B was reelected president by 49 percent of the voters.
Exactly one week before the election, Dick Morris’s chief pollster, Mark Penn, met with the cabinet in the Roosevelt Room to give us the Morris version of the Lesson of 1994.
Penn is standing at one end of the big mahogany table. He points to a chart on an easel. “We started working on this here in January of 1995, when Clinton was ten points behind Dole or any other likely Republican. And now we’re here.” He moves his finger to November 1996, which shows B leading by twenty points. Translated: Dick Morris was the genius behind this remarkable comeback, and I deserve some of the credit too. That’s why you’re all here listening to me today. Kiss my ass.
Penn steps back toward the table. “We did this by co-opting the Republicans on all their issues—getting tough on welfare, tough on crime, balancing the budget, and cracking down on illegal immigration.”
He then pushes a button on a VCR mounted on a stand. We see five different Clinton-Gore campaign commercials, each illustrating one or more of these themes.
Penn stops the tape and turns back to us with a self-satisfied grin. “We also addressed the issues swing voters care most about—their kids and their families. The suburban swing are busy at their jobs and worry about the values their kids are picking up. These aren’t the sorts of things a president can do much about, of course. [Translated: You’re all completely irrelevant.] But it was important to show the President was concerned. So we emphasized teen smoking, school uniforms, nighttime curfews, drug testing at school, and sex and violence on television. All these polled very well.” Another self-congratulatory grin.
The cabinet sits mute.
Penn goes back to the chart and points to the lower line, which represents Dole’s ratings. “The third part of our strategy was to keep Dole down. Every time he approached fifty percent approval, we knocked him down ten or fifteen points with these ads.”
He pushes the VCR button again, and we get a sample. Most of the ads picture Dole with Gingrich. Their faces are gray. The voice-over warns of cuts in Medicare and education. I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to be impressed or appalled.
Penn continues, looking directly at me. “We stressed optimism. And the mood of the country flipped from being anxious to being positive. Now people are oriented to the future. They don’t care what Bill Clinton did in his first four years. [Translated: Everything you busted your asses for was completely irrelevant.] They’re eager to get on with the next four.”
He pushes the VCR button for the third time, and now the picture is bright and sunny. The music is upbeat. The voice-over speaks about how wonderful things are, and how even better they’ll be after B is reelected.
“If we had run this eight months ago no one here would have believed me.” Penn smiles at me. I smile back through my teeth.
Penn summarizes in two simple sentences, like a teacher talking to his dim-witted class. “This election signals the end of the old Democratic coalition of blacks, the elderly, and the downscale. It marks the emergence of a new Democratic coalition of women, Latinos, and, especially, middle-class suburban married couples.”
The session’s over. No one has said a word. My colleagues look dumbfounded. We file out of the Roosevelt Room in silence.
I wander upstairs to Gene’s office.
“We just had an amazing lecture by Dick Morris,” I say.
“He’s back?” Gene asks incredulously.
“No. Only his shadow, Mark Penn. He just handed out the most self-aggrandizing bunch of crap I’ve heard in a century.”
“Don’t argue with success,” Gene says meekly.
Indeed, it was a success. B is only the third Democrat to pull this off in this century, after Woodrow Wilson and FDR. I probably shouldn’t argue with it. Maybe I’ve been too much of an idealist. Maybe that awful cliché—politics is the art of the possible—is true after all.
But the fact is, remarkably few people voted. The turnout was the lowest percentage of the voting population since 1924—seven million fewer people than in 1992. And almost all of the new non-voters were from households earning less than $50,000 a year. The great mass of non-voters—which keeps growing—is overwhelmingly poor or of modest income. They didn’t vote in 1996 because they saw nothing in it for them.
Who knows what the result might have been had B given them something to vote for? Had more lower-income voters gone to the polls, they might even have elected a Democratic Congress. Had B ignited their interest and their passion, the Democratic party might dominate America for decades to come. But as it is, the largest party in America is neither Democratic nor Republican; it is the party of non-voters, who see no reason to become involved.
Were Morris and Penn correct as well about the national mood? Did it flip? Did B’s happy talk actually work? Here, too, it depends on whom you’re talking about.
As soon as Buchanan’s candidacy ended, the national media lost interest in widening inequality and stagnant wages, just as Morris had predicted. And then came the feel-good Olympics, and the first full season of baseball since 1993. And the economy continued to generate new jobs and low unemployment. All this surely helped. By the end of 1996, incomes had become slightly less unequal, mainly because more people were employed and they were working long hours, and because elderly retirees with low incomes were doing better.
But even though more people had jobs, their earnings continued to diverge. Earnings inequality among full-time adult workers was greater by the end of the first Clinton administration than it had been at the start. Workers with only a high-school education or less continued their long-term slide. And workers in the middle were earning no more than they did in 1989. Top professionals and executives, meanwhile, continued to soar. The wage gap was mirrored in a benefits gap. As employer-provided health care and pensions dried up for lower-wage workers, it increased for people at the top. Pensions took the form of compensation deferred until retirement. And the stock market roared. The top ten percent of households, holding almost seventy percent of the stock market’s value, including all pension benefits, enjoyed most of its rise. In short, nothing fundamental changed to alter the national mood.
Morris was correct about one thing. A president does interpret reality to the nation. He can’t alter it, but by explaining it he can make it more palatable. If the President says times are good, and says it often enough and convincingly enough, people may begin to accept that times are as good as they can be.
“You’ve got to understand,” Morris explained to me one day in the main corridor of the West Wing, when I was on one of my forays to find the loop. “Clinton tacks to the right when the wind is blowing right. Then he tacks to the left when it’s blowing left. Now it’s blowing right, so that’s where he’s heading. But he always knows his ultimate destination.”
“Where’s that, Dick?” I asked him.
“Back to the White House for another four years,” he said, without so much as a smile.
B and Al Gore did go back for another four years. But the story doesn’t end there.
Tom Glynn, my taciturn deputy, became chief operating officer of the biggest network of hospitals in Boston.
Kitty Higgins became Deputy Secretary of Labor in the second Clinton administration.
Joe Dear, the embattled head of OSHA, left to become chief of staff to the governor of the state of Washington.
Gene Sperling became chairman of the National Economic Council. Last time I saw it, his office was clean as a whistle.
Laura Tyson went back to Berkeley, to teach.
Leon Panetta also returned to California, hinting he’d run for governor.
George Stephanopoulos left the White House to teach at Columbia and do political commentary on television.
Dick Morris sold his campaign memoirs for $2.5 million.
“Chainsaw Al” Dunlap became president of Sunbeam Corporation and fired half its employees within the year.
Bill Bywater, the fiery president of the Electrical Workers Union to whom I gave the monkey wrench, was driven out of office by a man who vowed to fight for more job security for union members.
John Sweeney, the new president of the AFL-CIO, started an unprecedented campaign to recruit new members.
Newt Gingrich was reelected Speaker of the House by a slim margin, and then reprimanded by the House for misusing funds and misleading the House ethics committee.
Mr. Ono of Bridgestone finally settled the strike with the union and rehired everyone.
Don Fehr and Bud Selig agreed that the big teams would subsidize the small ones—almost exactly the proposal Selig had rejected two years before—and ended the baseball wars.
Several federal judges decided the President didn’t have authority to issue his executive order on striker replacements, and the Justice Department decided not to take the issue to the Supreme Court.
The new minimum wage went into effect.
Just before Christmas, the National Retail Federation placed full-page ads in major national newspapers urging customers to be wary of goods made in sweatshops, listing the names of major retailers that had pledged not to deal with them.
The fiscal year 1997 budget started right on schedule. The biggest budget cuts were in programs for the poor.
At the same time, the nation’s budget deficit had been reduced to a tiny 1.4 percent of the nations output, the lowest percentage since Richard Nixon was in the White House, the lowest of any industrialized nation.
Some half a billion dollars was spent on the presidential elections. Most of it came from corporations and Wall Street, which outspent even organized labor in their support for Democratic candidates.
Several Republican congressional leaders launched a campaign to rid the federal budget of “corporate welfare.”
Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, the most powerful man in America, began his fourth term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Soon after the election, I had breakfast with Greenspan in his private dining room. When I arrived, he was reading the newspaper and eating porridge.
“Congratulations on the reappointment,” I say, sitting down in the chair opposite him.
“Thank you.” He smiles and puts down his paper.
We talk about many things, but the conversation finally turns to the new welfare law. I tell him how difficult it will be to get jobs for people on welfare without displacing poor people who are already working. “There aren’t enough jobs to go around,” I say, “especially ones that pay enough to live on.”
“Labor markets are extremely tight,” he responds, taking another spoonful of porridge.
“But maybe not tight enough,” I say pointedly. I tell him what our analysts are finding. “Only in metropolitan areas where the official level of unemployment is under three percent are we beginning to see employers recruit from the central city and train employees in basic skills.”
“We can’t go tighter.”
“But, Alan, the benefits to society would be enormous. And you know better than anyone that there’s no sign of accelerating inflation.”
“Once you let the inflation genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to get him back in.” He takes another spoonful.
“Haven’t you been telling Congress lately that the government’s official measure overstates inflation? If you’re right, there’s even less reason to worry about it.”
“Why not at least experiment?” I ask. “Try lowering interest rates and see what happens. If inflation ignites, then go back to where you were.”
He smiles and wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Too risky,” he says. “We have to maintain the confidence of the market.”
I’m not surprised by his response. His job, as he understands it, is to keep inflation at bay—not to get people from welfare to work, and not to raise wages for workers at the bottom. And I give him credit. Under his stewardship, the economy has experienced both low inflation and low unemployment. B would not have been reelected otherwise.
But if it’s not Greenspan’s responsibility to help the people at or near the bottom, whose wages and benefits have fallen fastest and who haven’t benefited from the good times, whose responsibility is it? The rest of the federal government is abdicating responsibility. State and local governments are unlikely to take it on, even when they’re in charge of reducing the welfare rolls. As Americans increasingly segregate by level of income into different townships, local tax bases in poorer communities are not capable of supporting the same quality of schooling and other local services available to the wealthier. De facto racial segregation has become the norm in large metropolitan areas, as I saw in Philadelphia. Class divisions are tracking the boundaries of towns and cities. Economic apartheid is becoming the rule.
Can we expect companies to recruit and train people out of the generosity of their corporate hearts? Not as long as Wall Street continues to reward the likes of Chainsaw Al Dunlap. There must be an economic inducement. Tight labor markets are an important first step.
I bid good-bye to the most powerful man in America, and wish him well.
As for me, I had expected to stay on in the cabinet. But about two weeks before the election, something happened to change my plans.
The issue had been building for many months. Ron Brown’s death had crystallized it for Adam, Sam, and Clare. They wanted me home in Cambridge, not because they feared I was in any danger but because they experienced my absence even more acutely than before.
I had resisted. Even with all its frustrations, my job was the most fascinating and rewarding I could ever hope for. I felt I had accomplished a great deal in four years, but there was so much left to do. If B was reelected, I wanted to help devise ways to move welfare recipients into jobs. I knew Medicare and Social Security would be revisited. Republicans wanted to turn Medicare into private medical savings accounts, and Wall Street was salivating over the prospect of “privatizing” Social Security. I wanted to be there to argue that the wealthier and healthier shouldn’t be allowed to opt out of these insurance pools, that we can’t have still more shredding of what’s left of the social compact. And I wanted to fight what was certain to be another Republican push to cut capital-gains taxes on the wealthy.
More generally, I wanted to stay at work on the problem of widening inequality of earnings, wealth, and opportunity. B didn’t have many other people around him who would push him to do what he could to reverse these trends. I don’t mean to suggest that no one else cared about them. But few of the others had known B as long as I, and thus felt as free to talk candidly to him about them.
The prospect of being away from Glare and the boys saddened me, but for the most part I put it out of my mind. Earlier in the fall I ran into a friend who had been in the administration, whose youngest child was just then heading off to college. He had left the White House just before the 1994 election. I asked him if he regretted missing the action. He said that leaving was the hardest decision he had ever made, but that the times with his daughter during her last two years at home had been among the most precious of his life. The conversation gave me pause, but I was soon back in the fray and I forgot about it.
The issue came to a head the Friday of the week before the election. I hadn’t been home in six days. I promised Clare and the boys I’d be back soon after dinner that evening. But as it turned out, there were meetings at the White House that I couldn’t miss.
When I called to tell the family I’d be late, Sam answered the phone. I explained to him that I wouldn’t make it home in time to see him before he went to bed. He said that was okay. “But will you wake me up when you come in, Dad?” he asked.
I told him I might not arrive until early in the morning and that he needed his sleep. “I’d like it if you’d wake me,” he responded. “I just want to know you’re here with us.”
Then something seemed to snap inside me. It was almost as if I were transported to someplace very far away where I could see everything at once—Adam and Sam in their infancies, then as toddlers, then young boys, then as they were when I started in Washington, at ages eleven and eight, respectively. Then I saw the young teenagers they are today, ages fifteen and twelve. And I could see beyond, as they reached late adolescence, then as they left home, and as they became young men pursuing their own independent lives at an age corresponding to mine when I first met Clare at Oxford almost thirty years ago. And I knew then that I didn’t want to miss the precious few years we still had together as a family. I knew with as much certainty as I’ve known anything that it was time for me to come home.
“I’ll … wake you when I get home, Sam,” I stammered.
“Thanks, Dad.”
How do you balance a job you’re deeply committed to against a family you deeply love? In the end, you can’t, It’s not a matter of finding a better “balance” because you can’t do more of both. It’s not fixed by managing your time better because you can’t schedule when a young teenager will want to sit and talk, or when you and your spouse will want to share intimacies. I had devoted four years of my life to being secretary of labor and I didn’t regret it for a minute. I hoped I had done some good. But I knew then that I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t return.
Not long after, I told B I’d be leaving and explained why. He said he understood.
My last official meeting with B was in December, after the election. He was running late, as usual. I waited in the little outer office next to the Oval until his meeting broke up and he beckoned me in.
He sat down on the chair facing away from the fireplace, where he always sits. I’m on the couch next to him.
“So what’re you gonna do?” he asks.
“Not sure. Probably teach, write, cause trouble—what I was doing before.” This feels awkward. Neither of us knows quite what to say.
There’s a long pause. He looks straight at me. “We tried, didn’t we?” he asks. “We did some good things.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say quickly. “And you’ll have four more years to do even more.” I force a smile.
His eyes move away. “It was a hard four years.”
“But you came back.”
He grins. “Those bastards have a completely different way of thinking about the world. They don’t think government should even exist, except for national defense. But the public was with us.”
“I think they always were.”
“I think you’re right.” He grins again.
Another pause. “What are you gonna do now, Bill? What do you want to be remembered for?”
“Pulling this country back together,” he says smoothly.
“It’s still coming apart, you know. The rich are even richer and the poor poorer than when we arrived. People in the middle are still under enormous stress.”
He nods. His eyes turn glassy. He doesn’t want to hear me sing my usual song.
I continue, trying not to sound accusatory. “I heard you say the other day that balancing the federal budget was your most important goal for the next four years.”
“It’s something we have to do,” he says matter-of-factly.
“But the deficit is down to almost nothing. The whole goddamn budget is an accounting number. What about the poor? They’re bearing the brunt of deficit reduction.” I’ve raised my voice. “And what about the investments? Four years ago you proposed an extra fifty billion dollars a year, and it’s vanished. You can’t possibly deliver education and job skills on the scale they’re needed, and you won’t be able to do much of anything else.…”
“I’ve got to deal with these Republicans,” he says softly.
“It’s insane!”
He shifts in his chair. I’ve stepped over the line yet again.
He changes the subject. “I bet Clare and Adam and Sam can’t wait to have you home.” He smiles, and his eyes sparkle.
I’m willingly seduced.
“My family has forgotten how hard I am to live with,” I say. “In a month they’ll want you to hire me back.”
Another long pause. He smiles affectionately. “I’m gonna miss you like hell.”
“The hell you are.”
We laugh.
Then he reaches over and gives me a bear hug, and I hug him back. And then we stand silently, and silently walk out of the Oval Office together.
That’s all there was to it. That was how we left it.
There was a good-bye party at the department. About a thousand attended, including senators and House members, a fair number of them Republicans. Hyperbole is to be expected at such an occasion. Al Gore and Bob Rubin said a few glowing things about me. John Sweeney told the crowd I was the best labor secretary since Frances Perkins. Gene Sperling got completely carried away and claimed my ideas were foundation stones for the Clinton presidency. And so on. Then Tom and Kitty presented me with the gigantic chair I’d sat in during cabinet meetings, so large I could never bend my knees and had to sit like a three-year-old with legs extending straight outward. The brass tombstone on the back of the chair was now engraved with the official date of my departure. Then I stood and thanked everyone and pronounced a few banalities. I would have said more and said it better if I weren’t fighting to control a tremor in my voice and a lump in my throat. And then, when I finished, the employees of the Department of Labor stood and cheered for what seemed like a long time.
I’m back home now, for good. Cambridge hasn’t changed much, except the old house has developed some new leaks. Old friends eye me a bit warily when we first meet again, as if I’ve been to another planet and back. I suppose I have. But after a while we take up where we left off.
Clare is busy teaching law and running her domestic violence institute. Adam is rehearsing for a high-school play, which I have a good chance of seeing. Sam is becoming proficient on the drums; his recital last week was a knockout. The boys are spending most of their late afternoons and evenings on homework or on the phone, and weekends with their friends. I’ve taken a teaching job at Brandeis University, which seems to be a stimulating and friendly place. Everyone’s preoccupied, and that’s probably how it should be. We’re back to normal. Most days, at least, we have breakfast and dinner together.
By the way, the new hips are still working beautifully, four and a half years after they first went in. I remember how trapped I used to feel in the old body that could barely walk. I’m free now—freer than I’ve been in years.
—February 16, 1997