CHAPTER

NINE

The Comeback Kid Overcomes the President in 1992

The liabilities Bill Clinton carried into his presidential campaign were enough to sink another candidate, but he wasn’t just another candidate. Clinton was a master campaigner and a very lucky one. He was glib, too, crafty and smooth enough to talk his way out of almost anything. Clinton had a woman problem beyond the kind of fling that drove Gary Hart out of presidential politics. His draft-ducking agility made Dan Quayle look like a willing warrior, if a weekend one. He rose from the Democratic field to become the preprimary leader, then plunged more sharply than any early front-runner since the early slump that sent the favored Ed Muskie to early defeat two decades before.

It read like the resume of a loser, a compilation of woes that had damaged or undone a succession of campaigners. But for all of it, Clinton ran off with the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination faster than any contested candidate ever had. The guy was that good. He was smart, adroit, a political actor to rival Reagan with a sack of tricks Nixon would have admired.

Then, too, he was running in a weak Democratic field, the star in a cast of mediocre candidates. The rivals who would have been most formidable all declined to run, stepping aside before the campaign year began, when President George Bush was riding record-high readings in the public opinion polls. Bush was the president who won a war in the Persian Gulf, the president during whose term the Cold War ended in victory, the Berlin Wall was toppled, and the Soviet Union unraveled. But recession at home trumped victory abroad, especially for a president who had no discernible program for dealing with the economic slump. He’d reneged on his no new taxes pledge of 1988. His reelection campaign was tardy and remarkably disorderly for a candidate with the advantages of the White House at his command. Besides, Bush was a lousy candidate. Watching him, I sometimes wondered how much he really wanted a second term.

The campaign of 1992 was my first as a full-time columnist for the AP, with a new set of deadlines—three columns a week. But I wasn’t ready to part with the old ones, the spot news deadlines I’d been handling all my career, and I wasn’t comfortable being “just” a three-a-week columnist, although colleagues said that was more than full-time work. When I went on the road with the candidates, I wanted to write the news, the major developments of the campaign day, too. It was satisfying work and it kept me in the flow of events, invaluable for the analytical columns I wrote. I covered the news, and then I tried to explain it, fill in the background blanks and put things into context. My columns offered analysis, not opinions. I never had any use for the pontificators who wrote what they thought and told readers to think likewise, although that became a growth industry as cable television put the loudest mouths on the air. I thought it most useful to make my case with facts and history and let the reader decide whether my conclusions made sense. The role added pressure but also extra satisfaction.

The 1992 election was a three-way choice, Clinton versus Bush versus Ross Perot, the crankiest of candidates. He ran; he quit; he ran again; he griped about one-liners while spouting them. Perot obviously detested Bush, although he claimed his campaign was nothing personal. Perot’s popularity testified to the voters’ disenchantment with the president and with politics in general. Perot had no real program, falling back on the time-tattered claim that he could save the government billions by cutting out waste, fraud, and abuse. Elect him and he’d tell us where and how much.

It was the campaign of the TV talk shows. Watch Larry King on CNN long enough, and you’d see everybody who was running. That’s where Perot declared that he might run, where he went for airtime after dropping out, and where he appeared after renewing his candidacy, reentering with the antic explanation that he’d quit only because Bush’s Republicans were plotting to sabotage his daughter’s wedding. Perot’s was the strangest performance I ever saw in national politics. The guy was a nagging oddball, but that’s what his supporters seemed to want. Talking with them at Perot campaign outposts that fall, I found his volunteers zealously committed to their man, a mood that was not matched by supporters of the major party candidates. Rank-and-file workers for Bush or Clinton were dutiful. The Perot crowd was devoted.

A succession of potential Democratic challengers to Bush stepped aside before the campaign began, narrowing the field to the untested and the unlikely. Ted Kennedy, who wasn’t running, said in 1991 that the party was essentially conceding Bush a second term. It did look that way. Clinton did not seem a formidable figure. At first, he was the Republicans’ favorite choice for challenger, given the character questions and the personal baggage he carried into the campaign. But he checked the bags skillfully and got past the problems. He’d been governor of Arkansas for a decade but had no national profile. His debut on the national stage was laughable—a thirty-two-minute run-on introduction of Michael Dukakis at the 1988 convention during which, he ruefully acknowledged later, the only applause line was “in conclusion.” However, he was an emerging leader of the centrist Democrats who saw the old liberal ways as a political dead end and knew that to win, the party would have to adapt to the landscape shaped by the Reagan revolution. The dwindling Democratic field handed Clinton his first break because it left him running against three little-known senators, a flaky former governor, and a solid but electorally improbable one-term senator from Massachusetts who had dropped out of politics for five years for treatments to fight off cancer.

Senator Al Gore, the failed candidate of 1988, was a prime prospect for 1992 until a personal trauma led him to say he wouldn’t run. Gore took his son, Albert III, to the Orioles game in Baltimore on opening day in 1989. As they left the stadium, the boy pulled his hand out of his father’s and ran into the street, where he was hit by a car and gravely injured. He recovered, but Gore said later that the accident changed the way he looked at his life and politics and led him to decide against running in 1992 because his family needed him at home. I always thought that if he had run, Clinton might have remained a footnote. Not that Gore would have won the nomination, but with the senator from Tennessee on the primary ballots of the South, the governor from Arkansas would not have had an easy ride through the Super Tuesday primaries that made him the dominant Democrat.

When Clinton’s personal excesses overtook him in the Monica Lewinsky affair, nobody could claim there had not been storm warnings long in advance. His flaws and his deceptions were on display in 1992, but the voters chose him anyhow. He was the slick standard-bearer for change over the Republican president who couldn’t seem to convince people that he really cared about their problems. When Bush’s handlers tried to fix that problem at the start of the campaign, they gave him a reminder on an index card, an explanation of how concerned he was about the economic plight of too many working Americans and how he meant to do something about it. Instead of a dissertation, the audience got the cue card. Bush glanced at it and read it aloud. “Message: I care,” he declaimed. No details as to what he’d do about the economy; Bush promised those later. When they came, they amounted to a warmed-over pudding of what the administration already had offered, with a gimmick or two to touch up the product.

Clinton was the new guy from the baby boom generation. He’d been reelected governor of Arkansas in 1990, fending off Republican claims that he only wanted to keep the job as a stepping-stone for a presidential campaign by promising that he would serve all four years of the term. He hadn’t finished one year when he declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. He dodged the promise by asking his audiences in Arkansas whether they thought he should run for president and, wonder of wonders, read the applause and decided they wanted him to go for it. He said his campaign wouldn’t offer a choice of liberal against conservative. “It’s both and it’s different,” he said.

Clinton had been drawing notice as a promising Democrat since he got to the Statehouse in 1978 and began claiming leadership among the party’s centrists in the 1980s, although he lost his reelection bid in 1980, regaining the governorship in 1982. By the time he ran for president, they said he was the only politician around who had been proclaimed a prodigy in three different decades; the ’70s as a promising newcomer, the ’80s as a governor with national potential, the ’90s as candidate and president. The liberal label that had haunted Dukakis wasn’t going to be stuck on Clinton. He said the 1992 campaign had to be about curing the economic woes left by the recession of 1991, the slump that undid Bush’s towering support after the Persian Gulf war and left him fumbling for answers.

The 1992 campaign and election proved again the oldest political lesson: Bread-and-butter issues trump everything else when economic times are hard. That was a ready-made theme for a Democratic challenger, and with the Democratic heavyweights out of the way, it was waiting for Clinton. “The economy, stupid,” was the sign on the wall in his Little Rock campaign headquarters, the reminder to stay on the central message. Bush handled it as though he thought it was just the stupid economy, getting in the way of the great international undertakings he wanted to pursue. He said he preferred foreign affairs, on which he could act by himself, to domestic ones, which required him to work with that pesky Democratic Congress.

In the fall of 1991, Clinton delivered three issues speeches at Georgetown University to show he had a grasp of national and international issues, and that he was a major-league candidate, not just a governor from a minor league state. He claimed the political center, a departure among Democrats. Clinton went before the councils of the more liberal Democratic establishment seeking to erase their reservations about his centrist stance, saying he wanted to “push this party into the future, not pull it to the right or left.” He drew good reviews from politicians and in the news media, and before the election year began, they anointed him the front-runner, with both the risks and the advantages of being the man to beat. He was rated the leader going into the New Hampshire primary campaign—until January 16 when the Star, the supermarket tabloid, reported that a woman named Gennifer Flowers, a sometime nightclub singer who’d gotten a minor state job in Arkansas with the help of the governor, had been Clinton’s mistress. The accusation had been made before, during Clinton’s 1990 campaign, but he had an easy comeback because it was raised by a state employee who had been fired for misconduct. The man filed a lawsuit claiming Clinton had spent state money on dalliances with Flowers and four other women. Reporters checked it out, found no proof, Flowers denied it, and the story didn’t make print. That’s the reason most political sex stories were spiked before they were printed. One of two participants in an affair had to go public to make rumor into publishable fact, although the bar was lowering, first with the tabloids and then with Internet gossip that didn’t meet the traditional tests of responsible journalism. With Clinton running for president, the Star published its version and made Gennifer Flowers a sudden campaign sensation. Clinton certainly knew her—in every sense of the word, it turned out. I thought he’d asked for trouble when he got cozy with a woman who spelled Jennifer with a G.

The episode was a seamy landmark in the way political campaigns are reported. Before Flowers, we who styled ourselves the “mainstream press” did not deign to pursue, let along pick up, the findings of the bottom-feeding supermarket sheets that thrived on sex, scandal and occasionally space aliens. But not after the Clinton-Flowers episode. the New York Post and the Daily News went with the story and it spread into print elsewhere. Clinton said the accusation had been thoroughly investigated before and found false. Not thoroughly enough. It was true, as Clinton finally had to admit in 1999. In 1992, he called the allegations “totally bogus.” The establishment newspapers still weren’t buying the story, although they began backing in with accounts of the way the New York tabloids were handling it, which put the accusations in print on their pages. Then the moderator of a televised Democratic debate raised the question of women trouble, and while Clinton called it all “a pack of lies,” the story got a new cycle, revived in the next day’s newspapers and TV shows. the Star delivered a follow-up punch: Flowers told all about it in a first person account of what she said was a 12-year affair, and supplied tape recordings of telephone conversations with Clinton as recent as the fall of 1991. Clinton denied the affair again, but he couldn’t deny the tapes, so he said he’d talked to Flowers on the phone because she was being harassed and frightened by people trying to get her to change her story. He said he’d called her only after checking with his wife Hillary first, every time. He also said Flowers obviously had been paid to tell her story to The Star, which was true, business as usual for the supermarket tabloids, which pay for scandal stories. By now, with Clinton talking about the whole business, the mainstream press had a way into the story. Denials keep a story going because we recount the accusation in reporting what a politician is denying. An accusation a good reporter would not repeat in print becomes fair game when the candidate talks about it in denying it.

The effect of all this can be to reduce political journalism to the lowest common denominator—to report things because another outlet has reported them, to go with the story because somebody else did. It is an old dilemma, and it worsened as the number of outlets multiplied, from the supermarket scandal sheets to the talk shows to the cable TV cacophony to the Internet with its unlimited rumor-exploding capacity. Clinton was the one lying in 1992, although we didn’t know it until long after, when he confessed in a deal with a special prosecutor that his sworn denial of the Flowers affair was not true. As was his habit, he tried a tricky way out. He said it was only a one-night stand and that what he’d denied under oath was a long affair, twelve years by her account.

Trapped in the Flowers mess, the Clintons made their remarkable appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Super Bowl Sunday to talk about their marriage. The candidate admitted that he had been guilty of wrongdoing and causing pain. He wouldn’t be more specific, but he said that the people watching would “know what we’re saying, they’ll get it.” In Clinton code, that meant he’d had his affairs and people would figure it out without his saying so directly. Beyond what he’d said, Hillary put in, what happened in the privacy of their lives together was just that, private. But there was one more installment. The next day, the Star produced Flowers at a New York news conference and played edited excerpts from the telephone tapes, her voice and Clinton’s. Nothing in the tapes played that day proved an affair, but Clinton’s advice to Flowers certainly proved an embarrassment. CNN televised the show as Flowers, in a bright red outfit, said she had been Clinton’s lover and had lied to protect him. The performance featured twelve minutes of edited tapes, including one in which a man whose voice matched Clinton’s described New York Governor Mario Cuomo as a “mean son of a bitch” and agreed that he acted like a man with Mafia connections. There was no date on the conversation but it would have been before Cuomo stopped hinting he might run for the nomination himself and announced that he would not. That sequence put Clinton in an odd position. He wouldn’t acknowledge that the tapes were valid, but he said he was trying to telephone Cuomo to apologize. Cuomo sniffed that Clinton should save the telephone toll.

Perhaps the most telling line on the tape—given what Clinton did and said after he was president—was this advice to Flowers: “If they ever hit you with it, just say no and go on. There’s nothing they can do . . . If everybody is on record denying it, no problem.” That would be his strategy and almost his downfall in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal in 1998. Dishonest denials got him impeached by the House; political survival tactics got him acquitted by the Senate to finish his second term.

In New Hampshire, Clinton said it was up to the voters to determine whether his almost-admitted straying from Hillary would disqualify him from the presidency. “We’re putting this in your hands. You get to decide.” The questions wouldn’t go away, though. In a Democratic debate, all the candidates were asked to speak on the issue of character. They began politely, bypassing Flowers. Not Jerry Brown, the former California governor who played the wild card in the campaign. He said the others weren’t being realistic. “I mean, what’s the biggest character issue out there right now? The stories on Bill Clinton, isn’t it? And whether or not there’s an issue there . . . that’s what everybody’s thinking about, they’re looking at that . . . whether it’s legitimate or not.”

Clinton played the long-suffering victim. “I think I’ve said all I need to say about that and I think the American people have got more of me and my wife together than they ever thought they’d get in the primary process.”

The Flowers episode stalled Clinton in New Hampshire. The lead he’d been opening in the polls sagged and his leading primary rival, former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, gained on him. Tsongas was an engaging, open man who only looked dour. He was from Lowell, Massachusetts, a short commute down the interstate from New Hampshire. He’d served only one term in the Senate, dropping out of politics in 1984 after he was diagnosed with cancer. Now he was back in action, saying he’d beaten the disease and had the right answers to the economic slump. His campaign manifesto was “A Call to Economic Arms,” an eighty-six-page pamphlet that broke with Democratic orthodoxy to advocate spending cuts and business tax incentives. The booklet was bound in gray, a shade that fit the content. Watching Tsongas autograph copies after his rallies, I suspected that he was signing a lot more of them than people were reading. Tsongas was against the middle-class tax cut Clinton was promising. The liberals said he was a closet Republican. But his bigger problem was the need to convince people that he would have a chance of winning in a national election in the fall. He joked he had the burden of being another Greek from Massachusetts, four years after Michael Dukakis’s defeat. A heavier burden was not openly addressed. It was his health, and while he said he was fine and past the cancer, you could hear people murmuring about it in the campaign crowds. (Tsongas died of pneumonia in January 1997, at the age of fifty-five.)

Despite the Flowers furor, Clinton held his edge in the primary polls in New Hampshire and actually widened his lead over the Democratic field in national surveys. But there was another storm coming, this time over the Vietnam-era draft and the way he ducked around it. This one didn’t start in some tabloid. the Wall Street Journal broke the story, reporting that a former recruiter said Clinton had manipulated an ROTC deferment to avoid being drafted. The secretary of the draft board back home said Clinton had been given special treatment because he’d asked to stay at Oxford University and they liked having a hometown boy over there in England as a Rhodes Scholar. Clinton had dropped the ROTC deferment in 1969, asked to be put into the draft lottery. Questioned about it in New Hampshire, Clinton said he’d opted for the lottery instead of keeping his ROTC deferment “because I didn’t think it was right” when friends from Arkansas were dying in Vietnam. The Clinton organization said it was old stuff, nothing wrong, all plowed over before in his Arkansas campaigns. But it also was sensitive stuff, and with the Flowers uproar subsiding, the draft questions took over. “All I’ve been asked about by the press is a woman I didn’t sleep with and a draft I didn’t dodge,” Clinton complained. But it all depends on what dodge is. He avoided the draft legally, but he certainly had played games with the system in order to do so. It looked questionable, not a topic a politician would want raised as he went to the voters in the first presidential primary. When Dan Quayle was battered in 1988 over the appearance that he’d used family influence to get into the Indiana National Guard and out of the draft, he had said he would have done things differently if he’d known he would be running for vice president twenty years later. Clinton wasn’t so candid.

What the Flowers case hadn’t done, the added drag of the draft questions did. Clinton sank in the New Hampshire polls and Tsongas took over the lead with the primary little more than a week away. The Great Denier was still at work. “The key issue is that I made myself available for the draft,” Clinton said, but there was more to it. Clinton put his name into the draft lottery late in 1969 and drew a predictably high number—quotas were down and the odds were against being called. He then wrote a letter to the director of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas to thank him “for saving me from the draft” and to explain what he’d done. Clinton wrote that the draft was interlocked with his opposition to the Vietnam war.

“I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: To maintain my political viability within the system,” Clinton wrote. That 1969 explanation didn’t fit the claim of the 1992 presidential candidate, who said he had been driven by conscience. The deceptions were accumulating, and I thought they were enough be his campaign undoing. I thought wrong. “I don’t think it’s undermined my electability,” Clinton said in a paid TV appearance with a panel of New Hampshire voters. “If you say I’m electable on Tuesday, by definition, I’m electable.” Enough of them said he was to keep him going, into primaries in which the sex and draft issues wouldn’t be so fresh and so damaging. Weeks later, Clinton did have one last draft item to admit, when it developed that he had received an induction notice in April 1969, before he signed up for the ROTC program that got him deferred. He said it hadn’t “occurred to me that this was relevant to the story,” so he didn’t mention it during the earlier controversy. He’d gotten permission from the draft board to finish his term at Oxford, and then temporarily joined the ROTC. No big deal, he claimed, and it had just slipped his mind. I didn’t believe him. No man who ever has received a draft induction notice brushes it off as irrelevant. It gets your attention. I remember mine, nearly fifty years after I got it. I’d already joined the Vermont Air National Guard when it came, so I was off the hook. There was no war on at the time but I didn’t want to spend two years in the Army instead of at work on my career as an AP reporter, so I opted for a brief tour of active duty and then weekend service. I even got a commission for which I was totally unqualified. That happened because the commanding officer of my unit was at the statehouse one day and saw me in a friendly chat with the governor. He figured if I knew the governor that well, I ought to be an officer, so they made me a second lieutenant. Later, after I’d transferred back to Boston, I drew duty one rainy night at a base in the city and was walking to my post when a general shouted at me. “Lieutenant,” he said commandingly. “Stop.” I stopped and thought, “Damn, I forgot to salute again.” So I walked his way and saluted. “No problem,” the general said, “It’s just that I haven’t seen a second lieutenant since World War Two.”

So I understood a bit about dealing with—and around—the draft. I thought Clinton inflated the topic with his deceit about it. Candor would have cured the problem, or at least minimized it, but candor was not Clinton’s way.

In the 1969 draft letter, Clinton also wrote that he hated and despised the Vietnam War and demonstrated against it not only in the United States but as a protest organizer at Oxford. I never covered the war, but I did cover the mass protest rallies against it in Washington. In one, guards made the Nixon White House into a barricaded haven, surrounded by city buses parked bumper to bumper. As a reporter, I kept my views out of my copy, but I thought the war was a disaster from the beginning, a wrong-minded policy that killed young Americans who deserved better from their government. It poisoned American politics. The excesses and deceptions that went with it twisted the 1968 campaign, planted the seeds of Watergate—which began with covert, illicit attempts to plug leaks about the war, and led to the cynicism and mistrust of government that persists, long after the U.S. withdrawal from Saigon. I finally saw Vietnam in 2000, covering Clinton when he became the first American president to go there after the victory of the North Vietnamese Communists in 1975. We got to Hanoi late at night, and when my story was done, I walked down the quiet street from the hotel and just stood for a while, marveling at the delusions that led American policymakers to decide that what happened in this small corner of Southeast Asia was so great a threat to the United States as to warrant more than a decade of war.

In 1992, the history of the war wasn’t at issue. The personal history of candidate Clinton was. He tried to stay on his economic message, but we’d heard all that and we kept questioning, and writing, about his alleged affair and his draft avoidance. They added up to the character issue and it was costing him support. By primary time, the New Hampshire polls favored Tsongas. Clinton, the early front-runner, was braced to be beaten his first time out, and he was. Tsongas won easily with 33 percent of the vote. Clinton got 25 percent. History’s lesson was that an early front-runner couldn’t afford that. Muskie had won the 1972 New Hampshire primary by nine percentage points, the victory that began his undoing because it failed expectations. But the old rules didn’t apply to Clinton. He was a survivor, as skilled and agile a candidate as I ever covered, and his campaign hatched a plan. Clinton would ignore the defeat and claim that he had actually won by doing as well as he had, no matter what the numbers said. Clinton ran second, with the rest of the Democratic field far behind and discredited as contenders. The returns were still being counted when Clinton held what amounted to a victory rally. “New Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the comeback kid,” he told his cheering supporters. Tsongas had won, but Clinton made it sound as though he had, and grabbed the TV attention before the real victor got to celebrate. Only a candidate as sly and skilled as Clinton could make that setback into a sendoff. I wrote about what really had happened, but there was no avoiding the fact that Clinton was the quotable Democrat. He had another advantage that night: Bush won the Republican primary, but upstart conservative Pat Buchanan drew a hefty vote against the president, and that became the major story of the New Hampshire primary. The political troubles of the president trumped the maneuvering of his would-be Democratic challengers, and that emphasis helped Clinton. His defeat was the second paragraph; the lead was the Republican outcome, Bush’s victory over an unexpectedly strong Buchanan challenge. Clinton pretended he’d won. Bush sounded almost as though he’d lost.

Within six weeks, Clinton had validated the claim with victories in the South and the Midwest that effectively clinched his nomination on March 17. Even Clinton was surprised. “Son of a bitch,” he said in a telephone chat with an AP colleague. “It’s only the middle of March.” Tsongas withdrew, saying he wasn’t going to be the man who split the Democrats: “I did not survive my ordeal to be the agent of George Bush’s reelection.” That left Jerry Brown as Clinton’s sole rival, but he was a protest candidate, not a real threat. He kept going, and not quietly. He said the nomination of Clinton would ruin the Democratic Party, that “I am not the spoiler, Slick Willie is the spoiler.” He said Clinton was unelectable, “the prince of sleaze.” In New Hampshire, Tsongas had called Clinton “pander bear,” claiming that Clinton wanted to please everybody at once, and sometimes waving a teddy bear as a visual aid. The character questions had not gone away, but they had come early in the game and Clinton won in the primaries despite them. What I’d once thought would cripple him strengthened him instead. The early disclosures and rebuttals did not immunize him on the women and draft questions, which would come up again in the fall, but they did take the edge off the stories. Had either or both broken in the middle of the general election campaign, the spotlight would have been far more glaring, the damage far more telling. Instead the Republicans were left trying to revive what essentially was old news.

For Clinton, evasiveness seemed to be a habit. He was deceptive even when there was no point to it. On his youthful experiment with marijuana, for example. That was not a new question; other presidential candidates had answered it honestly and said yes, they’d tried the stuff years before. Gore was among them, saying he’d sampled it when he was in the Army in Vietnam. So it was no surprise that Clinton was asked about drugs. “I have never broken the laws of my country,” he answered. He did not mention anybody else’s country because we didn’t think to frame the question that way. We should have known better; Clinton found the loophole and took it. Finally, a New York TV reporter had the sense to restate the question to include state laws or laws outside the United States. “I’ve never broken any state laws,” Clinton repeated. “And when I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two. And I didn’t like it and I didn’t inhale.” Why the obviously evasive answer until then? “No one had ever asked me that direct question before,” he said. Nobody ever asked him whether he’d inhaled; he volunteered that odd information because he instinctively looked for cover by talking his way around potential problems. All that one did was draw ridicule. Clinton said later it was just that he didn’t know how to inhale. “I took it, and I tried to smoke it like a cigarette,” he said on a TV talk show. “I did my best. I wasn’t trying to get a good conduct medal.”

Richard Nixon’s performances wrote the text on political image problems and sly evasions to get around them. I thought Clinton was struggling with the sequel. “Tricky Dick, meet Slick Willie,” I wrote that spring. Clinton was trying to dispel character questions he said were the creation of strangers repeating the worst about him. When a TV questioner told Clinton that changing positions might account for the “Slick Willie” label, the candidate said the question was wrong, that he had been consistent. “And you see, one of the reasons that you get a Slick Willie attack is if someone like you mischaracterizes my position.” Clinton said voters were being fed “bad stuff” about him, that he was being made a punching bag.

Nixonesque problem, Clintonesque answer. But there was more than a political divide between the two politicians. Nixon was awkward and often aloof, a man with few friends. Clinton was the opposite. You couldn’t help but like him. He’d drape an arm over your shoulder and treat you like a pal, whether you were or not. Later, when Clinton was president, I took my boss to the White House to see him. While we were talking, Clinton’s dog Buddy started licking the boss’s well-shined shoes. Without missing a word of the conversation, Clinton grabbed a Kleenex from a box and crouched down to wipe them clean. It looked as though he was giving AP President Lou Boccardi a shoeshine.

Clinton could explain away anything, or try to. The character doubts were just “a case of buyers’ remorse” about a nominee who had sold himself to the Democrats so quickly. “I’m the most investigated, examined, gone-over person running for president.”

Overall he won primaries in twenty-nine states, but even so, his favorability and trust ratings in the public opinion polls were lousy. He blamed the process he’d just come through, saying that the primary campaign “kind of clouds and muddles your image with people.” That struck me as strange because unless campaigns tell the people who the candidates are and what they propose to do in office, there is no point in the exercise. Clinton said otherwise. “The American people are so disgusted with both political parties—and I don’t blame them—that anybody who’s gone through this primary process winds up weaker coming out than they went in because you become like a politician,” Clinton said. Odd, I’d thought he was a politician all along and a very good one.

Clinton also came through the primaries with an advantage no candidate had gained since Jimmy Carter’s winning campaign in 1976: He did not have to guard his left flank by catering to interest groups there. That had been a primary campaign necessity and a general election liability for Democrats since their reformers took the nominating clout away from party leaders and delivered it to the primary election voters. Nixon’s Republican tenet was that a candidate had to move far enough right to win the nomination and far enough center to win the election. In the Democratic mirror image, candidates usually had to move left to win nomination and then try to get back toward the middle, which was sometimes a struggle as it had been for Dukakis and for Mondale before him. Both Democratic losers were saddled with the impression that they were beholden to liberal and labor interest blocs. Dukakis had tried to shun left-right philosophy but was stuck with it anyhow, with a capital L. Nobody was going to pin that on Clinton. When Bush said Clinton’s middle-road, moderate stance was only camouflage for a liberal Democrat, the candidate from Arkansas said that was an old dog that wouldn’t hunt again. “People try to put on yesterday’s broken record that sticks in the same old place in the song: tax and spend, tax and spend . . . liberal, liberal, liberal,” he mocked, saying that it wouldn’t work this time. Take the Republican effort to win points on crime control and capital punishment. Clinton said Bush could only talk about law enforcement, “I’m the only one who’s carried it out,” by signing off on four executions as governor of Arkansas.

Besides, Clinton didn’t have to defend his left flank because there were no rival candidates there. New York’s Cuomo, the heavyweight contender waiting in the locker room, never came out. The opinion polls rated him a powerful candidate, the traditional liberal versus the centrist Clinton. An airplane was idling on the Albany runway, waiting to take Cuomo to Concord to file entry papers in the New Hampshire primary, when he said no. The cliché was to call him the Hamlet of the Hudson. I always considered him a realist, a man who knew that he would have been an awful candidate for president. He did not suffer foolish questions, let alone fools, lightly. He’d said in 1988 that Dukakis had a problem in campaign debates because he was too intelligent for the format. “A lot of people find it difficult to take these complex subjects and distort them into a twenty-second sound bite,” Cuomo said. He certainly did. He also had political rabbit ears, like the ballplayer (he’d been one, with big league prospects in his time) who hears every jeering fan. He was given to telephoning reporters and columnists who wrote things about him he didn’t agree with or just didn’t like, to complain and debate the matter. No presidential candidate could operate that way.

In December 1991, on deadline day for filing in the New Hampshire primary, Cuomo went to the brink of entering. If that waiting plane couldn’t get to Concord in time, duplicate papers already were in the hands of his supporters in Concord. Only then did Cuomo announce that he would not run. He said he had hoped to, but he had to stay in Albany to deal with a state budget crisis. Nor would he leave open the possibility that he might enter later. He said he was out, period, although he seemed to flirt with running now and then. He neither promoted nor discouraged a New Hampshire write-in effort, calling it flattering. It flopped. Cuomo still ventured unsolicited advice to Clinton. On taxes, for example. He said Clinton should tell people, “Look, I’m Bill Clinton. I am going to solve your problem but I’m going to have to raise some taxes. I know Mondale said that and lost.” Somehow Clinton never got around to saying such things, although he did get some taxes raised as president. As candidate, he promised a middle-class tax cut, but that idea was gone before he was inaugurated.

After entering three Democratic campaigns, Jesse Jackson did not run in 1992, which eliminated another pressure point on the left. Jackson sought and got concessions from the prior Democratic nominees before endorsing them, deals so publicly done as to cement the impression that they had bowed to his demands in order to get black votes. That fit the Republican argument that the Democratic candidates were captives of liberal interest blocs. Clinton knew that trap, and he meant to avoid it. He appeared determined to snub Jackson to underscore his own independence of the old liberal coalition. During the primaries Clinton was told, incorrectly, that Jackson had endorsed a rival in South Carolina and blurted into an unexpectedly open radio microphone that it was “dirty double-crossing back-stabbing.” It was accidentally broadcast, and he apologized to Jackson, but I always suspected that Clinton didn’t regret it all that much. There was no doubt about his intent when he spoke to Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and criticized the organization for giving a black rapper called Sister Souljah a place on the program after she’d said that in view of the Los Angeles race riots, blacks should consider killing white people instead of each other. Clinton said that reflected “a kind of hatred” at odds with what he understood to be the aims of the organization. Jackson was furious at the slap from his own platform, complaining that Clinton owed him advance notice of what he was going to say. Clinton countered acidly that he had no reason to because Jackson was “not in the habit of clearing his public remarks with me.”

“If you want to be president, you’ve got a responsibility in a consistent way, even when it’s unpopular, to stand up for what you think is right,” Clinton said. The calculation was evident: He needed black votes for the Democratic ticket, but he needed independence more. Clinton already had told Jackson that he would not be considered for the 1992 vice presidential nomination, which never had been a real possibility in earlier campaigns but had not been so clearly ruled out so soon by the nominees. Jerry Brown said that if he was nominated, he would ask Jackson to be his running mate, and Jackson said he would be honored to accept. It was all fiction, since Brown wasn’t going anywhere. “If Jerry Brown is the answer, it must be a damned peculiar question,” Senator Lloyd Bentsen had observed.

While Clinton was declaring his independence of the Democratic left, and even of the Democratic Congress, Bush was struggling with a problem on the Republican right. He never overcame it. The problem had a name: Patrick J. Buchanan. Conservatives were angry before Buchanan entered the campaign, declaring his challenge to Bush only ten weeks before the New Hampshire primary. The Republican right had been miffed since Bush’s “read my lips” bravado against new taxes had vanished in surrender to Democratic demands in budget bargaining. Bush agreed to “tax revenue increases” in June 1990, enraging antitax conservatives. But their anger was submerged by conflict abroad, first the buildup in the Persian Gulf against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then, in 1991, the Gulf war itself. Bush’s popularity soared to record approval in the public opinion surveys, but the economy slumped and his polls soured. He was still paying that toll as he geared up for his reelection campaign. His initial campaign plan did not make provision for the primary elections; the president didn’t know that would be necessary, but Bush was forced to defend his right to run again. Protest votes against presidents are nothing new, and usually are inconsequential. Nixon was at the peak of his political power when he ran in 1972, and two GOP congressmen who ran against him in the New Hampshire primary came away with 32 percent of the vote anyhow. Bush was in a political slump in 1992, reflecting the economic one for which he seemed to have no answers. Enter Buchanan, and the president who intended to concentrate on the national campaign could not because he first had to defend himself in the primaries. Buchanan began with an influential ally in the reliably rightist Manchester Union-Leader, which always had been down on Bush. He had the issue of the economic situation, more severe in New Hampshire than elsewhere with lost computer industry jobs and plunging real estate values. And he had his ardent conservative message. “We put America first,” he declared, accusing Bush of a seedy, backroom deal on taxes and of surrendering to the Democrats in signing a civil rights measure conservatives called a job quota bill. His face was familiar, voters had seen him on TV and heard him argue the conservative line. Still, he was just a right-wing commentator, and George Bush was president. For Bush to pay him too much heed would risk elevating Buchanan’s political status by giving him a rebuttal platform. To ignore him would risk letting him elevate it himself by showing strength in the primary.

Buchanan knew all that and he knew the territory. I first met him in 1968 in a cocktail lounge in North Conway, New Hampshire, when he was a media aide and speechwriter for Richard Nixon. He was an engaging guy, quick with a wisecrack and a laugh, most heartily at his own jokes. To Pat, right was right and everything else was wrong. He had worked for Nixon in the White House—it was disclosed years later that he’d had a hand in some 1972 dirty political tricks—and later for Reagan. Between those White House stints and since them, he had become the voice of the Republican right on CNN. He found a vein and a nerve in unhappy New Hampshire voters, not only textbook conservatives but also working-class men and women who saw jobs and salaries eroding in the slumped state economy. Bush couldn’t ignore Buchanan, so he spent the first day of his reelection campaign there, six stops beginning with a confession that had been long in coming:

“I know times are tough. This state has gone through hell, extraordinarily difficult times. And yes, people are hurting, and I am determined to do something to turn it around . . . I’ve known the economy is in free fall. I hope I’ve known it. Maybe I haven’t conveyed it as well as I should.” It struck me that he hadn’t conveyed it at all. Instead he had taken to reciting the forecasts of economists who said times were getting better, or would soon, which was of no help or interest to people who weren’t drawing a paycheck.

Bush declared that his answers would not be the Democratic medicine of a Congress “that’s still back in the dark ages of government intervention, liberal spending and more taxes.” Enough of that, he said, and lapsed into Bushspeak. “I am getting sick and tired of every single night hearing one of these carping little liberal Democrats jumping all over my you know what,” and that was just the warm-up. Bush said he’d intended to stay calm. “But I’ll tell you something, I’m a little sick and tired of being the punching bag for a lot of lightweights around this country yelling at me day and night.” At his next stop, he described his health as fine despite the illness that hit him in Tokyo and caused him to vomit in the lap of the Japanese prime minister. “Jeez, you get the flu and they make it into a federal case.” And later, he declaimed: “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.” Which made no sense at all. Times were hard, Bush acknowledged, but they would get better. Always had. “If you want to see a rainbow you’ve got to stand a little rain,” he said, borrowing a lyric from the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band. Except that Bush called it “The Nitty Ditty Gritty Bitty Great Band.” He drew good crowds, though, and the nonsense lines didn’t bother them. I never saw political vaudeville to compare to Bush’s six-speech outing that day, before or since.

Bush was an easy target and he made his own problems, but he also took some cheap shots from the media. One notable example was a New York Times story that fed the old preppy image by reporting that Bush had been amazed to see the way a supermarket checkout line works. It was raw material for cartoonists, comedians, and for media commentators who reflected scornfully on Bush’s life in splendid isolation. It is a fact that presidents are isolated; they don’t run out to the supermarket. But when Bush toured an exhibit at a grocers’ convention in Orlando, Florida, he was shown a new-fangled scanner that got the price right with the label ripped to pieces. He said he was amazed at the technology. Told that way it wasn’t much of a story. Indeed, the reporters who actually accompanied Bush on the tour didn’t give it more than a mention in their own stories. The Times reporter was not among them. His piece was written from a pool report, notes distributed to the White House press corps by a small group of reporters designated to represent the rest when the whole crowd won’t fit.

White House reporters take pool turns by rotation. That is a seldom-mentioned secret of the coverage—most reporters don’t get close to the president but wait in the pressroom for the pool reports. It is unavoidable given the planeloads of print and broadcast news-people who travel when the president does, and it is sometimes abused by the White House to restrict coverage even when there’s room for everybody to watch. I always thought it was pointless to fly thousands of miles to sit in a media center and write stories based on speeches piped into the pressroom and on details put together by the pool and handed out to everybody. But that’s the routine. Set up your laptop and you can cover everything without ever leaving the press center. It wasn’t a problem for me and my AP colleagues because the Associated Press always has a spot in the pool as the wire service that delivers coverage to every significant American newspaper and broadcaster and to thousands more internationally. AP people are there to see and hear what we report, and if it isn’t always perfect, it is firsthand. It’s also straight, not bent to make a point the way that supermarket scanner story was.

The facts never caught up with the notion planted in that 1992 Times story that Bush was so out of touch with the real world that he was a totally alien to supermarket checkouts. The Democrats needled him about it all campaign, and the impression stuck afterward as part of the Bush legend.

Buchanan kept sniping at “the hollow army of King George” in New Hampshire, saying that in the primary, his conservative brigades would cut through it like a knife through butter. His rebellion forced Bush to play defense. Bush still seemed tone deaf to the economic travail he’d walked into. One of his lines was that what happened to New Hampshire happened to him because when a hurricane hit the coast there it hit his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, next. True enough, but not a useful example when he was talking about a rambling family vacation home and the New Hampshire voters were worried about keeping jobs or finding work to pay their mortgages.

When the primary votes were cast, Bush and his people made a bad situation worse by reacting to what they thought was a stronger Buchanan uprising than the challenger actually delivered. The day was marked by premature exit polls—network projections based on interviews with people after they’d voted, compiled before the real results were counted but supposedly confidential until the election was over. The confidentiality is fiction. Reporters know what the exit polls are showing, and that means politicians know. You swapped information. You gave a candidate a heads-up on the trend, and you got an election night telephone interview in return. In 1992, the New Hampshire exit polls began leaking to the White House in midafternoon, and they were not promising for Bush. The partial poll results also were wrong, which should not have been a big deal because the full survey and then the actual returns were what counted. But the White House picked up word that the first exit polls showed Buchanan running even with the president and possibly even winning the primary. The projections shaped first impressions of the New Hampshire primary, including Bush’s own, making Buchanan a bigger threat than he was. With only partial returns counted that night, Bush issued a victory statement that sounded like a concession: “This election was far closer than many had predicted. I think the opponents on both sides reaped the harvest of discontent with the pace of New Hampshire’s economy. I understand the message of dissatisfaction.”

For Buchanan it was an uprising to celebrate. He thought he’d gotten at least 40 percent of the vote, and in acting as though he had, the White House magnified his showing. It turned out to be 37 percent. Bush got 53 percent of the Republican vote in New Hampshire, a sorry showing for an incumbent president and one he made worse with his own reaction. He wouldn’t fare that badly against Buchanan in the later primaries, but the game had changed. Buchanan could not deny Bush renomination, but now he was more than an upstart right-wing commentator. He was the vehicle for a protest vote that harried Bush into catering to the Republican right when common political sense was to seize the center, especially once Clinton was installed as the opposition. But Bush couldn’t seem to get over the scare he got in New Hampshire. Buchanan made the Georgia presidential primary his next, and really his last, major stand. Bush trounced him, 64 percent to 36 percent. “I hear your concerns and understand your frustration with Washington,” Bush said in the oddest of victory statements. As for Buchanan, he said that night that Bush ought to withdraw. “I’m the only guy in this race who has a snowball’s chance,” the loser blustered.

Bush may have been getting the message, but he wasn’t doing anything about it. He was stuck between voter discontent over the economic situation on one side and, on the other, the rebellious conservatives who thought job programs and economic bailouts were for Democrats. So he stayed put and ventured no new answers on the economy.

If the voters were frustrated, Ross Perot knew whom to call: Ross Perot. He was just a temperamental tycoon, in one of Quayle’s better lines, but there was a vein of voter anger and discontent with the major parties and the whole campaign just waiting to be tapped. So the short, wiry billionaire with the grating voice edged toward his third-man campaign. There had been a draft Perot movement for months and he’d been saying no. Just after the New Hampshire primary, he turned up on Larry King’s CNN show and said maybe. He would run if his volunteers got the petition signatures to put his name on the ballot in all fifty states. But he’d be different, he claimed, calling Washington a place of “sound bites, shell games, handlers, and media stunt men who posture, create images, and talk.” After scorning those political hired hands and tactics, he used them all himself. He was the king of the sound bites, and he usually bit Bush with lines like: “We are now in deep voodoo, I’ll tell you that. We got into trickle down economics and it didn’t trickle.”

“I don’t want the job,” Perot drawled. “That makes me weird, right? Because everybody else out there would kill his mother to get the job.” Feigning disinterest was good politics in a time of voter resentment against Washington and politicians in general. It also was disingenuous, because no candidate who really meant that would have been campaigning for the White House. Perot postured that he’d run only out of a sense of duty “to my volunteers,” as though he wasn’t the one egging them on. He had no program and no patience with reporters when we tried to find out what he proposed to do as president. “If I ever get stuck up there, give me thirty days, and I will have access to the numbers and I can tell you,” he snapped. Until then, leave him alone. Perot was a political sniper given to outrage when anybody shot back. He claimed to be the outsider, different from all those other guys. He wasn’t, and Nixon-era papers in the National Archives proved it. In 1969, according to White House memos, he offered Nixon $50 million to finance a public relations campaign that was supposed to include outright purchase of a newspaper and television outlet. He pledged another $10 million to create a pro-Nixon think tank. Nixon accepted both offers, the memos reported, but Perot never delivered on either. In 1992, Perot contended it was all “fantasyland stuff” invented by Nixon aides. Other documents showed that Perot sought and got White House help on tax and business matters. When reporter John Solomon of the AP disclosed those facts, Perot said the Bush White House put him up to it, which wasn’t so. Solomon got the story by pursuing clues he had picked up in interviews with Perot himself. When a reporter asked Perot at an editors’ convention about his earlier idea of house-to-house drug searches, he denied advocating it (he had) and then got personal, calling the reporter a woman given to flights of fancy who couldn’t hold a job. To disclosures that he had private investigators look into the lives of people with whom he had differences, Bush among them, Perot denied all and said the system was out to get him. That always was the answer—deny everything and change the subject.

No matter. Disenchanted voters heard what they wanted to hear, and public opinion polls showed him running strong against Bush and Clinton, even leading in some surveys. He said the volunteers were “the owners” of his operation, although I thought that any of them who tried to act like proprietors would be gone in minutes. Perot was his own show, even after he hired two veteran political advisors—a Democrat and a Republican—and a campaign spokesman, all in the traditional mold he supposedly was shunning. Perot never announced that he was a candidate for president, he just became one. He worked the TV talk shows as no candidate ever had. Bush and Clinton didn’t know how to handle him. This wasn’t a regional challenge like that of George Wallace in 1968. When John B. Anderson had run as a third candidate in 1980, it was as a dissenting liberal Republican. Perot came with no identifiable cause, no evident philosophy, and no clear programs. I thought he was as paranoid as the White House said he was, and as phony as any politician I’d seen. Phonier, perhaps, because he pretended not to be a politician at all. Then, hours before the Democratic National Convention nominated Clinton, Perot announced in Dallas that he wasn’t going to run after all. He said the Democratic Party “has revitalized itself,” which led him to conclude he couldn’t win the election but might force a deadlock that would have to be settled by the House of Representatives, and therefore would be disruptive to the country. Perot said he’d answer questions about what he was doing, but immediately took offense at the tone of them and walked out of his own news conference.

I watched in our convention newsroom at Madison Square Garden, no less surprised than anybody else at the campaign upheaval, but not at Perot’s erratic performance. I’d always doubted he could take the questions and criticism a candidate gets, or at least that he would accept them. Billionaire businessmen can have it their own way. So he got out, although he didn’t shut up. “I could have been an effective president if we didn’t have this partisan stress,” Perot said. “I didn’t realize how vicious it was, how petty it was.”

Presidential campaigns can indeed be petty, nasty, off the point, demeaning, too long, too expensive. Despite all those flaws and more, nobody has devised a better way to test and choose among people who want to be president. One reason is that campaigns force accountability for past performance and for new ideas. Perot flunked on both counts. He wanted to be crowned president or, better still, to crown himself. So he got out, leaving a constituency without a candidate, which led both Bush and Clinton to remember just how much they’d admired him all along. They couldn’t wait to call him up and tell him so, each trying to woo Perot supporters to his side. Perot said he wasn’t endorsing either man, and he kept his ballot petition volunteers going. The guy was craftier than we credited. He still had a hand to play.

In mid-September his movement met his original condition for candidacy by qualifying him for the ballots of all fifty states. The major party nominees sent delegations, hats in hands, to audition for his support, missions I thought both crass and humiliating. Perot pretended that he was going to settle his 1992 campaign course only after talking it over with his supporters. “My volunteers decide,” he claimed, having already decided himself, since he said that quitting was a mistake. So he surveyed his troops, which was a farce because their advice was obvious: Run. On October 1, he was back. He said he would not be answering any more questions he did not think relevant, and when he didn’t like what he was being asked, he ended the news conference he had called on his reentry by stalking out of the room. While he’d claimed in quitting that he was concerned about disrupting the election, his explanation now was that the Bush campaign had been planning to sabotage his daughter’s wedding in August. He claimed to have multiple sources for that strange alarm, but they all seemed to stem from a private eye as wacky as the explanation. I thought it was a laughable performance, but Perot had his following, and he was back in the game he supposedly disdained, making his own rules. Pandering to the Perot vote, both Clinton and Bush had offered him a third seat in the fall campaign debates, so Perot came back with his ticket punched for television. He’d get equal billing with the major party nominees, although the polls he once had led in his days as a novelty item now showed him third and more people had negative than positive opinions of him. So it was a threesome. “The more the merrier,” said Clinton. And the odder, with Perot sniping at will while both Clinton and Bush granted him a kind of campaign immunity, wary of taking him on lest they offend his supporters who might still be sensible enough to switch to one of the nominees with a chance of winning. “We haven’t said the first unkind word about Ross Perot,” said Al Gore, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Before the Democratic National Convention in New York, I was having dinner with John King, a skilled, relentless political reporter then with the AP, when he got the scoop on the Gore selection. King had arranged with a Clinton insider to call him with word of the vice presidential choice before it was announced. But the Clinton camp clamped down to prevent leaks, and the guy couldn’t say the name for risk of being overheard. Instead, he called King’s pager and left a cryptic message—the number 4673. Not a number you could call back, which puzzled John, who hurried off to work the telephone. When he looked at a telephone key pad he got the message. Translate the four numbers into the matching letters on the phone, and it reads G-O-R-E. With that to go on and a couple of calls to confirm it, John filed a bulletin story that beat the competition, as was his usual standard.

Clinton scrapped the traditional rules of ticket-making when he chose Gore for vice president. They both were centrist Democrats, from adjacent states, same generation, similar politics. The idea of balancing regions and party wings in selecting running mates didn’t apply to their ticket.

Bush and Quayle had been renominated at a Republican convention that added to their campaign liabilities with a shrill turn to the right. Buchanan hadn’t quit his challenge, although he had long since conceded that he didn’t stand a chance. He’d agreed to endorse Bush, but he wanted a prime-time convention slot when he did it. The Bush camp agreed, and Buchanan appeared on opening night with a theocratic diatribe against the Democrats: “There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war . . . for the soul of America.” His speech set a tone for the convention that catered to the conservatives while stirring a backlash, not only from the left and the interest groups Buchanan denounced, but also from moderate Americans who didn’t care for religious ranting about political choices.

Bush kept tuning his message, trying to find one that registered with voters. He changed campaign management. Just watch, he would say, now I’m really going to get tough. He’d been saying that periodically all year. “I’m starting to dish it out,” he announced six weeks before the election. It struck me that the dish was skimpy and stale. He repackaged his economic proposals and his campaign issued them in a blue-covered pamphlet, stale wine in a new bottle. His wheels always seemed to be spinning.

Dan Quayle was back. There had been rumblings from his Republican detractors about dumping him in 1992, but Bush decreed long in advance that Quayle would absolutely be on the ticket. He’d produced a dossier of gaffes as vice president. I thought he peaked with his contorted attempt to recite the slogan of the United Negro College Fund. “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind, is being very wasteful. How true that is.” Yes, a mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste. His most convoluted sentences notwithstanding, Quayle was no dummy. To borrow the line used against him in that 1988 debate: I knew Dan Quayle, Dan Quayle was a friend of mind. I thought he was a competent man and a competent senator who would have been better off had he stayed in the Senate. He was better than his reputation and his worst lines, but in over his head as vice president. He thought all the gibes and put-downs were unfair. When he tried to run for president himself in 2000—his campaign quickly sank from sight—he told me, “They can’t do that stuff to me again.” I said he was kidding himself, and he was. Any slip was a blow to a man who was strangely prone to them. One of his aides once told me, jokingly, that he thought maybe Quayle was dyslexic because he was smarter than he seemed able to express. One personal Quayle memory: I was on the practice range at the Burning Tree Club one Sunday afternoon, hitting golf balls when his motorcade pulled in, and the vice president came over to ask whether I wanted to play. I did, and we set out in a golf cart, betting a few dollars on a game in which I got, and badly needed, handicap strokes against him. Quayle was a fine golfer. He was keeping the scorecard and a few holes in, I looked at it to see how the bet stood. He’d put our names on the card as “Walter” and “VP.”

In 1992, Quayle filled the campaign role customary for the VP: He was the attack man. He took on the trust and character offensive against Clinton. He told people that they would be wasting votes by casting them for Perot. He also chafed at the way the campaign was being run. Over dinner on Air Force Two shortly before the election, he bristled that it was the lousiest campaign operation he’d ever seen.

Clinton was rolling. He hammered Bush on the economy, and the president had no comeback except to say things were going to get better. Clinton and Gore broke another tradition, campaigning together for almost three weeks when the theory always had been that running mates worked separately to cover more territory and broaden the reach of the ticket. They did a lot of their tandem campaigning on eight bus tours in nineteen states. You could get really tired on those bus rides. They always ran late, sometimes hours late, because of extra stops and extra long speeches. The candidates spent all day riding together and then had late-night bull sessions that sometimes ran long past midnight while the rest of the entourage waited, scores of aides, Secret Service agents and reporters, weary but stuck until the candidates decided it was time for bed. Their campaign theme song was Fleetwood Mac’s hit, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” sometimes played at a volume that prevented you from thinking about anything at all. In Hannibal, Missouri, the music that brought them on and off the platform was so loud that my laptop computer malfunctioned as I tried to write and file a story from the press table behind the stage.

There were three presidential campaign debates, plus one among the nominees for vice president. Bush took the hits; Clinton and Perot delivered them. By debate season, Clinton had a lead to protect, and did. I think Perot would have been relegated to the minor share of the vote third candidates usually get had he not been put on equal footing with the major nominees in the campaign debates. He nagged at the others but said little of substance. The line I remember best was an unintended self-portrait. “I’m all ears,” Perot said, and had to wait for the laughter to subside before he went on. Bush’s worst night was in Richmond, Virginia, an audience participation debate in a format he had tried unsuccessfully to avoid. Clinton thrived as an up-close campaigner, strolling the stage, walking to the edge of the audience like a talk show performer. Bush was uncomfortable and awkward. The telling questions could have come from Clinton’s speechwriters, or perhaps Perot’s. One was a challenge to the candidates to stop negative campaigning, clearly targeting Bush, who fumbled it by hedging. “It think it depends how you define it,” he said, arguing that Clinton started it and he was only responding to attacks. “I’m not going to sit there and be a punching bag.” But he was one, again. “I’m just as sick as you are of having to wake up and figure out how to defend myself every day,” Clinton answered piously, as though attack tactics were not part of his arsenal. “I’ll take the pledge because I know the American people want to talk about issues and not tabloid journalism.” Perot pledged purity, too. Bush was stuck as the odd man in the threesome.

He took another hit when he got a question that made no sense and tried to answer it sensibly. The question was how the national debt had personally affected each of the three candidates. It hadn’t; the national debt doesn’t do that. What the woman really wanted to know was how the economic slump had affected them, but that is not what she asked, and Bush talked about the national debt, saying it affected interest rates and then lapsed into doubletalk about his grandchildren having to pay for it. “I’m not sure I get it,” he went on. “Help me with the question and I’ll try to answer it.” The Democrats taunted Bush for the rest of the campaign as the president who didn’t get it. Bush also gave them a visual aid that night in Richmond. The camera caught him glancing at his watch while Clinton was talking. It looked as though he just wanted to be out of there, which he probably did. That was the image that played in the TV spots.

In the vice presidential debate, Quayle and Gore pitched their tickets with tough lines, wisecracks, and no blunders. Perot’s running mate was the more interesting figure. “Who am I? Why am I here?” asked retired Admiral James B. Stockdale, trying to answer his own questions and never managing to do so. He was literally the man in the middle, at the lectern between Quayle and Gore, admitting that he felt like an onlooker at a ping-pong game. He fumbled with his pen, missed hearing one question saying his hearing aid had been off, presented himself as an amateur and proved it. There was a naive charm about his performance in contrast to the practiced politicians on either side of him.

There was one last bit of Republican sleaze to come. It was delivered by a lame duck congressman from Michigan, Guy Vander Jagt, who had lost in a primary but was still chairman of the House GOP campaign committee. At a news conference the night before the election, Vander Jagt charged that Clinton was having an affair with a wire service reporter covering his campaign. It was a slanderous lie. The Republicans repeated it in a press release and sent that by fax to newspaper offices that night. No name, but there was only one woman covering Clinton’s campaign for a wire service, a talented, dedicated reporter for the Associated Press. I seldom lost my temper about politics, but I was damned mad that night. The Republicans disgraced themselves with that performance. They acted like the losers they were going to be the next day.

Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote, to 38 percent for Bush. Riding the wave of voter disenchantment and inflated by the debates, Perot got 19 percent, the strongest popular vote showing by a third-party entry in sixty-eight years. My guess is that Clinton would have won a two-man election because the Perot voters obviously wanted a change in the White House and might have stayed home from the polls had he not been on the ballot, but probably would not have gone to Bush. That said, no one can be certain what would have happened without Perot. What happened with him was that Clinton’s call for economic change overrode persisting doubts about character and trust. Well-founded doubts, as we would learn in White House sex scandal that scarred his second term. It wasn’t as though people hadn’t been on notice. They weren’t saying they’d trust Clinton with their daughters. They did trust him to deliver economic revival, and no candidate ever lost an election by promising to see to everyday, bread-and-butter issues.