals, and Lieberman thought his arrival an “act of God” to save the party.
Clinton decided he had to get on the playing field, and a speech was drafted. “We can’t be the party of the deficit,” he said. Gore personally called the four television networks requesting live coverage for five minutes at 9 P.M. on Tuesday, June 13.
“Tonight I present to the American people a plan for a balanced Federal budget,” Clinton said. In a dozen long paragraphs, he said his plan was designed to help working people, avoid cuts in education, strengthen Medicare, save Medicaid, cut taxes for the middle class, cut welfare and protect the environment. “Balance the budget in ten years,” he proposed. “Now mind you, we could do it in seven years, as congressional leaders propose. But the pain we’d inflict on our elderly, our students, and our economy just isn’t worth it.
“But this debate must go beyond partisanship.”
Clinton faced a virtual insurrection among Democrats. Many felt blindsided. Representative David Obey, the 26-year veteran Wisconsin Democrat, said, “I think most of us learned some time ago that if you don’t like the president’s position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks.”
The New York Post headlined the next day: “Bill Flips Again & Pushes For Balanced Budget.”
Morris was exultant. He had broken the system. He had broken Panetta, and Ickes and Stephanopoulos. He figured now he could get control of the White House staff, place his people in key positions. Message and political strategy were not enough. He would now move on personnel.
Clinton would win in 1996, Morris said. The victory party would be publicized to the American people through paid advertising on television, he only half joked.
Stephanopoulos was beginning to think that if Morris didn’t want to convert Clinton to a Republican, he at least intended to make him not a Democrat.
Mike McCurry was deeply worried about the Morris strategy. Taking all the Republican issues off the table sounded well and good, but if it worked the Republicans would be issueless. In that event they would surely fight with what remained. “They can only win by doing the single most dangerous thing for Clinton,” McCurry said, “which is to totally destroy him as a human being.” With the Whitewater investigation the Republicans were trying to destroy the First Lady, and next they would turn to the president. “They will do everything they can to turn him into a liar or turn him into a cheat or turn him into a philanderer. That basically is the danger here if you don’t have a substantive grounds for debate. I despair of that more than anything.”
On June 15, the Clintons went to Canada for the G-7 economic summit meeting. Hillary received an honorary degree from a women’s university. It cited her work and leadership on health care reform. The Canadian citizens and doctors she met praised her, going on and on. They claimed to have read the 1,300-page health care reform bill and they said what she was trying to do was absolutely right. It was so discouraging for her to see that the Canadians understood she had been right, while it seemed nobody in the United States thought so.
The previous month Hillary had been in the Ukraine touring a hospital, and the minister of health had taken out a copy of her Health Security Act and asked her to autograph it. The plan was brilliant, the minister said. It diagnosed health care problems on an international level and he hoped she knew how useful it was in guiding the Ukrainians as they attempted to figure out how to rebuild their health care system.
Hillary burst out laughing, but the bitterness was evident. “You know,” she remarked, “this is getting really embarrassing. I travel around the world, and this has happened to me dozens of times now, somebody from another country tells me that they’ve read it and analyzed it. More people have read it in the Ukraine probably than read it in the United States.”
All this reminded her of a point her husband had made in his inaugural address, that nearly every problem had already been solved someplace but we didn’t learn from each other.
Morris was determined to expand Clinton’s communications strategy as much as possible. That meant not just focusing and redirecting his statements and actions as president. It meant political advertising on television. Too many other people—opponents, the media—were defining Clinton and his ideas. Clinton had to get out front and define himself in the most controlled and directed environment: the political ad. Going on television with ads would move poll numbers up, which in turn would allow Clinton to generate more money for his campaign. Morris wanted to attack the crime issue—another traditional Republican issue. Political advertising by a sitting president was a dicey undertaking, especially more than a year before the election and especially since he didn’t have a primary challenger. Being too proactive so early could look like desperation. The advertising couldn’t be half-assed in quality or scope. The project would require millions of dollars. Would the money be available?
On June 19, Terry McAuliffe invited his national finance board to Washington for a meeting at the Mayflower Hotel and a reception at the White House. More than one third of the 200 members had already shipped in or were about to deliver on their midyear quotas of $25,000, which was half of their $50,000 overall yearly goal. That added up to nearly $2 million. McAuliffe had already made almost a dozen trips to New Jersey, where in three days the first Clinton-Gore fund-raiser would amass well in excess of $1 million. Same for the next fund-raisers in Little Rock and Chicago—$1 million each. McAuliffe was traveling around the country to major fund-raising cities to meet with the top Democrats and local fund-raisers. “Folks,” he said first, “we are coming to your city once. Now you’re used to primaries where we come five, six, seven times. We’re coming in once. It’s the only event we’re doing.” He wanted the checkbooks open.
On Thursday, June 22, Clinton flew to New Jersey for the fund-raising dinner at the Garden State Convention Center. The place was jammed and about 300 people who had paid $1,000 a plate didn’t initially have seats. Clinton was beaming, seeming joyous as he moved around to the VIP receptions for those who had sold a large number of tables. It was a security nightmare as the president moved around.
“Isn’t this great!” Clinton said buoyantly. There was no draw like the president.
“I can’t believe it,” Ickes declared, surveying the turnout. It was a huge boost, and Clinton was even more pumped as he was introduced and took the podium just before 9 P.M.
He thanked McAuliffe and the fund-raising crew for their efforts, “So I can devote my energies to being President and to running in a responsible way.”
He did not lay out the election as a contest between Democrats and Republicans. Instead, he said there were extremists in Congress. “There are people today in Washington who believe that the federal government is absolutely worthless except for national security.” Presumably they were Republicans, but Clinton kept referring to them as “people today in Washington” who didn’t want the government to protect the environment or who thought the answer to crime was to lock more people up for a longer time. At one point he said it was a battle between right and wrong. “You can have a decent humane budget and still balance it if you do it in the right way, not the wrong way. That’s the difference between us!”
“Bring this country together,” Clinton said. It had been one of Richard Nixon’s campaign slogans in 1968.
The total take was $1.2 million.
Erskine Bowles was pleased by the big fund-raising push. It made business sense. “The best time to go fishing is when you can,” he said. “The only better time is when they’re biting.”
The next day Clinton raised more than $1 million in Little Rock, Arkansas. McAuliffe would have more than $9 million raised by the end of June, a terrific first three-month fund-raising sprint. Now Morris had money to spend for television advertising. He had Bob Squier make a series of 30-second spots on Clinton’s successful efforts to ban deadly assault weapons.
In one of the TV spots, an Ohio police officer who was wounded by an assault weapon comes on screen and says, “President Clinton is right. It’s not about politics. It’s about a ban on deadly assault weapons.” Another ad began with a black and white film of police and citizens who were killed by assault weapons, shifts to color close-ups of assault weapons being loaded with ammunition. The announcer intones: “An officer. Killed in the line of duty. A father. Gunned down at work. A student. Shot at school. A mother. Murdered in cold blood. Victims killed with deadly assault weapons. Bill Clinton did something no president has ever been able to accomplish. He passed and signed a tough law to ban deadly assault weapons.”
Clinton himself appeared in another spot, saying, “Deadly assault weapons off our street. 100,000 more police on the streets. Expand the death penalty. That’s how we’ll protect America.”
Morris checked on how much cash the new Clinton-Gore campaign had to spend. He pitched Clinton a proposal to spend $2.4 million to run the ads in 20-some major television markets in key electoral states for several weeks.
Bowles was opposed. Looking at the matter as a businessman he said that advertising was not effective so far ahead of the decision point, which in this case was nearly 18 months away. Such advertising would be too early and ultimately have no impact. Clinton would be able to utilize those resources better later on, he said.
Ickes put it more directly. “The biggest fucking waste of money,” he said. Why? Who would remember? What could possibly be achieved? The ads would undermine the plan to keep Clinton looking presidential. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” These were precious funds.
Clinton approved the expenditure.
The White House publicly and privately offered a number of explanations for the unprecedented advertising blitz. McCurry said the ads were not campaign spots but were to demonstrate how vital it was to preserve the assault weapons ban, which Bob Dole had promised to try to repeal. Though no legislation was pending, it was a kind of preemptive strike.
Dole thought the ads were directed at his promise to seek a repeal of the ban. “Oh, right at me,” Dole said in his office. “No doubt about it,” he added, laughing somewhat uneasily. “I picked up on it.”
But the ads were central to the Morris triangulation strategy of repositioning Clinton. After the ads ran, he was claiming progress. “Moved him 10 points!” Morris said, referring to some in-market surveys where the ads had run. He compared these surveys with areas where the ads were not running, the so-called outmarket.
“What are you guys, nutty?” McAuliffe asked. He didn’t believe they had spent so much money.
Neither did Ickes. He believed in it even less, and went nuts himself.
Stephanopoulos decided not to fight. “Total horseshit,” he said. A temporary bump in the polls was possible with two weeks of solid ads in one state or region. Did it mean a damn thing? No. Affect Clinton’s national ratings? No.
This was an education for them, Morris replied. Going on the air was generating better numbers, which would make it possible to generate more money, which in turn would pay for more ads. They would see.
On Friday night, June 30, Dole and Elizabeth went out to dinner and then had a rare evening at home in their Watergate apartment. They tuned in to the C-SPAN public affairs cable television coverage rerunning some early Senate floor debate. Dole had made six speeches on the floor on subjects ranging from the Fourth of July and somebody’s retirement to Japanese trade talks and welfare reform. Then he argued on the floor with two of the most liberal Democrats, Senators Paul Wellstone and Carol Moseley-Braun.
“How can you do all these things?” Elizabeth asked. His life was so intense. He had to juggle so much.
“Well,” Dole replied, “so far, so good. I think the first six months were the hardest.”
The next afternoon, Saturday, July 1, I interviewed Dole in his Hart office for two and a half hours. Wearing casual khaki pants, a blue dress shirt with cufflinks, and purple Nike tennis shoes, he was very relaxed. I was again the last appointment of the weekend for him. After an hour and a half, he seemed to grow slightly tired. At the two-hour mark, I turned off the tape recorder for the last half hour and we just “visited,” as he called it, off the record.
“We’re trying to pace ourselves,” he said during the taped interview, his voice and demeanor suggesting some ambivalence about the reduced schedule. “It’s like today I’m not traveling, which is hard to believe. Tomorrow we go to Iowa, get back at 1 A.M. We’re off all day Monday.” That was July 4th. “Then we go to New Hampshire,” he said with relief in his voice and apparently in pleasant anticipation.
On the early theme of his campaign, Dole said, “I didn’t want to be in a contest with Phil Gramm on who was the, quote, ‘most conservative.’ I’m mainstream.” Dole said he didn’t think he had to shout the loudest, and expressed disdain for Gramm’s “take no prisoners” style.
Yes, he was still working on his message, even after all these efforts to win the Republican nomination, the 35 years in Congress. The speeches that Mari Will prepared had to make sense to him, he said. “You just can’t read something that somebody’s written and say, ‘Oh, boy, this is dynamite.’ You’ve got to have a feel for it and you’ve got to think, Jimminy, this might work. And this is the message. And I think we’re still testing it, and I think you can’t say that if I said this on day one, it’s going to be written in stone forever.”
I said that I didn’t think his message was clearly defined yet. “There’s something people are waiting for somebody to say that no one has said yet.”
“Right,” Dole answered. “I think you’re right.” He volunteered no new possibilities.
His strategy, he said, was to keep running the campaign the way it was. “As long as we’re on target, on message, and got money in the bank, and people are signing up, we’re mostly doing the right thing,” he said, adding wistfully, “But I also have been around long enough to know that somebody can make a mistake and it’ll be all over, too.”
Dole made one key point about the divided roles of managing the Senate and running for president. He realized he couldn’t be a presidential candidate first and the majority leader second. The 54 Republican egos in the Senate would not hear of it. He first had to be majority leader, trying to direct legislative business and his Republican colleagues. Only then could he be the presidential candidate. The Senate was hard, he acknowledged. “Somebody has to manage it. And it may not be manageable. It isn’t, you know, it’s a frustrating place sometimes but generally it works out.”
Though Dole seemed a little tired, he seemed to be in no hurry. I was not out of questions but I too was growing tired, and it seemed time to stand up and thank him.
At the end, Dole handed me a copy of “Ten Laws for Winning Presidential Elections” by Gerald F. Lameiro. He said someone had just given it to him. Dole was pretty excited about it and had a staffer making photocopies this Saturday afternoon of the Fourth of July weekend. The laws tried to reduce winning to a formula, noting the importance of optimism, economic prosperity, consistency, and a campaign built around an offense. Law number seven was the “Law of the Dominant Issue. There is usually one dominant issue in each election campaign.”
As I read it over later, I realized that neither Dole nor anyone in his campaign yet knew what that dominant issue might be. I certainly didn’t. What was going to drive the campaign?
The morning of Thursday, July 6, Clinton called Dick Morris from the car as he was on his way over to Georgetown University.
“Watch this speech,” Clinton said. He wanted to make sure that both Morris and Stephanopoulos tuned in to a speech he was giving called “Responsible Citizenship and the American Community.” Nearly everyone on the White House staff, including Morris, had not wanted Clinton to give the speech, but Clinton had insisted.
So the two aides went over to Bill Curry’s office in the Old Executive Office Building to watch the address.
“Today I want to have more of a conversation than deliver a formal speech,” Clinton said, but then lectured for nearly an hour on the need for “common ground,” a favorite theme that he had used before.
“I’ve got it!” Morris yelled, almost jumping out of his chair midway through the speech. “What’s happening here is the president has to go give a speech to the whole country to get us to listen to him.”
Stephanopoulos was astounded by Morris’s comment. It was so self-centered, almost megalomaniac.
Don’t you get it? Morris asked. Clinton was talking to them the only way he could. He did not want a sampling of a little from the left, a little from the right, a little Republican or a little Democrat. He was talking about a true dialectic—taking the thesis and the antithesis and achieving a genuine synthesis. Something new and above. He wanted them to agree, work it out. “Common ground.”
Stephanopoulos knew that Clinton’s efforts to get on course were always painful exercises to watch. And Morris was the latest instrument of his course correction, the most painful one Stephanopoulos could imagine. Morris often talked gibberish. Morris was small, Stephanopoulos concluded, no big-league strategist.
Morris and Curry for their part felt that the White House staff, embodied by Stephanopoulos and Panetta, and by Harold Ickes most of all, had perfected the art of passive resistance to new ideas, even Clinton’s. They just talked, debated and raised questions. They didn’t need to provide answers or a strategic direction. They just played to Clinton’s penchant for the fullest consideration of all alternatives, and won delay.
Later, when negative stories about Morris began appearing more and more in the media, Morris and Curry began to refer privately to Ickes’s operation as a “thugocracy,” because they felt he was trying to intimidate them both politically and personally.
On Friday, July 14, at 2 P.M., Bill Lacy and pollster Neil Newhouse went to Dole’s Majority Leader’s Office to report on the latest survey.
Dole was favored by 52 percent of the Republicans, the new poll showed, the first time he had been above 50 percent. More important, 22 percent of the Republicans said they were definitely for him. By comparison, Lacy said, George Bush did not reach 22 percent definite support until January 1988, a month before the Iowa caucuses that year. So in this sense, Dole’s position was six months ahead of Bush’s. The best news was that Dole’s support among Republicans who identified themselves as conservatives had risen above 40 percent. Phil Gramm had dropped into the abyss. Dole’s anti-tax pledge and the Hollywood attack had paid off, Lacy said.
Looks pretty good, Dole said. He latched onto the big bump among conservatives. Hollywood sure was an attention getter. What do we do next? he inquired.
Number one, Lacy said, most important of all we keep staying on our message. Number two, we come back and tap this entertainment industry theme from time to time without overdwelling on it. Number three, prepare for a big economic speech in September, which Dole had just agreed to do. They needed to come up with something for working people, to show the middle class how a Dole administration would make their lives better and allow them to keep more of their paychecks.
Most immediately, Lacy had been arguing that it was time for Dole to take Clinton head-on, and Mari Will had prepared such an approach for Dole’s upcoming speech at the Republican National Committee meeting in Philadelphia the next day.
But Dole was resisting, telling Will that he didn’t want to give any scripted speech to the Republican Committee. “I know these people,” Dole said. “I’ve been working with them.” Over the decades he said he had accumulated knowledge about their lives, their families, where they worked. He had been Republican Party chairman 25 years earlier when Nixon was president, and there were two or three good old souls still on the committee from those days. “I’ve always felt sort of a family relationship,” Dole said. That was his crowd. “Those ought to be Bob Dole supporters.” He wanted to set himself apart from the rest of the pack of presidential candidates. “It will be insulting to them for me to read just a political speech.”
Will understood what he was striving for—a personal connection, the campaign trail of small-town Kansas. She thought Dole wanted to be like Reagan, get up and say, just let me talk to you, push the scripted speech aside. Dole wanted to sound more sincere than a political speech.
Will had gone on vacation and some of her assistants had written the draft attacking Clinton. Often Dole felt that when he indicated he wanted things taken out of a speech, they would send back to him the same stuff thinking he would forget about it in the next draft. So he watched closely, reading each draft very carefully, noting when his deletions had been restored.
“Not much new and exciting in it,” he scribbled on the draft.
Next, Lacy and the speechwriters made three little changes and sent it back saying they had dealt with his input.
This time they had made his cuts but it was still dull, Dole felt. “This is the same,” he wrote back.
A few more changes were made in the next draft. Lacy argued that it was worth playing tug-of-war with Dole on this. Let’s stick to our guns and not make lots of changes.
“This is the same speech you sent me before with minor changes,” Dole wrote back.
Of course, that was the point, Lacy felt. That was the speech they wanted him to give.
Dole finally signed off on the speech. Scott Reed decided to go up to Philadelphia with him July 15. On the plane Dole clearly still wasn’t happy with the speech.
“It’s too boring,” Dole said. “It’s boring.” Reed said he thought it was an important red-meat speech that reporters would like because a good, sharp attack on the sitting president by the opposition front-runner would get lots of play on television and in the newspapers.
Nelson Warfield was one of the assigned blockers for the occasion, supposed to keep people, especially old Dole friends and advisers, away from the candidate as he moved about before his speech. But as Dole walked through a public hallway, a senior Dole campaign deputy from 1988 approached him. There was no way to keep this old friend away. He reported that Phil Gramm had just really gone after Dole in his remarks to the meeting, saying that tough welfare reform should not “perish on the ramparts of compromise and status quo and deal-cutting in Washington.” Gramm’s words were directed squarely at Dole. Respond, the former deputy said, invoke Reagan and Dole’s own service to Reagan.
This threw Dole off. He went out and did another one of his off-the-cuff Jay Leno routines, neglecting the prepared speech. At one point he referred to the Republican gains the previous year, saying, “It all started in 1944.” He corrected himself, saying, “1994,” but the slip underscored that he was World War II vintage.
Reed was appalled. Dole was stepping all over himself.
Dole told the party leaders that he understood the yearning for another Ronald Reagan. “Well, I am willing to be another Ronald Reagan. If that’s what you want, I’ll be another Ronald Reagan,” he said. The remark came out sounding like he would pander to the majority no matter what. Party leaders and delegates ridiculed him. Grover Norquist, author of the anti-tax pledge that Dole had signed, really stuck it in, saying publicly that Dole would dress up in a clown suit if that pleased the most people.
Warfield realized he had failed as a blocker. He also saw that Dole didn’t deal with abstract suggestions very well such as the one about invoking Reagan. He needed more direct suggestions or there was no telling what would come out.
On the plane back, it was mostly happy talk. Reed and Warfield didn’t realize the magnitude of the Reagan line until they saw it in the newspapers the next day. Reed had spent most of his time walking around with Dole instead of trying to guide reporters.
The New York Times ran a front-page story about Gramm and Dole fighting over welfare reform, with Gramm pushing the more conservative ideas such as cutting off payments to unwed teenage mothers.
Charlie Black, Gramm’s chief strategist, called Reed on Monday morning laughing.
“You took our bait!” Black chided.
Never again, Reed vowed to himself.
That line, “If that’s what you want, I’ll be another Ronald Reagan,” haunted Dole as much as any.
No matter how Warfield and the others in the Dole campaign tried to spin what Dole had said, their sale sounded a little ridiculous and not many reporters bought it. Warfield figured the political reporters for The New York Times had Dole’s line programmed into their computers and with the stroke of a single key the quote would be inserted into their stories on Dole. “It pops up all the goddamn time,” Warfield complained.
In an interview later, Dole said, “Well, I felt a little later on I could have gone back and cleaned it up, and I didn’t. I sort of left it hanging out there. What I wanted to tell those people who are all great Reagan fans was that I’d worked with Reagan, we’d cut taxes together, and he had made a [positive] statement about my leadership, that he sort of started the revolution. Probably should have said it that way.”
But Dole had another problem with making an unbridled attack on Clinton such as the one in the speech Will had prepared. Some very important matters that went beyond the value of one political speech were yet to be worked out with the administration—welfare reform, the budget and Bosnia.