THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN
TWO MONTHS LATER, on the afternoon of January 11, 1983, the faithful and curious waited single-file in a queue that circled from the second floor of the Arkansas Capitol down to the rotunda and out the steps into the warm winter wind. It was the largest crowd that had ever gathered for an inauguration in Little Rock, there to celebrate the return of the favorite son. Bill Clinton stood in the receiving line inside the governor’s conference room, surrounded by portraits of his predecessors, one of whom was himself. Already that day he had belted out redemptive hymns with his Immanuel Baptist Church choir. He had swept back to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony in the House, the click of his heels echoing in the marble halls as he moved through his old haunt. He had delivered his inaugural address on the Capitol steps and felt the applause wash over him. Now the welcome-back handshakes and bearhugs made the restoration complete. He was blessing and being blessed in the sacred rite of Arkansas politics.
Clinton was back in power; but he was not picking up where he had left off a few years earlier. Everything was different this second time around. The youth crusade atmosphere of the first term was long gone. His staff was almost entirely recast in a more reassuring image, with a grandmotherly receptionist and a good ole boy executive assistant, old enough to be his father, and another senior aide whose duties included praying with fundamentalist preachers when they visited the governor’s office. “He realized that he needed some older folks on his staff,” recalled Paul Root, who had been Clinton’s high school world history teacher and was recruited at age fifty to work in the governor’s office on education and church issues, which often intersect in the Bible Belt. “He said the first term he had some of the brightest people he knew, but they were all policy people, and if a right-wing preacher came in, he didn’t have anyone to pray with him.” The emphasis this time was on how aides got along with the public, state agencies, and the legislature. To sharpen his focus and open up the decision-making process, Clinton began chairing staff meetings every morning at seven while the legislature was in session during the first few months of the year. They were freewheeling, open-door discussions at which interested legislators were welcome to get some coffee and take a seat.
The state’s mood had also changed. In place of the pride-and-hope theme of his first inaugural, Clinton now spoke of a battle “with an old and familiar enemy: hard times.” Arkansas was in the midst of a recession, with three bad years on the farms and double-digit unemployment in the towns. He attributed the recession in part to the Republican policies of the Reagan administration in Washington, and in part to a larger state and national lethargy in adapting to a changing world economy through a renewed focus on education, information services, and worker retraining, themes that his Rhodes Scholar friend Bob Reich was expounding in his book The Next American Frontier. But the central parable of Clinton’s inaugural speech came not from his generational experience but from Depressionera family folklore: the story of when Pappaw Cassidy fell to his knees and cried because he could not afford to buy young Virginia a two-dollar Easter dress.
If the public image Clinton conveyed was one of earnest determination, in private he feared that the state’s condition, and his political situation, were more precarious than he had let on. In this moment of vindication, he was nagged by a sense of impending disaster. The bad news had started on the morning after the election, when Frank White’s chief of staff had called Betsey Wright, who would be Clinton’s staff director, and revealed that there was a $30 million shortfall in state revenues. Much of the transition had been consumed with targeting budget cuts. And there were other worries. In his comeback campaign, Clinton had pounded away at utility companies, portraying them as greedy villains and himself the returning champion who would give consumers a break on spiraling rates. The populist theme had helped him get elected, but now he had to deal with the raised expectations. He did not yet control the Public Service Commission, which set rates. Legislators and editorialists were lined up against his pledge to require that the utility commissioners be elected rather than appointed. A federal ruling on the state’s financial obligations to a regional nuclear power consortium might force rates higher. In the end, he worried, he might appear no better on the issue than White.
An even more difficult predicament loomed. The Arkansas Supreme Court was considering a lower court ruling that had declared the state’s system of financing public education unconstitutional because it denied equal opportunities to students in poor districts. A final decision, almost certain to uphold the lower court ruling, was expected sometime during the new two-year term. Clinton’s options looked unappealing. He could try to take money from rich districts and give it to poor ones, which would invite class warfare and be of minimal value since education was severely underfinanced in the entire state. Arkansas was at the bottom nationally in student spending and teacher salaries. He could make a concerted push for consolidation among the state’s rural school districts, an effort that might reopen the old desegregation wounds and was sure to hurt him politically in areas that would lose their high school sports teams and school identities. Or he could raise taxes for education, the most likely alternative, yet a disturbing prospect for a governor who could not forget that he had lost his job attempting to get more money for better roads.
But among the things that had changed since his first term was Clinton’s strategic approach. His political personality was largely unchanged: he was still restless, eclectic, intellectually hungry, eager to please. But this time he had a survival plan: the permanent campaign.
SINCE his period of exile, Clinton had been spending endless hours talking with Dick Morris about political theory and strategy. Morris was a nonstop plotter, constantly spinning out strategies and scenarios, calling his favorite clients late at night or flying in for intense, secretive head-to-head consultations in which he often left them mesmerized and reassured. He was competitive and contentious, always asking for his next check, and tended to drive other staffers crazy. To the extent that his flexible ideology was apparent, he was moderate and moving rightward. Of the politicians of both parties who dealt with him, none listened with more rapt fascination or engaged him in more debate than Clinton. Morris also established a special bond with Hillary, who shared his dark, untrusting perspective on politics.
Clinton’s problem, Morris told him, was that in the past he had bisected means and ends with “an almost Catholic splitting of virtue and sin.” Candidate Clinton would do whatever it took to get elected, but Governor Clinton would “go about serving without any significant thought to the political connotations, with almost a shunning of that which would be politically useful.” Means and ends, pragmatism and idealism, had to be “completely interwoven,” Morris advised. “When you lead in an idealistic direction, the most important thing to do is to be highly pragmatic about it. And when necessity forces upon you a problem of great pragmatism, you need to use idealism to find your way out of the thicket.” This axiom became one of the three basic tenets of Clinton’s permanent campaign.
A second arose from the benchmark poll Morris had conducted in 1981 in which the intensity of disillusionment with Clinton was measured to see whether a comeback was possible. The survey had found a widespread perception among voters that Clinton had probably done some good things in his first term but they could not remember any specific accomplishments. All they could recite were actions he had taken which they disliked. Morris, Clinton, Hillary, and Betsey Wright, the quartet that comprised the inner circle, decided that they would never again rely on the “free media”—newspaper, radio, and television reporters—to define Clinton and his programs. Interweaving means and ends, they would use paid media, commercials and grass-roots mailings, whenever they wanted to get their message to the public, even during a midterm legislative session. Individual journalists might be courted, especially the peskiest ones, such as Arkansas Democrat managing editor John Robert Starr, who would nip at the governor in his daily column unless he was made to feel like an insider. (Starr remembered Clinton calling him the day he got back to the governor’s office and saying, “Okay, what do you want?”) But for the most part, the press was not part of the plan. “His entire strategy in governing the state,” Morris recalled, “was based on flanking the press through the paid media.”
The third aspect of Clinton’s permanent campaign involved the use of voter surveys in similarly perpetual fashion, taking poll results to shape the substance and rhetoric of policy debates. The goal was to discover more than whether voters supported or opposed an initiative. Word by word, line by line, phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph, rhetorical options would be tested to see which ones were most effective in moving the public a certain direction. It was polling as a form of copy writing, as a way for Clinton to organize his thoughts. Although Morris conducted the polls, each of the four played a role in the process. Hillary Clinton was usually the one to articulate the larger problem. Wright was there to lay out the facts. Clinton and Morris would play endlessly with the words and arguments. Clinton became so hooked on the process that his rhythms could be charted by it. When polls were out in the field, he seemed passive and noncommittal. Wright and Morris discovered that Clinton was never happier than when he got the results.
Morris would read an answer, and Clinton would shout, “You know, I feel it! I feel it! I’m out there and that’s just what I feel! That’s absolutely right!” Then he would practice the rhetorical argument again, elaborating, rehearsing, seemingly overcome by joy as things that had been unclear became clear to him and he sang from a political score that he and the voters had jointly composed.
All of these elements of his permanent campaign were put to the test during Clinton’s first year back on the job. It was a difficult stretch that started slowly and ended in controversy, yet it was also the year of Clinton’s greatest legislative triumph. On the surface it seemed at first that he had no better grasp of how to operate than he had displayed during his first term. His means and ends were snarled. The state press corps found his agenda unenterprising. The only apparent resolve he exhibited was on utility issues, which were going nowhere. One February day, Clinton spent ninety minutes beseeching the House Insurance and Commerce Committee to endorse his bill that would require the election of Public Service Commissioners: He brought in an expert witness from North Dakota to testify with him. When their presentations ended, not a single member of the committee made a motion to endorse the bill. A local columnist described it as “one of the most embarrassing defeats any governor has suffered.”
It was being said that Clinton was indecisive, reluctant to move on issues ranging from school consolidation to taxes. His maneuverings in the renewed battle between the highway lobby and the trucking-poultry lobby did nothing to enhance that image. First Clinton endorsed the highway commission’s bill to impose a weight-distance tax to cover additional damage incurred by trucks weighing up to 80,000 pounds that were soon to roll down state highways. When that bill got through the Senate, leaders of the lobby, organized as the Forward Arkansas Committee, expressed outrage, saying they thought Clinton had told them that he opposed the measure because it raised more money than was needed. A few days later, the trucking forces pushed their less costly alternative through the House, this time with Clinton’s endorsement and the help of his legislative aides. The state highway director was now shocked, calling the governor a “double-crosser.” Clinton eventually took a third position, saying that he supported both bills and that whichever one passed was fine with him. In an end-of-session interview with the Arkansas Gazette, published under the frontpage headline, “Wasn’t Weak, Vacillating, Clinton Says of His Stands,” he argued, without irony, that it was unfair to say that he tried to please everybody because “in reality the effect probably was that I ended up displeasing both sides.”
Although these apparent blunders might not have been deliberate ploys, they did fall into a larger strategy. Clinton and his inner circle had already chosen education reform, not utility reform or highway improvements, as the central issue of his governorship, the one for which they planned to put to full use the tactics of the permanent campaign. Clinton was eager to become known as the education governor. For all his romance about the regular folks of Arkansas, he was frustrated by the state’s inferiority complex, a sense that “God meant for us to be last, that God meant for us to be poor.” Basic education was the “key to our economic revival and our perennial quest for prosperity.” But the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the school-funding case. Morris had just begun testing the tax possibilities and the rhetoric that would shape the public debate. Hillary Clinton was preparing to serve her husband as chairman of the Education Standards Committee that would design the substance of reform. The serious work awaited a special legislative session.
Before that, during the regular legislative session, Clinton’s essential objective had been to buy time. His goal with truck weights was to try to avoid being viewed as the central force responsible for a new tax, whichever way the tax went. He managed to do that, at the calculated expense of angering both sides and appearing equivocal. On utility reform, his aim had been to push hard in public so that he would not appear to be backing away from a campaign promise, while essentially conceding the issue in private. “He knew he couldn’t succeed, but he had to show that he had tried and failed,” Morris recalled. “He had to keep up the rhetoric.” This strategy also had mixed results. While it enhanced Clinton’s pro-consumer image, it infuriated some utility reform advocates who concluded that he had been grandstanding. One of his longtime energy advisers, Scott Trotter, finally turned on him, issuing a seven-page critique in which he said, “Clinton’s actions on utilities during the current term have been phony and inconsequential. What is worse, this is not a mistake but a politically calculated policy.” Trotter bitterly cited a meeting in early summer at which he said Clinton told him that he no longer needed the utility issue because he was now focused on education reform.
FEW people in Arkansas were surprised when the state Supreme Court ruling came out in the final week in May declaring public education financing unconstitutionally inequitable. Here was a state with 367 school districts, more than twice as many districts as neighboring states, some so remote and poor and with such meager property tax bases that they could barely pay teachers a living wage or supply basic educational services. In some schools in southwest Arkansas, not far from Clinton’s birthplace in Hope, teachers were making less than $10,000 a year and qualified for food stamps, with their own children in federally subsidized free lunch programs. The need for more money to spread around to those districts was obvious. But it was also Clinton’s great practical dilemma. Even though Arkansas ranked next to last in the nation in the tax burden imposed on state residents, above only Alabama, there was a prevalent notion among Arkansans that they were poor and overburdened already. As the car tag revolt of 1980 had made clear to Clinton, any tax hike could be rejected as an unwarranted imposition, especially during economic hard times.
How to raise taxes? How to solve this practical dilemma? Rule number one of the permanent campaign: Turn to idealism. The first decision of Clinton and the inner circle was to move the focus away from the tax by making it an idealistic crusade. Rather than merely raising enough money to satisfy the court mandate, they would seek twice as much, and build an entire program around it. There was a national context to this approach: the National Commission on Excellence in Education had just issued a landmark report citing a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s schools and detailing a long list of needed reforms. Some southern states had already launched education reform efforts, most notably Mississippi, whose threadbare schools usually ranked fiftieth, below Arkansas’ forty-ninth, in comparative studies of the states. The traditional sarcastic cry in Arkansas, “Thank God for Mississippi!”, might no longer apply.
Hillary Rodham, now going by Hillary Clinton or Mrs. Clinton, took a leave of absence from Rose Law Firm to spend the summer and early fall chairing the Education Standards Committee. It was not the first time she had worked for her husband (in the first term she had chaired a committee on rural health care), but it was her widest public exposure, reflecting her idealistic and pragmatic sides: her profound interest in children and education issues and, even more, the extraordinary commitment she had begun making to advance Clinton’s cause since the 1980 defeat. In selecting her for the committee, Clinton had said, “This guarantees that I will have a person who is closer to me than anyone else overseeing a project that is more important to me than anything else.” From then on, increasingly, he would turn to her for critical tasks that he needed done or was not good at himself.
The Education Standards Committee held seventy-five meetings, in which it took public testimony at the same time that it prepared the public for a largely predesigned set of reforms, from mandatory kindergarten to smaller class sizes in elementary school to competence tests for students in third, sixth, and eighth grades to minimum standards and scorecards for every school. The inadequacies the committee members found in many Arkansas school districts were stunning: no physics classes in 148 high schools, no advanced math in 135, no foreign languages in 180, and no music in 204 schools. At every session, parents would hover around Hillary Clinton after the meetings and tell stories about their troubled schools. Gradually, over the course of the hearing process, it seemed that Hillary, after living in Arkansas for nearly a decade, was finally being accepted as a member of the family, viewed less as a professional outsider and more as an intelligent public servant. When she appeared before an interim committee of the legislature to outline the reforms that her panel was considering, Representative Lloyd George said into his microphone, “I think we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!”
While Hillary concentrated on substance, Clinton and Morris experimerited with tax strategies, testing a variety of options in polls which they wrote and rewrote together. Clinton finally decided to try to raise most of the money by increasing the sales tax I percent. It was the least progressive form of taxation, unpopular with organized labor and advocates for the poor, but it was also the surest way to get the money. It required only majority approval in the legislature, whereas most other tax hikes would require three-quarters approval. Some of Clinton’s allies thought it was time to reform the sales tax by eliminating food from items that could be taxed or expanding it to include a variety of exempted services. But Morris, strongly supported by Hillary, argued that it would be counterproductive to make the tax that interesting because it would then become the issue, “rather than the good things it would achieve.”
As the final education package was prepared for the special session which was to begin in early October, an idea that had not been part of the committee’s recommendations took on a central role: competence tests for public school teachers. It was a concept that Hillary had considered privately, especially after coming home from hearings where she heard horror stories about some teachers. In their strategy sessions, the Clintons would recall the teacher who taught his class about “World War Eleven”—apparently mistaking the Roman numerals of World War II. But the overriding reasons for adding the teacher tests to the program were political. Frank White, the former governor, who represented the conservative business establishment, announced in a speech a few weeks before the special session that he would support the tax increase and pay raises for teachers only if they were accompanied by teacher tests.
Morris offered two other reasons to include teacher tests in the package in tandem with teacher salary increases. In surveys he had conducted going back to 1978, one of Clinton’s highest negatives was that people thought he was the tool of special interests, which to many Arkansas voters meant not powerful business forces but liberal groups such as the Teachers Association, labor unions, and blacks. Public employee unionism was un-popular in the state. When Morris polled on the teacher tests, he found that the support for it was overwhelming, exceeding 75 percent. “It distills the quality of helping children from the soup of helping children and helping the teachers’ union,” Morris told Clinton. “It boils off what people didn’t like, which was caving in to the teachers who want more money, and shows the purity of your motivation of helping children, because you are offending the special interest that would be most gratified by what you are doing.” It was also, Morris noted, a decisive break from the Democratic left.
On the day before Clinton appeared on statewide television to unveil his proposal, Betsey Wright invited Kai Erickson, executive director of the Arkansas Education Association (AEA), to her office in the Capitol and told him what was in the package, including the teacher tests. Erickson was stunned. He told her that the teachers had worked with Clinton and Hillary throughout the hearing process and had never been informed that the competence tests were on the table. He asked whether it was something that could be discussed and negotiated. Wright said no.
RULE number two of the permanent campaign: Never rely on the press, the free media, to get your message across. The education campaign started before the special session began, and it was almost indistinguishable from an election campaign. Clinton formed a finance committee, Arkansas Partners in Education, that raised and spent $130,000 for radio and television commercials promoting the reform package. Another support group, the Blue Ribbon Education Committee, distributed satin blue ribbons and 250,000 brochures explaining the program along with postcards that could be mailed to legislators by citizens supporting the reform effort. Most of the money was raised from financial institutions and corporations in a four-day solicitation blitz orchestrated by Clinton and his executive secretary, W. Maurice Smith, the rural financier and farmer, who also began making personal loans to Clinton from his own bank to sustain the permanent campaign.
On Tuesday, October 4, in an address opening the special session, ten months into his term, Clinton declared that the legislature was presented with a “magic moment” to change Arkansas history. It was an emotional speech, infusing his personal struggles with his hopes for his state. “In the life of our state, as in the life of a person, there are times of growth and decline, times of joy and sadness, times of triumph and tragedy, and times of ordinary getting along,” Clinton said. “Much of what life brings is a matter of circumstance beyond our control. Yet always our will makes some difference, and sometimes our will can make all the difference. We are here tonight in such a time.” He cited one of his favorite quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “’I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.’” He read from Robert Frost: “ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference.’” And, mindful of Morris’s polls indicating that the public was overwhelmingly behind teacher tests, he called mandatory tests a “small price to pay for the biggest tax increase for education in the history of the state and to restore the teaching profession to the position of public esteem that I think it deserves.”
What had been a last-minute, throw-in idea now became the symbolic center of the reform package. The Teachers Association accused the Clintons of labeling their entire profession incompetent. One of the major fears of the AEA leadership was that a standardized teacher test, like many standardized tests, would prove to be culturally biased against some black teachers, but they were reluctant to make that case in public, fearing a backlash among redneck legislators. Carol Willis and other black aides on Clinton’s staff also thought that the tests would have racial implications: they drafted their own satiric version of a test with a cultural bias toward the inner city, with such items as “Q. When is Mother’s Day? A. The day the welfare checks arrive.” Clinton expressed chagrin at the AEA’s charges that he and Hillary were smearing the teaching profession. But in private, according to Morris, he appreciated the political benefits of picking a fight.
With the poll numbers behind him, Clinton struck an unyielding position. If the legislature killed the testing plan, he said, he would drop the entire package. Angry teachers roamed the halls of the Capitol and packed the Senate gallery for the crucial vote, which was close enough to go either way. Clinton did much of the last-minute lobbying himself, calling senators out of the chamber and displaying the full range of his abilities to plead, cajole, and persuade. He cornered Vada Sheid, the former treasurer of Baxter County who had been his friend and ally since the day in the spring of 1974 when he had stopped at her furniture store in Mountain Home to ask for her support in the congressional race against John Paul Hammerschmidt and she had sewed a loose button on his shirt. Sheid wanted to vote with Clinton, but the teachers in her district were putting pressure on her to go against the tests. “Bill Clinton comes to the Senate and he calls me out and he says, ‘Vada, you’re not thinkin’ clear, you’ve forgotten your grandchildren have always had priority with you,’” Sheid recalled. “He said, ‘You’re afraid, Vada. But I have to have one more vote to pass this thing.’”
Clinton “had tears in his eyes,” according to Sheid. “He had to have that one vote. He was dead meat. He was emotional about it.” She told him that she was nervous about reelection. “This will defeat me,” she said.
“No it won’t,” Clinton promised. “It will help you.”
Sheid voted for the tests. The teachers campaigned door to door in her district against her. She lost the next election, but did not hold it against Clinton, who rewarded her act of loyalty by appointing her to the state police commission.
In the legislative endgame, Clinton also had a problem with the tax aspects of the package, and he resorted to a different sort of gamesmanship to prevail. Among the issues still in dispute were his insistence that the sales tax hike include an emergency clause making its effect immediate, and an amendment pushed by labor and public action groups giving an annual rebate to low-income families for the sales tax on food. At a meeting in the governor’s office, Clinton struck a deal with J. Bill Becker of the AFL-CIO and citizen activist Brownie Ledbetter, two vocal advocates of the food tax rebate. If they would lobby for his emergency clause in the House, he would support their amendment. The deal was witnessed by two legislators, one of whom interrupted Clinton and repeated the terms to make sure the governor understood what he was saying. Clinton said yes.
The House then passed the tax measure with the rebate amendment, but the emergency clause failed by a narrow margin. The rebate lobbyists, satisfied that Clinton was upholding his end of the deal, joined forces again with the governor’s aides the next day and pushed through the emergency clause. The following day, however, when leaders of the Senate said they had troubles with the rebate amendment, Clinton started backing away from it. By the time the Senate had passed the bill without the rebate and sent it back to the House for final action, the governor and his lobbyists were actively working against it. Clinton said that the deal was only temporary, and that he had to turn away from it in the interest of getting the reform package enacted. Whatever savings low-income residents might gain from the food tax rebate, he said, were of transitory and minimal value compared with the permanent benefits of better educational opportunities.
Becker was enraged. He complained that Clinton had turned away from the rebate amendment too hastily. The vote in the Senate would have been close, he agreed, but with a full-scale lobbying effort by the governor it might have passed. When he was lobbying the House for the emergency clause as part of the deal, Becker said, several representatives had warned him, “Clinton’s lying to you! He’s lying to you! He’s not going to do it!” Becker had not believed them then, but now he decided that they had been right. He had been a presence in Arkansas politics since the days of Orval Faubus, Becker said, but never before had he felt so deceived by a governor. He called Clinton’s maneuver “inexcusable” and one that he would not soon forget.
Becker held his grudge, and so, for a long time, did the teachers. The AEV spent most of the next three years and two elections trying to defeat Clinton and repeal the competence tests. But as influential as it could be in isolated legislative races, such as Vada Sheid’s, it was rendered powerless against Clinton. The more it took him on, the more his popularity grew statewide. The substantive results of the education reform package were uneven. Over four years, all of the school districts eventually complied with the new standards on class size and course offerings. Advanced math, science, and foreign languages eventually became available in every district. The number of graduating seniors who moved on to college increased from 38 percent to 50 percent. Teacher salaries went up, but still remained near the bottom nationally, as did student test scores. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education indicated that scores for Arkansas high school seniors taking the American College Test declined in the four years after the reforms were enacted.
Still, Bill Clinton now had a cause, a story, a political identity. From the passage of the reform package in November 1983, in every poll, the people of Arkansas could cite something they liked about him as governor: he was the one who had improved the schools and forced the teachers to prove their competence. He was the education governor.
JOGGING was the craze in Little Rock during that era, and Clinton took up jogging. One day he ran in a four-mile race on a course that weaved its way past the Victorian homes in the historic Quapaw District, around the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, and back down to the Capitol. Jim Blair, his lawyer friend from Fayetteville, was in town and ran the race at the governor’s side. As they jogged by the mansion, Clinton decided to take a break. He walked for a few minutes, catching his breath and playing with his dog Zeke. Then he started up again, lumbering down the street to catch Blair. “Let’s finish strong!” Clinton huffed as they crossed the highway and neared the Capitol, and suddenly he sprinted past his friend to reach the finish line first. It was a fitting performance for Clinton’s second act as governor. Now he was the long-distance runner, plodding along mile after mile for his state. To stifle the inevitable talk that he was looking for a faster track, he said that he hoped and intended to serve as governor for another six to eight years. He was in it for the long haul, the marathon man.
Clinton’s Arkansas experience became a testing ground for strategies and policies that might be applied on the national level. Since the morning after he and Jimmy Carter had been defeated in 1980, Clinton had focused on what it “would take to recreate a new majority for change in America,” which is to say what it would take for an activist Democrat to make it to the White House. He felt that his party had become stuck in “no-win situations” and become known as “the party of blame.” It got in trouble, he said, when “the need for change conflicted with people’s most deeply ingrained habits or most cherished values. If you want to be for change, you have to render that change in ways that people can understand and relate to.”
That did not mean, he said, resorting to the familiar nostrums of the New Deal coalition. Clinton had long since turned away from what he viewed as the politics of nostalgia. Going back even a decade before his defeat to Frank White, back to the Duffey Senate campaign in Connecticut in 1970, he had been searching for new formulas for Democratic success. By the time his party gathered in August in San Francisco for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he believed that the great divide that needed to be narrowed was not so much between liberals and conservatives as romantics and realists. Although he had remained neutral in the presidential primary battle that year between former Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, and although he eventually cast his convention vote for Mondale, his intellectual sympathies rested with Hart, his onetime boss in the McGovern campaign, who was basing his challenge on generational change. During an informal gathering at the convention, Clinton asked one of his colleagues, Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado, what he thought of the keynote address by Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a rhetorical masterpiece that had stirred the crowd with its rich evocation of the core Democratic principles of empathy and equality. Lamm said he was impressed and moved, to which Clinton responded, “Come on, what did it really say about the issues we’re trying to raise?”
In Clinton’s own speech to the convention that week, he cited Harry Truman to talk about the future of the party. “Harry Truman would tell us to forget about 1948 and stand for what America needs in 1984,” Clinton said. “That’s the way to attract the millions of Americans who feel locked out and won’t vote because they think we’re irrelevant. That’s the way to attract millions more, mostly young and well-educated, who intend to vote against us because they think we have no program for the future. Harry Truman would say: America has a productivity problem. What are we going to do about it? America is getting its brains beaten out in international economic competition. What are we going to do about it? America has millions of people who want to work but whose jobs have been lost because of competition from low wages abroad or the necessity to automate at home. What are we going to do about it? America is mortgaging its future with high deficits, driving interest rates too high, making our dollar too expensive and our trade deficit enormous. What are we going to do about it?… America is pricing itself out of affordable health care. What are we going to do about it? America needs an invigorated education system based on high standards and real accountability, as well as more money. What are we going to do about it?”
In the aftermath of Mondale’s defeat, Clinton began to place his programs into a broader philosophy of opportunity and responsibility, which he saw as a theme that could lead to change without alienating the middle class. His education reforms in Arkansas set the model: the opportunity was for teachers to get more pay and more flexibility, the opportunity was for students to get more course offerings and smaller class sizes, and the responsibility was for both teachers and students to document their skills through standardized competence tests. During the mid-1980s, as he took an increasingly active role in the National Governors Association, he pushed that theme and expanded its scope to include other issues such as welfare, where workfare-style proposals Clinton helped design and push offered opportunity for work, education, and child care, but linked them to the responsibility of welfare recipients to work their way off the rolls and find jobs. In Arkansas, he offered major industries the opportunity to expand through major tax breaks, with the responsibility of staying in the state and expanding their workforces. He was merging ends and means, strategy and philosophy. And as he followed that course, his critics argued that his efforts to develop win-win situations made him so malleable that his word was unreliable. Of his opportunity-responsibility theme, some complained that more of the responsibility seemed to be placed on the less powerful and more of the opportunity seemed to be going to those who already had ample clout and, not incidentally, the wealth that Clinton needed to fund his political rise.
The essential question of his permanent campaign became whether his will to survive would overwhelm his convictions.