Chapter Twenty-three

RE-ELECT

The signing of the welfare reform bill was followed that August by an extraordinarily productive season of governing. Republicans in Congress, not wanting to wear the obstructionist label as they faced voters that fall, abruptly abandoned nearly two years of confrontation. A long-stalled measure to increase the minimum wage finally passed. Even more important was approval of the Kennedy-Kassebaum legislation, a bipartisan proposal that gave people the right to carry health insurance from one job to another. The measure was a far cry from the comprehensive health plan Clinton once sought. But it was a laudable reform and a welcome piece of additional evidence as Clinton made his election year case that he was solving the country’s problems with progressive policies in incremental steps. He furthered the case later in the month when he signed an executive order granting new regulatory powers to the Food and Drug Administration to curb teenage smoking.

Implicit in the newly cooperative Republican strategy was that legislators were giving up on their presidential nominee, Robert Dole of Kansas, and looking out for themselves. Dole could hardly argue that the president was getting nothing done in Washington. He was left instead to warn that the election year Clinton was a fraud, and that once re-elected he would return to his old ways.

“He’s a closet liberal,” Dole brayed.

This was a hard charge to make stick against a president who had signed welfare reform, markedly lowered the budget deficit, and declared that the era of big government was over. Clinton simply laughed it off. “A president is too exposed,” he parried. “I don’t have a closet.”

Voters would eventually learn about some surprising items then collecting in Clinton’s closet. Who knows what might have happened if the name Lewinsky had surfaced in 1996 instead of 1998?

But Dole was hardly the man to slow the upward trajectory of Clinton’s presidency as he moved inexorably to re-election. While a brave man and commendable senator, he was a miserable presidential candidate. Even though Dole and Clinton rather liked each other, as Dole faced an election blowout he was stunned that voters were rewarding a man whose character and values he regarded as flawed in obvious ways. “Where’s the outrage?” he demanded plaintively.

Voters, in fact, had rather shrewdly taken the measure of both men. Clinton might be flawed, but not in ways that mattered to them—certainly not if the alternative was an aged and inarticulate figure like Dole. Still, the president was roaring to re-election on the back of an oddly ambivalent majority. A Washington Post poll two months before election showed that 56 percent did not believe he had “high personal moral and ethical standards,” and 52 percent did not believe he was “honest and trustworthy.” The same survey showed him with a fourteen-point lead over Dole. A political cartoon captured the mood of the year: It showed a pollster at the doorstep of a harried housewife, rolling pin in hand and hair in curlers. “I’m for the scumbag,” she tells the pollster. Voters were fully capable of applauding the things about Clinton they liked and looking past the things they did not. Republicans would spend several more years trying to learn this lesson.

The challenge for Clinton this year was not Dole but his own expectations about his presidency and its role in history. Clinton had done some substantial things as president, deficit reduction and welfare reform chief among them. But this campaign, like much of Clinton’s presidency, was now organized around the small but popular initiative. The Kennedy-Kassebaum measure was one example. So was his proposal, never enacted, calling for national drug-testing for minors before they got a driver’s license. There was his plan for a national computer registry to track sex offenders. There was a call for new federal rules to discourage and punish “deadbeat dads” who failed to make their child support payments. He urged new rules on federal meat inspections, and laws allowing longer hospital stays for mothers after childbirth. He implored localities to fight youth violence by imposing curfews and adapting school uniforms. All these proposals scored well in polls, and nearly all were defensible policies. There was nothing unworthy about advocating concrete initiatives to make lives better, even if they never would be confused with the New Deal. Still, did such items really add up to a consequential presidency?

Clinton had grown up in an America that associated greatness with largeness. He was born one year after his country had mobilized on an unprecedented scale to win history’s largest war. The paradigm achievements of industry in his youth were big, like the Boeing 747. The most awe-inspiring event in Clinton’s early life was the Apollo moon shot of 1969. Sometime in the succeeding decade, however, history had pivoted. The frontiers of human achievement were less likely to be explored by government and more likely by scientists and technology pioneers working alone, or in university or corporate labs. Moreover, their achievements weren’t big, visible things but invisible ones, like the microchip and gene splicing. This shift was accompanied by reduced faith in big organizations and big government projects. But the health-care reform effort of 1993 and 1994 reflected the values of two people who had been raised on the idea of bigness. By contrast, the values Clinton had embraced by 1996, in which government served as the catalyst for change rather than its principal engine, were far more in keeping with the spirit of the times.

For his own peace, however, Clinton needed reassurance that small measures still added up to something large. It was during this re-election campaign that he began regularly invoking Theodore Roosevelt. As he explained frequently in speeches, the challenges of the 1990s were similar to those of a century earlier, when the country made the transition from an agricultural to a large industrial economy. Now, America was making a shift from an industrial economy to a high-tech economy. Government’s role was to shepherd the shift and protect people from its harshest consequences. Clinton wanted historians to write, he said in one interview that August, that under his watch “America had made a major change in the way people worked, lived, and related to each other and the rest of the world” without a major war being the catalyst. He added, “The first time, obviously, being under Theodore Roosevelt’s administration.”

The historical analogy was imperfect. Roosevelt’s Progressive Era was a time of powerful clashes between big industry and a rapidly strengthening national government. TR himself was a confrontational personality who relished putting the federal leash on the “malefactors of great wealth.” Clinton, as an accommodator, had settled on a less ambitious project. His goal was not to create a new order between government and the private economy. It was to modernize the existing government to meet the demands of the age more efficiently. His conflicts were with Republicans who felt the time had arrived to discard large portions of government altogether.

Clinton had been citing Theodore Roosevelt all year, but his notion that the Bull Moose Republican had managed to achieve greatness without a war closely echoed a remarkable conversation the president had with Dick Morris a few weeks earlier. Usually, Morris’s nightly calls were brass-tacks business, devoted to going over the previous night’s polling or the next day’s schedule. On the evening of August 4, a Sunday, the consultant asked Clinton if they could talk a little more broadly. Morris had been thinking, he said, about how presidents make history. Clinton listened with interest as the consultant said he had ranked all forty of Clinton’s predecessors. Only eighteen of these had made enough of a mark to qualify as historically outstanding. Of these, only five—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR—qualified as “first tier.” Beneath these were two additional tiers of leaders who managed some level of greatness.

“Right now, to be honest, I think you are borderline third tier,” Morris said.

“I think that’s about right,” Clinton said. “What do you think I need to do to become first tier?”

There was little Clinton could do, Morris responded, unless an unanticipated event like war gave him the opportunity. But he presented a long list of other goals, from a battle to eradicate tobacco use to a global assault “to break the international back of terrorism,” that could vault Clinton into the second tier.

Perhaps many presidents have had similar flights of fancy. But there is no record of a predecessor plotting a bid for history with his strategist in such self-conscious detail, as if it were a presidential campaign.

Before Clinton waged his campaign for history, of course, he needed to finish his campaign for re-election. The 1996 election might have lacked suspense, but it did not lack innovation. Clinton’s signal achievement that year was to fashion what counted as the most comprehensive melding of politics and domestic policy ever in a White House.

Ground zero for this project was a bright and welcoming room in the White House residency. Every Wednesday, usually about 8 p.m., a large group of White House aides, cabinet secretaries, campaign consultants, and even the deputy national security adviser would finish the day by joining Clinton and Vice President Gore in the Yellow Oval Room. Here they would engage in long discussions about the political week ahead, as well as the president’s larger governing strategy.

These discussions had started small. In the beginning, there was just Clinton and Morris, sometimes joined by the first lady. Later, she dropped out and Gore came in, along with pollsters Mark Penn and Doug Schoen. Gradually, as Morris’s role became more public and the re-election campaign began in earnest, the group grew still larger. By the end, a couple of dozen people had gained the coveted right of attendance. The evenings always began with Morris providing an overview of the latest polling, often followed by media advisers Bob Squier and Bill Knapp previewing the latest campaign ads. As the Wednesday night sessions grew in size, Clinton necessarily became more circumspect, for fear that his unvarnished musings would get leaked. Sometimes he would just sit quietly, working a crossword puzzle, leaving people to wonder whether he was paying attention at all until he would suddenly interrupt someone’s talk by asking precisely the right question. With the exception of when the president was before an audience on the road, these evenings were his favorite time of the week. The Wednesday night group was the research-and-development department for a new brand of government Clinton had fashioned in response to the Republican takeover and the imperative of his own re-election.

After the debacle of 1994, Clinton had decided that he would never again allow his policies and public image to become so estranged from the main currents of public opinion. Never again did ideas flow from the policy operation on to the presidential agenda without being extensively tested through polling. Indeed, sometimes the pipeline flowed the other way. The political team would come back with data showing strong support for an idea, such as requiring employers to offer a choice between compensatory time and overtime pay, and insist that the policy operation come up with ideas to meet demand. Even the specific words Clinton would use to announce new proposals, or denounce the opposition’s ideas, were tested in polls before he said them. When Dole unveiled his tax cut plan, Clinton repeatedly called it a “risky tax scheme”—language that polls showed was the most effective in raising public doubts. Polls themselves were nothing new. Since FDR’s time, all presidents had used them, but no one before Clinton had so systematically merged his policy, polling, and communications operations.

This did not mean that Clinton always did what the polls told him to do. The interventions in Bosnia and the Mexican currency crisis demonstrated Clinton’s willingness to swim against the current when necessary. But only when necessary. In the main, he had concluded that his personal fate and his ability to check the congressional Republicans demanded that he create and sustain a wide margin of public support. No more going off half cocked, intoxicated by good intentions.

Sometimes this new realism produced initiatives that did not seem quite worthy of presidential attention. There was the announcement that Clinton had persuaded the cellular industry to donate phones to neighborhood watch groups. He ordered the Education Department to mail new manuals to schools on combating truancy. Some of Clinton’s moves, moreover, were nakedly defensive. In this category was his endorsement, over the objections of some Justice Department lawyers, of a new constitutional amendment to protect victims’ rights (he never mentioned the idea again after the election was over). There was also his stand on the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which said that states did not have to recognize same-sex marriages in other states. He had denounced the measure as election-year “gay baiting,” then signed it at one in the morning. (Years later, Clinton kept returning in conversation to this bill, insisting he agreed with its substance even while disdaining the Republicans’ motives in passing it. The fixation was a sure sign he felt guilty about what he had done.)

Yet many of the policies produced by Clinton’s new style of politics were not piddling, and had little to do with moving to the right. There were new regulations for meat inspection, stalled for years by industry opposition. He expanded federal power over tobacco advertising, despite warnings this would cost him votes in border states like Kentucky. This was an important blow against the cigarette industry, which continued to attract hundreds of thousands of new young consumers annually even as its products hastened the deaths of hundreds of thousands of older smokers. In one fell swoop, he converted 1.7 million acres of spectacularly scenic but coal-rich federal land in southern Utah into the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, sharply limiting mining in this wilderness expanse. This move was not popular in Utah, which Clinton had no chance of winning in 1996, but it was in neighboring Arizona, where he was running hard. So Arizona was where Clinton went to make the announcement, standing next to actor and environmental activist Robert Redford. What was notable about all these moves is that they were accomplished not with traditional legislation but through executive order—no approval of Congress needed. Facing hostile Republicans, Clinton had found a more inventive approach to governance by necessity. As Michael McCurry described it that summer, “It ain’t the New Deal, but it ain’t bad.”

The 1996 campaign was effective, but it was not much fun. Morris, never an admired figure among most of the Clinton team, had been growing increasingly rude and megalomaniacal. His emphasis on polls and small initiatives, meanwhile, had created a campaign devoid of adventure or romance. With the outcome preordained, the election became a desultory exercise.

There was a prominent exception to this, one person who was plainly enjoying himself. Bill Clinton had earned the right to feel good. After the hard work of 1993, the humiliation of 1994, and the predictions of doom in 1995, he was in command of events again. At fifty, he did not look so young anymore. The salt-and-pepper hair of four years ago was now steel gray. His appearance was more solid. He had been lifting weights, and, as one writer noted, now “fills out his suits at the chest, not just the waist.” Even more than election day, the triumphant moment for Clinton came as he headed to Chicago to accept his party’s nomination for a second term. He got there by train. This throwback to an earlier era of whistlestop campaigning would have him chugging for four days on the “21st Century Express,” through West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan on the way to Illinois—all heartland states critical to his re-election.

The crowds at the scheduled events were breathtaking, with thousands of people waiting for him at Columbus, Toledo, and Ann Arbor. Even more exciting were the impromptu admirers who lined the tracks to catch a glimpse of their president. He stood at the back of the train, with a loudspeaker in hand. “I like your dog!” he shouted as the train rumbled by. “Nice garden!” The trip was a blur of cornfields and corn pone. In Ohio, Clinton led the crowd in an off-key version of “Happy Birthday” to a supporter on her ninety-eighth birthday. The train ride, he told his staff, was “my idea of heaven.”

Reality came roaring back as the trip neared its terminus in Chicago. Deputy Chief of Staff Evelyn Lieberman took Clinton aside to warn that there were reports of a potentially troubling story involving Dick Morris. The tabloid newspaper Star was reporting, with corroborating details that left little room for doubt or denial, that the consultant had been carrying on a year-long relationship with a prostitute while advising Clinton. At first, Clinton seemed not to register on the news. He was soaring too high from his train ride. By the time he arrived at his hotel suite in Chicago that evening the implications were obvious: Morris had to go.

With Clinton’s acceptance speech scheduled for the next night, this was poor timing for a sex scandal. The president, however, seemed unfazed, even slightly amused, by the news, and not especially upset by Morris’s departure. The consultant had played an essential role in his rehabilitation. Increasingly, however, he had become more trouble than he was worth. The president had not been enthusiastic a few days earlier, when Time magazine put Morris on the cover with Clinton for its convention issue. Clinton met in his hotel suite that night with Vernon Jordan and Erskine Bowles, who had then returned to investment banking between tours in government. Jordan and Clinton turned with mischievous grins to Bowles. Go talk to him, Clinton said. I don’t work for the White House anymore, Bowles protested. “Why do I have to talk with him?” But Bowles was in fact the obvious choice. He had always had a smooth relationship with Morris, and soon he was making the trip downstairs to his suite, where the distraught and angry consultant was huddled with his levelheaded wife, Eileen McGann, and loyal aide-de-camp, Tom Freedman. After much resistance, Morris faced the inevitable by sunrise and left Chicago before most of the national press was even aware of the blossoming scandal. Hillary Clinton was worried Morris might commit suicide. The word went out that there was to be no gloating by Morris’s campaign rivals, and the Clintons and Gores both called Morris when he got home to Connecticut.

It was not until several weeks later, during the campaign’s homestretch, that Leon Panetta got to raise the question he had long been curious to ask. The chief of staff and several political aides were with Clinton in the front cabin of Air Force One, chatting on a relaxed flight back to Washington. Sir, he asked delicately, how did you ever get hooked up with a guy like Morris anyway?

You have to realize, Clinton replied, when I first came back to Arkansas with Hillary, politics was our entire life. The answer was indirect, but his meaning was clear. This is a tough business. We did what we had to do.