CHAPTER

TEN

Bob Dole’s Turn and Clinton’s Return in 1996

When a president is running for reelection, his standard keynote message is to point with pride at what he has done the first term and promise even better results in a second. Presidents who can’t make claims to fit that formula usually have trouble winning another four years. Bill Clinton didn’t have much to boast about in 1995 after the voters repudiated his Democrats and Republicans won Congress. He got over it and won, boosted by an adroit early campaign, an inept Republican challenge, and an economic revival. But going in, he sounded defensive and sometimes dispirited. He said he knew that Americans were insecure, worried about the uncertain economy and distrustful of political leaders, including the president. “I’m trying to get people to get out of their funk about it,” Clinton said in September 1995. I thought I heard an echo of Jimmy Carter in 1979. Malaise by any other name is not a promising diagnosis for a president to deliver when he is asking voters to reelect him. In his own slump after the trouncing of the Democrats in the 1994 congressional elections—a beating many of them blamed on the president—Clinton was reduced to arguing that he was still relevant to what was happening in Washington, even with the new Republican Congress at center stage. A president who has to deny that he is irrelevant is a politician in trouble.

“They used to call me the comeback kid,” Clinton said as his approval ratings sank. Actually, “they” didn’t. He called himself that. Now the title was president, and Clinton needed a real comeback, not just a campaign gimmick. He got it, with the unwitting, sometimes witless help of those same Republicans. They were running Congress for the first time in forty years, and they didn’t remember how to be in charge. Zealous conservatives commanded the House, and they overplayed their hand, which played into Clinton’s. So by the time the 1996 campaign began, the oversold Republican revolution was slumping and Clinton was resurgent. Maybe he was a bit sleazy, but he came across as a leader who cared about people and their needs, an image drawn more sharply as the GOP House tried to slash away at social programs. When the government ran out of money and shut down some operations in a budget deadlock, the Republicans figured Clinton would get the blame, but they did.

Clinton’s presidential beginning had been shaky, with lurches to the left, mishandled choices for the Cabinet and top administration jobs, and then, worst of the lot, his failed attempt to decree an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

The moderate, middle-road course Clinton had advertised in 1992 seemed to have veered from his map and the Democrats suffered for it in the 1994 elections. But Clinton was adaptable. He said the message was that people still thought the government was more often the problem than the solution. That was, of course, a Ronald Reagan line, and if the voters wanted to hear it from a Democrat, Clinton would oblige them. Before the 1996 election, the conservative good news-bad news joke was that the next president would be a Republican—and that his name would be Clinton.

The other name was Bob Dole, finally nominated on his third attempt, after a Republican contest that was brief but scarring. It was as though Dole had been awarded a gold watch for long, faithful service to the party, which he certainly had delivered for more than thirty years, eleven of them as the longest-serving Senate Republican leader. By the time Dole clinched his nomination, Clinton was back in full stride, flush with campaign funds—some of them tainted, his liberal dalliances, if not his sexual ones, behind him.

The field included some of the usual suspects, among them Pat Buchanan on the Republican right and Ross Perot, back as a candidate with his hypocritical, grating claims that he didn’t want to be president but had to run for the job in answer to a call to duty, which only he heard. There was a boom for Colin Powell, who did nothing to disown it until his 1995 book publicity tour was over, and My American Journey was a raging best-seller. Steve Forbes showed up with his publishing fortune and his flat tax notion, climbing the charts in what turned out to be a fad that faded, out of pocket $36 million when reality hit and he quit. Lamar Alexander, former Tennessee governor, former Cabinet member, roamed the early primary trail in his plaid shirt, as though that would make him the political outsider he pretended to be. I thought Alexander probably would have been the strongest nominee against Clinton, without the lumberjack getup. But he couldn’t get past the early primaries, and when he tried again four years later, he didn’t even make it that far.

It was a campaign that set new highs for spending and a new low in the conduct of hired gun campaigners when Dick Morris, who advertised himself as the genius behind the president’s remodeling, landed in a sex scandal. Morris lent spice to the dull Democratic National Convention when he was forced out of the campaign over his conduct with a pricey prostitute, who sometimes listened in on a telephone extension while he counseled Clinton.

“Pricey” was the word for the campaign, too. Clinton’s comeback plan required big spending early in the season, and Democratic fund-raisers went after it with tactics that were borderline at best, illegal at worst. Republicans said Clinton turned the Lincoln Bedroom into a money-raising motel, offering overnight stays for high-roller Democratic donors. The Republicans had their own money hunt. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, whose view that he should be president was not widely shared, said that to be competitive, a candidate for the nomination would have to have at least $20 million in hand on January 1, 1996. Gramm raised that and more, but not even his $26 million bankroll was enough to buy him a way into real contention, and he quit before the first primary.

The reform lobby Common Cause reported that between them, the two national parties raised $231 million in unrestricted contributions for the 1996 campaign, “soft money” in Washington jargon. That was more than triple the take for the 1992 elections.

Dole was the leading Republican candidate from the start, “tempered by adversity, seasoned by experience,” he said. He’d be getting more of both. Bob Dole was one tough politician. His right arm was shattered in World War II combat that almost killed him, and he never recovered full use of it, a particularly difficult disability for a politician because constituents and voters always want to shake hands with the senator. He usually carried a pen in his right hand, shook hands with his left. When you got to know him, you’d extend your left hand, too. The hatchet man of the 1976 vice presidential campaign had mellowed, but the new, older Dole still had to be careful not to revive the dark-side image. “I went for the jugular,” Dole said of his caustic campaign history. “My own.” In the 1976 campaign, Dole sent an aide to a hardware store in Jackson, Mississippi, to buy him a hatchet. The guy had to go through a security obstacle course to get it to the candidate, but did, in time for the evening’s rally. “I pulled it out of the sack,” Dole remembered. “I said I’m supposed to be the hatchet guy. Here’s my hatchet.”

“I,” incidentally, was a pronoun he seldom used as he campaigned in 1996. He referred to himself in the third person, as in “Bob Dole is a man you can trust,” or “Bob Dole’s policy would be to cut taxes.” It was an odd affectation, apparently cured by defeat because he went back to the first person singular after the 1996 election.

While Clinton needed a political revival, he had one advantage no second-term Democrat had enjoyed since Franklin D. Roosevelt: He was unopposed for renomination. Dole began with a lead to defend in a widening Republican field that would reach ten before his rivals faltered. Even so, I always got the sense that I was on a nostalgia trip when I traveled with the Dole campaign, that it was one last tour for the veteran, and that it would end in retirement, not the White House. It was Dole’s turn at last. The establishment was with him. When his people tried to get an early endorsement from the governor of New Hampshire, Steve Merrill jokingly wondered why, when “they’ve already got everybody but U. S. Grant.”

Dole got started a full ten months before the New Hampshire primary with a kickoff rally at the colonial town hall in Exeter, entertainment provided by a skydiver and daytime fireworks. The show was on. Every fourth winter, the New Hampshire primary campaign draws droves of reporters and TV cameras, some crews from as far off as Sweden and Japan, to interrupt the customary peace of historic streets and town squares. Yankees welcome the business. Hotel rates go up, and the restaurant menus are at summer tourist prices, not winter bargain rates.

Dole was a skilled and seasoned legislator who knew the realities of budgets and taxes and, responsibly I thought, always had resisted the political allure of promising never to raise taxes. But he had suffered on the tax issue in his first two presidential campaigns, and he wasn’t going to risk votes on it again, so he took the position he’d considered irresponsible and said flatly that taxes would not be raised. He signed The Pledge, the gimmicky promise the antitax lobby regularly pushed on Republican candidates, promising that he would tolerate no increases. It was playacting, a commitment that could not be kept forever, as Dole knew, and as George Bush had discovered in reneging on his antitax vow of the 1992 campaign. But Dole took it anyhow as insurance against tax hits, cover he needed with his critics trotting out an old Newt Gingrich quote. In his days as a backbench rebel, the speaker of the House had called Dole “tax collector for the welfare state.”

Dole wasn’t the only Republican doing advance work in New Hampshire that spring. I turned on the radio in my rental car, and there was Pat Buchanan on a call-in show, disputing a questioner who said he had fascist tendencies. Buchanan said it wasn’t so. He said Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was the prototype fascist, wore uniforms, and invaded Ethiopia. Buchanan said he wore suits, not uniforms, and put America first. At least it was a unique commitment: I never heard another candidate promise not to invade Ethiopia.

“If I get elected at my age, you know, I’m not going anywhere, I’m just going to serve my country,” observed Dole, who was seventy-three. His sentences tended to drift. “Whatever,” he sometimes concluded. He was given to talking in the jargon of the Senate cloakroom, an alien language to puzzled voters. He never got over that problem. “I’m going to say this slowly because it will make your eyes glaze over,” Dole prefaced a campaign talk on his economic proposals, once he had some, after wasting months casting for a theme. “We’re starting to get some ideas out there,” Dole observed, the implication being that his campaign hadn’t started with any. His Republican rivals were no better at what George Bush had called “the vision thing.” They were, as right flank Representative Bob Dornan of California said during his brief, fringe candidacy, “charismatically challenged.” Steve Forbes did have one specific new proposal, although only one. He wanted to replace the federal income tax with a flat tax, which caught on as a topic, a sort of flavor of the month, especially after he began pumping money into television ads for the proposal. Then it ebbed, and so did the Forbes campaign. When the Republican candidates debated in the fall of 1995, they came on as ten men in dark business suits, talking about change but looking like a board of directors bent on business as usual. They’d been maneuvering and arguing with each other for months, long enough to be repeating themselves to the point of boredom, especially among the reporters who heard it every day. We do tend to have short attention spans.

That was the setting for the Colin Powell phenomenon. The retired black general who hadn’t even declared his party preference became a media star, cover man in the newsmagazines, soaring in the polls—all of which diverted attention and effectively stalled the Republican campaign until he quashed the speculation that he would run. I went to see Barry Goldwater, then eighty-six, in Phoenix that spring. Goldwater had dutifully endorsed Dole, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. He said he preferred Powell. “If Powell decides to run, he’ll get elected president,” Goldwater said. “If he runs as a Democrat, I might turn into a Democrat.” Powell didn’t buy into the rumors, but he knew the game, and he played it to advantage—a gesture here, a companionable telephone call there, and the media stars kept his stock rising. His twenty-three-city book promotion tour took on the flavor of a political swing. In November 1995, he declared himself to be a Republican and said that he would not run. “I understand that they are looking for new ideas and fresh faces in American politics, and I certainly was one,” Powell said.

I never thought the Powell boom was more than a bubble. It was politically incorrect to say so, but a black candidate had no chance of winning the election. The race factor didn’t come into play because the candidacy was theoretical. Put a black candidate into real contention for the White House and racial politics would have risen again. Nor could Powell have been nominated by the Republican Party. Conservatives dominate the GOP establishment, and they wouldn’t accept rational compromise on social issues, let alone a nominee who supported affirmative action and a woman’s right to choose an abortion. One of Powell’s exit lines seemed to me to cover both barriers. He said that when he talked about his views on social issues “instead of being burned at the cross immediately,” he found some Republicans actually willing to listen.

With Powell out, the lineup was set. Dole was still at the head of it, a particularly advantageous position given the latest round of Democratic tinkering with the rules, which accelerated the primary election schedule again. Political junkies called the result “front-loading,” and in 1996 that meant thirty-two states would be voting in the first six weeks of competition, a pace that favored the favorite, even a shaky one. And Dole certainly was that. Forbes was gaining headway with his TV barrage of flat tax ads. “If you take away the tax code, you take away the power of the Washington politicians,” Forbes advertised. A companion ad said Dole was just one of those old-fashioned politicians, that he was against change and had been voting for tax increases for years. Forbes, of course, hadn’t voted for or against anything because he never held office. Now he was the new-look cover boy of the Republican field. Before he was finished, which was soon, Forbes had spent more than $20 million of his own money, most of it on TV ads that scarred Dole all season. “Millions of dollars of negative advertising,” Dole complained. “It’s terrible. I might not even vote for myself.” The real problem was that the Forbes offensive forced Dole to spend more of his legally limited campaign funds in the winter than he could afford, leaving him strapped in the spring, when he had the nomination locked up but little money to put into the a national campaign against Clinton. Forbes’s speeches were monotone, his campaign mono-issue, his attempts at humor as flat as the tax idea. But his scrap-the-tax-code notion took hold, and soon all the Republican candidates were talking about flat, or at least flatter, taxes. Dole promised “an entirely new tax system,” although he’d been around the old one long enough to know that it is resistant, if not impervious, to an overhaul. In 1976, Carter had called the tax code a disgrace and promised to scrap it for a simpler one, but he left the system more complex than he’d found it. Taxes were always campaign fodder, and the simplicity theme put a twist on it, so Forbes hit a political nerve twenty years after Carter with his promise to make it so simple that a return would fit on a postcard.

But it was the belligerent Buchanan who closed in on Dole when the voting began in Iowa. Dole led the field but didn’t dominate it—26 percent to Buchanan’s 23, a margin of only three thousand or so votes. Alexander ran third and claimed satisfaction. The playing field moved to New Hampshire, but the game didn’t change. It was everybody against Dole, with Buchanan urging his forces on the right to “lock and load” and fire at the establishment. Alexander told anyone who would listen that the frontrunner was a voice from the past, out of ideas and out of his time. Dole’s performance was not inspiring. “I didn’t realize that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue,” he confessed after touring a New Hampshire factory just before the primary. That was as silly as it sounded, and Dole knew better, but he was stuck with what he’d blurted. Dole couldn’t break his unhappy habit of using congressional jargon about amendments to amendments and the like, baffling code to most people, instead of talking in terms voters could understand. What made sense at the Capitol made none in a New Hampshire town hall.

Dole got what seemed like a boost when Gramm conceded that he couldn’t win, quit before the primary, and endorsed the Senate leader. It was a so-what plug because Gramm had scant support and no way to transfer it to Dole anyhow. And it backfired because it took a conservative figure out of the running, which I thought could only help Buchanan, who stood to inherit any stray votes on the right.

He did, and he won the primary, with a 1 percent margin that shook the Republican hierarchy. “All the peasants are coming over the hill with pitchforks,” Buchanan crowed. He said he had the knights and barons of the Republican Party on the run. They didn’t run far; they ran to Dole, fearful that a Buchanan rebellion would wreck the whole ticket in the fall. Buchanan beat Dole by only 2,274 votes, not even a droplet in a national election bucket but enough to hobble the leader and shake the party. A holy war like the one he’d tried to declare at the 1992 convention was only going to help the Democrats. In party councils and in the political media, Buchanan was not treated as an upset giant killer but as a threatening loose cannon of a candidate. That led to another reverse spin. I later concluded that losing New Hampshire helped Dole clinch the nomination quickly. He wasn’t inspiring, he was the same old face, but he was safe, not menacing.

Appropriately enough, a dense winter fog shrouded Concord the morning after that New Hampshire primary. Dole was a shaky front-runner at best and the Republican situation was as murky as the weather. But Dole still had the strongest national organization and the healthiest campaign treasury for the rush of primary elections just ahead. Besides, losing to Buchanan was not as damaging to Dole as if he had been defeated by a credible candidate for the nomination. Buchanan was not going to be on the ticket; Republicans might turn to the right but not that far. He’d had his best night in New Hampshire in 1996, just as he had four years earlier in his losing challenge to Bush. “It’s the mainstream versus the extreme,” Dole said. But Buchanan wasn’t his only problem. Forbes was still at it despite a sorry showing in New Hampshire. He won a primary in Delaware, where nobody else campaigned, and he bought one in Arizona, where nobody else spent the kind of money he did—$4 million on a TV ad onslaught. Forbes said he was writing the obituary of conventional political punditry. Actually, he was buying his own campaign obit. He faded and Dole soon clinched the nomination.

Strangely, a day after Dole swept eight presidential primaries and all but certified his ticket, Jack Kemp, the former congressman and Cabinet member, declared that he was for Forbes. Kemp acknowledged that he was somewhat late in backing his flat tax pal. He was very late. Eight days and one more beating after Kemp had boarded his sinking political ship, Forbes quit the campaign and said he’d support Dole. And five months after that, Dole made Kemp his vice presidential running mate.

Kemp had a long history as a tax cut champion. As a representative from New York, he had joined Senator William V. Roth of Delaware in sponsoring the tax bill that was the prototype for Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981. Kemp had been a pro football quarterback in San Diego and Buffalo, and he was almost as athletic in promoting his bill. Kemp was the showman, Roth the toupeed elder of the two sponsors. I interviewed them together in a cubbyhole Capitol office back in the Reagan era. Kemp waved his arms as he argued his case. At one point, his gesture just missed the senator, who lurched back so hard his toupee went awry. Dole didn’t buy Kemp’s economic and tax theories, and their differences in those years got down to personal insults. Kemp said Dole was devoid of vision. Dole sniped back that Kemp was a pretty boy who wanted “a business deduction for hair spray.” Those tiffs were forgotten when Dole swallowed hard and asked Kemp to run with him that summer.

When Dole nailed down his nomination, the realistic rivals got out of the way. Buchanan was a different story. He’d concede the nomination was Dole’s, but he wouldn’t concede the campaign. He wanted clout and a platform at the Republican National Convention. So he kept running, although he shelved his active campaign for a while. “Bring the pitchforks, we’re going all the way to San Diego,” he told his supporters after losing twenty-five primaries in a row. He did nothing to dispel the scary image. At one point he peered out from under a broad-brimmed black hat, brandishing a shotgun over his head. Denouncing the North American Free Trade Agreement, he told people not to eat Mexican avocados because they had bugs. By then he sounded buggy himself. Bush had tried to placate the right with concessions to Buchanan in 1992. All that got him was trouble, and Dole wouldn’t do it. Buchanan said it would be a calculated insult if he was denied a prime-time speaking role at the San Diego convention. He was, and couldn’t do anything about it. Buchanan’s campaign finally ended with more whimper than bang in August, the day before the convention roll call that ratified Dole’s nomination. Buchanan issued a one-page statement endorsing Dole, with a hollow claim of triumph and vindication because the Republicans had adopted a conservative platform. They always did, and it would have happened with him or without him; if anything, his weekly primary defeats had shown signs of weakness on the right, not strength. He could fight Republican resistance and fire back at ridicule, but there was no defense against irrelevance. “He’s a commentator, not a candidate,” Dole had said while Buchanan was a holdout campaign challenger. Soon, Buchanan was back on the air, a commentator again—until the next presidential campaign.

His nomination secure by mid-March, Dole was a winner with a money problem. He’d had to spend most of the $37 million the law allowed for a primary candidate who got federal campaign subsidies. That led him to a silly suggestion. Clinton had no opposition for renomination so Dole said the president wasn’t morally entitled to the $12 million in federal funds he had received. “He ought to give the money back,” said Dole, as improbable a demand as I ever heard a candidate make. Clinton had more than $20 million to spend that spring and early summer before he hit the ceiling. By mid-April, Dole was bumping against the limit. Clinton’s bankroll went into television advertising, beginning his national campaign long before Dole could afford to start his. At the same time, Clinton was out raising more money, with tactics and sources that skirted and sometimes crossed the line of legality. By the time Clinton and the Democrats got into trouble over fund-raising conduct, they had spent the money to take command of the campaign, no matter that some of it had to be given back to illicit donors after the election.

Still, Dole had a card to play. This was going to be the campaign of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Republican leader of the Senate against the Democrat in the White House. A test of men in charge not only of rival parties, but of branches of government. That never had happened before. So the Senate would be Dole’s stage, his campaign would be centered there instead of on the road, which made sense with the travel budget about spent. “I’m going to be a full-time senator,” Dole said. And not just the senator from Kansas; he was going back to his job as the majority leader. “It’s just something I do fairly well.” In fact, he did it very well, as minority and then as majority leader. He knew how to make the wheels turn, when to lubricate them with compromise, how to get things done in the Senate. When a Democratic senator said he should quit as GOP leader in order to be a presidential nominee, Dole said if he was supposed to do that, Clinton should quit the presidency to run for it again. But the strategy of campaigning from the Senate was a flop. Within two months of announcing it, Dole resigned not only his leadership but his Senate seat, too, in an attempt to jump-start his stalled challenge to Clinton.

With the presidential campaign on, the Senate, balky and cantankerous at best, was at its worst, stalled and snarled. The Senate job that was supposed to be a springboard for Dole was turning into an anchor. Congress was gridlocked, and Clinton was making it a telling issue against Dole. Besides, while the Senate is a farm system for presidential candidates, senators seldom win. Only three men have won the White House while serving in the Senate, only one, John F. Kennedy, in the twentieth century. Slumping while Clinton gained in the public opinion polls, Dole offered up his dramatic sacrifice, forsaking the Senate after thirty-five years in Congress. On May 15, he announced he would quit within the month. He sobbed when he told his Senate staff, showing the private Dole the voters never saw, the human side of the tough guy. His voice choked as he announced he was resigning, but he kept his composure. “I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people, and nowhere to go but the White House or home.” Not that home meant he was going back to Kansas. Home was a fancy apartment at the Watergate. And the fallback would turn out to be a marquee role with a Washington lobbying law firm, a rainmaker, as figures like Dole were called in the Beltway world.

Dole’s campaign motto claimed that he was a doer, not a talker. That wouldn’t fit after he resigned from the Senate, and he had a lot of fast talking to do to reinvent himself. He’d already acknowledged that he could not match Clinton as a performer, conceding that the president was “a good speaker, a better speaker than I am.” And ex-senator Dole had the challenge he’d always faced: defining goals and programs that would convince Americans they should unseat a president even though things were going fairly well. Dole had answered like the legislator he was, dealing with campaign issues by talking about bills and amendments, proposals that could not be enacted but might serve as political sales points. Stalls, filibusters, and Democratic parliamentary ploys blocked that path and made the Republican Congress look hapless, a target the Clinton campaign couldn’t miss. Dole’s allies said the Senate had become his prison. He was out, but only on probation.

While Dole was trying to transform himself, Clinton already had, adopting an old-fashioned strategy with a newfangled name: triangulation. It was a fancy label coined by Dick Morris, the self-advertising campaign consultant. In Franklin Roosevelt’s time, a passion for anonymity was a job qualification for presidential advisers. Morris had a passion for promoting himself as the brains behind the Clinton revival. Triangulation meant blaming the Republicans on the right when things went wrong, scorning the Democrats on the left and planting Clinton back in the middle. That was the solid ground on which Clinton won the White House in the first place, before straying off into such issues as gays in the military and his futile attempt to overhaul the health care system all at once. He said in 1995 that he had been too obsessed with trying to do too many things at the same time. Forget that. Clinton declared an end to big government in his election-year State of the Union address. The Republicans complained that the Democratic president was trying to sound like Reagan. He was, of course, but there was no political patent on rhetoric. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Clinton wanted to talk in the center, govern on the left, and hope nobody noticed the difference. The Republicans had figured out the Clinton strategy. But they never figured out how to counter it.

Indeed, Gingrich and company blundered into helping Clinton make the game plan work when the Republicans balked at budget compromises in late 1995 and early 1996, leading to selective shutdowns of federal agencies for lack of appropriations. The Republicans believed the president would suffer politically for the stalemate. Wrong. They did. And the episode, illustrated on Democratic terms with the temporary closing of sites like the Washington Monument, propelled the Clinton comeback. In the Republicans’ heady First Hundred Days in command of Congress, Clinton was the afterthought in the White House. “The president is relevant here, especially an activist president,” Clinton said. It was a forlorn claim; no other president had to argue that he really was a big shot in the Washington scheme of things.

But Morris already was at work on a campaign revival that began with a barrage of television advertising in 1995. They were ads for Clinton but they were disguised as more general Democratic commercials. That way the party could spend $32 million without counting it against Clinton’s account or disclosing the sources of the money. The spending was supposed to be independent of the candidate and his operation. But the candidate was the president, and the independence was a fiction. It was the start of the anything-goes fund-raising that became one of the chronic scandals marring Clinton’s second term. The fund-raising abuses surfaced before the election but never caught on as an issue against Clinton. Never mind the potential consequences after the election; the big money, big TV strategy was working in the world of political operators like Morris and that’s all that mattered.

The day before Clinton’s renomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Morris held forth for a select group of political columnists and commentators. I was supposed to be there, but I’d been knocked out of action by an intestinal infection. That Sunday, the day before the convention began, I wrote a piece recalling the tumult of the last time the Democrats met there, in 1968. It was a reminder of my seniority—there were not many of us covering the 1996 convention who had been there twenty-eight years before. I got a more painful reminder as I finished my story, a sharp pain in the stomach. I figured it would go away, but it got worse, to the point that I had to be taken to the emergency room. I spent the convention at Northwestern University Hospital with an IV pumping antibiotics into my arm to treat diverticulitis, drowsily watching the proceedings on television, out of convention action for the first time since 1964. There always is an air of excitement at a national convention hall, even when all the decisions have been made in advance and the proceedings are only a show. I found nothing exciting in what I saw on TV from my hospital bed. I don’t know whether it was the doses of medicine or a dose of reality.

At that lunch with the columnists, Morris boasted of the way he’d put the whole campaign together and theatrically excused himself to make a private telephone call, leaving the impression that he’d had to tell Clinton what to do next. What Morris had to do next was resign the following day, when accounts of his kinky sex with a Washington prostitute made the newspapers. Clinton said Morris was “my friend and a superb political strategist,” and privately kept in touch with him later in the campaign. And Morris was the man Clinton called in 1998 when he was trying to decide how to deal with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They hatched a quick poll on the impact of confession versus denial, and Clinton then decided to dishonestly deny everything. In 1996, the Morris episode was a flap but not an issue. “It says something about who you surround yourself with, doesn’t it?” Dole asked archly. It said more about the way consultants with loyalties for sale had perverted campaign politics. Morris had worked for Republicans before he went back to Clinton’s campaign payroll in 1995. One of his clients was Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the man who succeeded Dole as Senate leader. Morris had been calling Lott in 1996, sometimes with inside campaign information, even after the White House reprimanded him for leaking polls on voter attitudes about a budget dispute in Congress.

After Morris quit he signed a big money deal for a tell-all book, which came out under the title Behind the Oval Office. Essentially, Morris wrote that he was. Clinton responded sarcastically that he’d had something to do with his own reelection. Within months of his forced exit from the 1996 Clinton campaign, Morris was back on the TV talk show circuit, and political writers were calling him for talking-head comments on the election and the second Clinton term. He later became a columnist for the New York Post, the newspaper he had accused of yellow journalism for publishing the prostitute story that drove him out of the Clinton campaign in the first place. Notoriety was its own reward.

In the 1996 campaign, my role was as an observer and analyst for my AP columns, with less hands-on news reporting than before. I still took a turn at my old spot-newswriting specialty now and then, but a new generation of AP reporters was taking over, and I didn’t want to be in the way. It was a season of nostalgia but also of satisfaction because my successors were people I had tried to guide and help on the way. My columns were appearing in hundreds of AP newspapers—they went to more than 1,500 newspapers three times a week. Editors told me they liked what I was writing and wanted more, which I appreciated. But I kept in mind the advantage I enjoyed over my syndicated rivals in column writing: Their columns had to be sold while mine were part of the basic AP service to newspapers, no extra charge.

Dole struggled all that spring and into the summer for lack of money. He had $62 million in federal campaign funds coming when he was actually nominated by the Republican National Convention in mid-August, but until then he had to scrimp. He tried to make ethics an issue, but survey after survey showed that while people rated Dole higher for honesty and integrity, Clinton was their preference for president. The Republicans said Clinton was hijacking their issues. He was. He was frustrating them because he was so good at it. Welfare reform was a campaign-year topic in Congress. As a candidate in 1992, Clinton had promised to “end welfare as we know it,” but he shelved the idea, taking on health care and leaving welfare for later. My guess was that if he had kept the welfare commitment instead of overreaching on health care, he and the Democrats would not have taken such a beating in the 1994 elections. After the Republicans won Congress, they pushed through tough welfare terms, but Clinton vetoed their bills twice. Then he bent, compromised, and signed a GOP-drawn welfare bill despite liberal Democratic protests, accepting provisions he said went too far in restricting benefits. Swallowing that Republican medicine, he made it sound as though he had written the prescription himself, erasing an issue Dole had tried to claim as his. Clinton said, disingenuously, that he’d never worried about the political impact of the welfare debate. Then again, Dole had claimed that his resignation from the Senate had nothing to do with the polls that showed him lagging behind Clinton. That was about as credible.

With the lead in hand, Clinton waged a low-risk campaign without major proposals for change, only minor ones. He had plans to deal with deadbeat fathers, with wife beaters, and to take unspecified steps against overseas sweatshop labor on imported goods. He favored school uniforms so that inner city kids wouldn’t fight about clothes. There’d be a toll-free number for victims of domestic violence. He wanted a second emergency line in case 911 was busy. He supported local curfews for teenagers. He favored cautious tax reductions for the middle class, balanced by spending cuts. He wanted literacy tutors, family leave laws, and school computers. Clinton’s miniagenda kept him safely in the center, away from the costly social programs of the liberal Democrats. Listening to some of them I thought he sounded like a candidate for county council, not president. But his tactics succeeded.

I never did figure out what Dole’s strategy was. I don’t think he did, either. He thought the character issue would boost him against Clinton, saying that “the drip, drip, drip” of ethics accusations would erode the president’s standing. But until the latter days of the campaign, he shied from a direct challenge on Clinton’s ethics, wary that to do so might revive his old image as a political knife-fighter. Dole stepped on his own lines. He’d once said that he was running for president because every country ought to have one, and now he seemed to have no better explanation, no blueprint for a new government. He sounded defensive, not a good omen for a challenger. “I’m not some extremist out here,” he said in one of his debates with Clinton. “I care about people.”

It was midsummer before he settled on a centerpiece issue: He’d cut taxes by 15 percent. He’d always been skeptical of the Reaganomics idea that tax cuts would pay growth dividends and bring in more money at lowered rates, but now he not only signed on, he signed up the political guardian of that theory, Kemp, to run with him. It wasn’t an easy match between two men who had been scorning each other’s ideas for years. Dole went shopping for a vice presidential nominee who might shake up the sluggish Republican campaign but couldn’t find one among the two dozen more companionable names on his prospect list. None of them seemed likely to be much help. “What about the quarterback?” Dole finally asked his advisers, who hadn’t thought he would turn to Kemp. The two men had feuded across the Capitol when Kemp was in the House and as rival candidates for the 1988 nomination. But Dole didn’t need a pal on his ticket, he needed a push. Maybe the energetic, photogenic Kemp could provide one. At least the selection was unexpected, which was not the case with anything else that happened at the Republican convention in San Diego. That was the convention at which ABC’s Ted Koppel announced that he was packing up his Nightline show and getting out of town because there wasn’t any news. “Nothing surprising has happened,” he explained to his TV audience. “Nothing surprising is anticipated.” I thought that was showboating because we all knew going in that nothing surprising would happen at the convention. Koppel certainly knew that when he got on the plane to San Diego. He could have saved the airfare, but if he hadn’t come at all he couldn’t have made himself a news story, if a brief one, by leaving in midconvention.

It was a three-convention summer: Republicans, Democrats, and Ross Perot’s Reform Party. Perot was on the TV interview circuit early, on the road in the spring, pretending he was not a candidate—although he said he would run should he be drafted by the Reform Party. “This is not about me,” he claimed. But the Reform Party was Perot’s creation. His share of the 1992 vote entitled its nominee to more than $29 million in federal campaign funds. I couldn’t imagine that anyone believed Perot had built a party to be a vehicle for an ego trip by any candidate but himself. He kept saying he really didn’t want to run for president again, and Dick Lamm, who had been governor of Colorado as a Democrat, announced that he would seek the Reform nomination. Suddenly, but not surprisingly, Perot then decided that he’d have to run after all because “the American people want me to do this.” There were dissenters in the Reform Party, but the “contest” for the nomination, with voting by mail and computer, was a sham. Perot, of course, was nominated. He never came close to the standing he’d gained in the 1992 campaign, and he couldn’t get into the 1996 campaign debates, although he sued trying. The candidate who once had complained that he was sick and tired of having people ask him to spell out his positions had a worse political headache now: Nobody much cared.

Dole fretted about the Perot vote and made the mistake of asking him to endorse the Republican ticket late in the campaign. The appeal was supposed to be secret, but it leaked instantly, making Dole seem desperate, which he was. Perot said the plea was weird and inconsequential. Still, if he wouldn’t endorse Dole he would denounce Clinton, saying the president was so ethically flawed that he might be forced out of office in a second term. “How could you even consider voting for a candidate that has huge moral, ethical, and criminal problems facing him?” Perot asked.

There was a sexual harassment suit pending, four special prosecutors were investigating Clinton and Cabinet officers, and prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigations of the Clintons’ role as investors in a failed Arkansas land deal had been broadened to cover a purge of the White House travel office and the improper handling of confidential FBI files on Republican figures. Dole tried to stir the ethics issue by indirection, saying he was a man to be trusted without saying flatly that Clinton was not. He got more explicit late in the campaign, accusing Clinton of betraying the public trust, but he still couldn’t ignite the character question. Clinton piously said people wanted a campaign of issues and ideas, not insults.

Traveling with the Dole campaign, I saw the frustration of his balancing-act attempt to cut down the president without a backlash. What Dole might gain by getting tough he could lose by looking nasty. “Where’s the outrage?” Dole kept asking. It never surfaced. The outlines of Democratic financial misconduct were on the record long before the election. The Democrats were raking in illicit foreign money; the party was forced to return about $3 million after the election. There were the White House sleepovers for fatcat donors. There was TV tape of Vice President Gore’s bizarre performance at a fundraising session at a Buddhist temple near Los Angeles in April 1996. Gore said he thought it was a “community outreach” event and hadn’t realized that the reach was for campaign contributions. I thought that all those nuns in saffron robes should have been a tipoff that it wasn’t a good setting for politicking, but Gore had smiled, steepled his hands, and stayed, to his regret. The illegal and borderline 1996 fund-raising didn’t do Clinton significant political harm because he was reelected before the official investigations began but haunted Gore as he readied his campaign to succeed the president in 2000.

Dole could have challenged Clinton directly on ethics and character when they met in the first of their two campaign debates. Dole was asked an ethics question that amounted to an invitation to attack, but he didn’t, perhaps wisely because his harshest words drew the most negative reactions in a postdebate opinion survey conducted by the Republicans. That’s the trouble with the character questions: They make voters uncomfortable. “Some people think I’m not tough enough, but I’m working on it,” Dole told us after the debate. Kemp took his turn next, and the opening question in his debate with Gore was down the middle of the plate: Should ethics be an issue against Clinton? Kemp didn’t swing at it. “In my opinion it is beneath Bob Dole to go after anyone personally,” Kemp replied, saying his ticket was for campaign civility. Gore thanked him for saying so. Kemp certainly had earned Democratic thanks by shelving a difficult topic.

Gore, incidentally, had become something of a campaign humorist, at his own expense, as he traveled for the Democratic ticket. The jokes were about his own reputation as a stiff. “Al Gore is so boring his Secret Service code name is Al Gore,” he would say, a sure laugh line. Or, “If you use a strobe light, it looks like Al Gore is moving.” Or, “I’d like to do the Al Gore version of the Macarena.” He would stand motionless for a moment. “Want to see me do it again?” It was a funny routine, and I’d played a role in it. Jokes about Gore’s dull stiffness once were put-downs. The laughter was at the vice president, not with him. In 1994, I became president of a Washington institution called the Gridiron Club, which satirizes politicians and hears them joke about themselves at an annual white tie dinner. I asked Gore to join the humor with a funny speech. It was casting against type and it interested his image-makers. Gore had himself wheeled in, board stiff, on a handcart. I had to sign for the delivery before he took the microphone. It was his debut as a self-deprecating humorist, and he was hilarious.

By the time of the second presidential debate, Dole was out of options. He had to come on strong or forget it. So he went on the attack, sharp and persistent in challenging Clinton on trust and integrity. Even when the question was why Americans couldn’t be more united, Dole’s answer was stridently on his message: “There’s no doubt about it that many American people have lost their faith in government. They see scandals on an almost daily basis. They see ethical problems in the White House today.” Clinton had his script, too, and it did not include a response to Dole’s accusations. He’d rehearsed the role of the patient, tolerant target. He said he could have answered Dole tit for tat but would not because he wanted to talk about America’s future and because attacks did not solve problems. He’d watched Bush stumble in the 1992 debates by refusing to promise not to go on the attack. Sometimes the most effective defense against a rival’s offensive was no defense at all.

Besides, that way his postdebate cheerleaders could tell us how Clinton had conducted himself with presidential gravity while Dole was just a complaining candidate. They were both candidates, of course, and candidates do whatever they think will get the most votes. The Republican rooting section said Clinton’s refusal to answer Dole’s accusations was the next thing to a confession that he’d done all those awful things. He hadn’t, only most of them. But neither reporters nor voters would find out about that until he spent his second term under investigation, eventually under impeachment, and was ultimately spared dismissal from the White House when the Senate voted to acquit him on two counts early in 1999.

Presidential campaign debates beget self-serving partisan appraisals of the candidates as soon as they go off the air. In one of the odd rituals of modern campaigning, each side sends its supporters to what politicians and reporters all called spin alley, at the front of the cavernous press centers set up for debate coverage. Rival politicians had been trying to convince us to see debates their way in every campaign since debating was revived in 1976. The game of trying to spin the story their way became more intensive, more organized, and, I thought, sillier each campaign season. Only a handful of reporters get into the actual debate theater to see what happens off camera. The hundreds of others work in nearby ballrooms or conference halls, watching the proceedings on television like the rest of the country. That’s where the political impact lies anyhow, in what the nation sees and hears. Trying to color what is written and said about the debate while it is happening, the rival campaigns assign teams of operatives to crank out news releases point by point, arguing that the other guy lied about his record or his program, and send young volunteers running among the press tables, piling up the paper. If you want to concentrate on what is happening between the candidates, you have to pitch the handouts or your laptop keyboard will vanish in all the paper, so it piles up around you. The useful paper is the debate text, delivered in sections that have to be grabbed quickly to make sure those pages don’t get buried in all the other stuff.

Actually, the claims and counterclaims begin before the debating does, when the candidates’ partisans show up in the pressroom to boast how well their man is going to do—meaningless bluster, but they get some TV time because the cable types have to put something on their nonstop news. For print, it is uselessly outdated the moment the debate begins.

As part of the bizarre rites of debate spinning, Cabinet members, congressional figures, governors, political operators, spokesmen, apologists, managers, you name it, crowd into the press center to try to tell us what to think about the debate we all just observed. I always figured that if I didn’t know better than they did, I shouldn’t be writing about it. At the 1996 debates in Hartford and San Diego, the Republicans boasted about how well Dole had performed, the Democrats solemnly pronounced Clinton the clear winner, and only the gullible paid any attention. “We’re burbling banalities,” admitted Mike McCurry, then Clinton’s press secretary, as he extolled his boss. To make clear who was babbling, campaign gofers carried placards with the name—or title—of the spinner. I thought it was demeaning to Cabinet members to parade in the pressroom under signs announcing who they were, but that became the custom. It reminded me of a wisecrack delivered by Jack Germond, who said after a senator had delivered his vacuous thoughts to reporters at a Capitol news conference that it amounted to casting imitation pearls before real swine.

In the end, the 1996 election fit the form charts. Clinton won with

49 percent of the vote to Dole’s 41 percent. Perot got 8 percent, not bad for a third candidate but not half what he’d polled four years earlier. It was enough to entitle the Reform Party nominee to government campaign funds in 2000, which would prove the rule of unintended consequences when Pat Buchanan claimed it. In polling place surveys, most voters said they were more interested in policies than in character, and the people who felt that way voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. A majority said they did not think Clinton was honest.

Long afterward, in the final months of Clinton’s term, I sat down with Dole amid the trophies, photographs, and mementos of his long political life as he reflected on it. He recalled the morning after the 1996 election when he got a call from a Democrat, a fellow in the select company of defeated presidential nominees. “Don’t despair, it’s just going to be different,” former Senator George McGovern told former Senator Dole.

“I ran for president,” Dole told me that day. “I did the best I could. We didn’t win. So get on with your life. Politics isn’t everything. I think as long as you behave yourself and just become sort of a senior something—’’ The thought drifted away.

Politics was everything for Clinton, I thought. After an interview on Air Force One late in 2000, with the disputed presidential outcome still unsettled, Clinton went into an hour-long soliloquy about House seats and states the Democrats had lost, and where he thought he might have tipped the outcome had he been asked to play a major role in the campaign. The two of us who had interviewed him and the aide who sat in could only listen; Clinton did all the talking. It was as though he was alone, reflecting.

He’d struggled to get past the stain of impeachment, even suggesting that it might become a positive part of his legacy: “I think when historians get a little space they will say, ‘I don’t know how those people stood up to that but, boy, I’m glad they did because it preserved the Constitution.’ So I think history will view this much differently.” But probably not unless Clinton is writing it, or rewriting it. Certainly Clinton was concerned about his legacy and bent on polishing it, in and after office. But it seemed to me he had another, simpler, concern. He just didn’t want to be out of the game. He was a masterful politician, sentenced to early retirement at fifty-four, the youngest ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt.

Dole, two decades Clinton’s senior, was more philosophical. “Losing,” he told me, “means that at least you were in the race.”