All Too Human: A Political Education (52 page)

For the next forty-eight minutes, I listened to the Morris story. Every last detail. How Dick managed his first student-council campaign in grade school and worked his way up to ward leader races on the Upper West Side, winning every time. How he did field organizing for McCarthy in '68 and McGovern in 72. How he shifted abruptly from urban policy analyst to political gun for hire in 1977, when he lost his job and found a wife. Dick talked nonstop, in fluent, unpunctuated paragraphs. Yet he seemed as disconnected from his own words as he was from us, as if he were reading someone else's obituary from a TelePrompTer; at least until he got to the heart of the narrative — part buddy movie, part perverse morality play: the story of Dick and Bill.

It was a tale of two political prodigies — one from the North, one from the South; one short, one tall; one a consultant, the other the candidate of his dreams. Idealistic, fast-talking baby boomers, they both grew up revering Kennedy, hating Nixon, losing with McGovern, and vowing never to let it happen again. They believed in the power of politics to help people but loved the sport of it even more. When they met in 1978, Dick was a fledgling consultant scouring the country for candidates and Bill was an ambitious attorney general of Arkansas looking to make a move. They bonded by poring over polls and bantering about campaign strategy the way baseball fans study box scores and relive their favorite plays. And together, they won. But it wasn't an easy or equal relationship. When Dick looked up at Bill, he saw a future president; when Bill looked down at Dick, he saw the devil he knew — the part of himself that confused power and popularity with public service and principle. Dick knew how to win, but by the time he met Bill, he wasn't scrupulous about how he did it or whom he did it for. His other clients were Republicans, and his attack ads were the roughest in the business. Word was that he would work for both sides of the same race if he could get away with it.

So after Bill became America's youngest governor, he fired Dick for being, as Morris put it, an “assault on his vanity.” Two years later, Bill had become America's youngest ex-governor. Tried to do too much too fast, let his ideals get the better of him. Chastened, he summoned Dick to plot the comeback. They trimmed their sails, tacked to the center, and won — again and again. The only victory Dick missed was the biggest — 1992 — though Morris claimed to me that Clinton's comeback kick in New Hampshire was plotted with him over the phone. The world according to Morris wasn't complicated: Over their sixteen-year relationship, when Dick was by his side, Bill succeeded; when Bill pushed Dick away, disaster.

Just as he reached that conclusion, Morris paused. His eyes widened, his hands fell still on the table, and his voice settled back into his body. For the first and only time that night, he sounded authentically human. “Bill only wants me around when his dark political side is coming out,” Morris said, self-aware and sad. “He doesn't want anything to do with me when he's in good-government, Boy Scout mode.” Dick knew his client well. Bill might need him, but he'd never be proud of him. They might be soul mates, but it had to be secret. And there would be days and weeks, months and years, when Bill just wouldn't call.

I almost felt for the guy. But the moment passed in the time it took for the insight to flash across Dick's face. Being out wasn't his problem now. Morris was as in as you could be. Hillary had helped bring him back. Although she didn't share Dick's politics, she valued his strategic skills and the magic he could work on her husband's political mood. They had stayed in touch, talking on the phone several times in 1993 and 1994; she knew they might need Dick one day. Shortly before the midterm election, the president joined the conversation. “I told Clinton that he was going to get beat,” Dick said. “I tried to tell him not to demonize the Republicans and focus on his smaller accomplishments, like family leave and direct student loans. After the Middle East trip, I told him not to campaign at all, just stay out of the race.”

Most of Dick's soliloquy had washed right over me.
Why is he telling me all this? Is he ever going to stop?
But these last few points were different. Not because they were new. Quite the contrary. I'd heard them all before — straight from the president. “I knew that going after the Contract with America was a loser. … I should have never let you talk me into attacking it. … Should have never let myself get sucked into campaigning so much.” Never mind that Clinton had insisted on doing more talk radio, more television interviews, and more campaign rallies in the closing days of 1994, or that when the spirit moved him on the stump, no one loved to rip into the Republicans more. Dick's advice — sound advice, I had to admit — was his ticket to the family quarters of the White House. It had also become one of the stories Clinton told himself to explain his defeat.

“I've been talking to Clinton constantly since the election,” Morris continued.
No kidding.
But my resentment was temporarily replaced by fascination. As Dick dictated to me what he'd been drilling into Clinton for months, he morphed into a political version of the autistic math genius played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie
Rain Man.
His voice gained speed but lost all its tone, as if it were being generated by a transistor wired to the back of his throat. His index finger tapped furiously at a slim pocket computer that stored the polls he called his “prayer book.” Weaving that data with bits of policy analysis, political science theory, and historical analogies from England, America, and France, Dick spun out an elaborate “Theory of the Race” — that Clinton would win in 1996 if he “neutralized” the Republicans and “triangulated” the Democrats.

Neutralization required passing big chunks of the Republican agenda: a balanced budget, tax cuts, welfare reform, an end to affirmative action. This would “relieve the frustrations” that got them elected in 1994 and allow Clinton to “push them to the right” on “popular” issues like gun control and a woman's right to choose in 1996. Triangulation demanded that Clinton abandon “Democratic class-warfare dogma,” rise above his partisan roots, and inhabit the political center “above and between” the two parties — a concept Dick helpfully illustrated by joining his thumbs and forefingers into the shape of a triangle. That meant Clinton had to deliberately distance himself from his Democratic allies, use them as a foil, pick fights with them. Combine these two tactics with a “strong” foreign policy, a reasonably healthy economy, and public advocacy of issues like school uniforms and curfews that would demonstrate Clinton's commitment to “values,” Dick said, and Clinton would win in 1996.

Suddenly he stopped. His spine stiffened, and his head dropped mechanically toward his belt. Then it popped back up, as if he'd been snapped out of a hypnotic trance. It was his beeper. “The president.” He smiled, followed by a little laugh.
All I need, another reminder of who's in charge.
But at least the interruption as Dick went to find a phone gave me a chance to collect my thoughts and absorb all I'd seen and heard.

It was a tour de force, no question about that. As abstract strategy, Dick's theory was elegant; as performance art, it was mesmerizing. Watching Dick, I began to see what attracted Clinton to him. Beneath the weird veneer, Dick's mind was color-blind. He thought in black and white, a useful complement to Clinton's kaleidoscopic worldview. Stan Greenberg, Clinton's previous pollster, was a former professor with an academic style, analytical and nuanced. He appealed to Clinton's intellectual instincts and synthesizing nature, but Clinton often groused that Stan didn't make definitive recommendations. Dick, however, spoke to the part of Clinton that wanted to be told what to do. He offered clear prescriptions and promised measurable results. His certainty helped cure Clinton's chronic bouts of indecision. I could almost hear his steady drone on the phone with Clinton, calming the anxiety that often came over the president after midnight:
“Remember the theory. If we stick to it, we'll win. Just like we always have. Promise. It's in the prayer book.”

Of course, no single adviser could ever fully own Clinton. He was too smart and too stubborn for that. But after hearing Morris out, I was struck by the degree to which Clinton had integrated Dick's thinking with his own. In strategy meetings, Clinton had been repeating the Morris mantra that I'd heard fully explained tonight: “We have to help the Republicans spend their antigovernment, antitax energy. We don't want 1996 to be about taxes and government.” Other scenes now started to make sense as well. Like the time in December when I was up in the residence with Hillary and Clinton as he prepared to address the nation from the Oval Office. “Who came up with this language on the middle-class bill of rights?” I asked. Clinton pretended he didn't hear me; Hillary wore a Cheshire grin, throwing me off. It wasn't her; it was Dick. Or on State of the Union day. Clinton and Hillary retreated to the family quarters to revise the speech themselves, or so we thought and faithfully spun to reporters as a sure sign that the president was preparing to speak from his heart. When I reviewed a late draft and questioned their decision to drop a line opposing Republican “tax cuts for the wealthy,” Hillary snapped, “You say what you want to say, Bill.”
That's weird. She usually likes a good pop on the Republicans.
I didn't know then that the edit had come from Dick, who was hiding in the family room next door.

Repeating Dick's rhetoric was one thing; what really worried me was the possibility that Clinton would actually act on it. Dick explained his theory in elaborate terms, but it boiled down to a relatively simple proposition: Steal the popular-sounding parts of the Republican platform, sign them into law, and you'll win. The fact that it would anger Democrats was not a drawback but a bonus. The fact that it would contradict Clinton's past positions and professed beliefs was barely relevant. Dick made obligatory references to avoiding “flip-flops,” but his cardinal rule was to end up on the right side of a “60 percent” issue. If six out of ten Americans said they were for something, the president had to be for it too.

How can Clinton even listen to this guy? He wants us to abandon our promises and piss on our friends. Why don't we just go all the way and switch parties?
“Neutralization” sounded to me like capitulation, and “triangulation” was just a fancy word for betrayal. I also thought the strategy wouldn't work. The Morris approach might have polled well, but adopting it in its pure form would eviscerate the president's political character and validate the critique that made him most furious — that he lacked core convictions, that he bent too quickly to political pressure and always tried to have it both ways. Not to mention that it would guarantee a serious challenge in the Democratic primaries — the surest predictor of a single-term presidency.

Preventing that challenge was Harold's job. His official title was deputy chief of staff, but his portfolio was politics, the nuts and bolts — building a campaign organization, watching the money, tending to our Democratic Party base. Harold despised Dick, always had, ever since the late 1960s, when they ran rival Democratic cells on the Upper West Side. He hated even more what Dick was trying to do to the Democrats now. Though he was loyal to Clinton, Ickes revered the party. He had played a role in every Democratic convention and presidential campaign since 1968, usually for the liberal underdog — Gene McCarthy, Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson. It was in his blood. His father, Harold Ickes Sr., had been FDR's confidant and interior secretary, a New Deal legend. Serving a Democratic president was an ambition passed from father to son. Now that Harold was actually in the White House, he was following in his father's footsteps in another way. The stakes were smaller now — we didn't have to contend with a depression or a world war — but Clinton was pitting Ickes against Morris just as FDR had created constructive tension in his inner circle by playing off Harold Sr. against counselor Harry Hopkins. Tonight, though, Harold was too tired to fight. He left the table before Dick finished his phone call.

“I'm glad we've had this opportunity to get together,” Dick said when he returned to the table, noticeably relieved to see that Harold was gone. “I want you to know where I'm coming from and what I'm thinking. The president's happy we're meeting too. He wants us to work together.”

The sound of Dick's reporting to me on Clinton's state of mind made me cringe, but I said, “We have to try,” my first full sentence of the night. In a weak attempt to establish my own bona fides as a Clinton expert, I added, “He hates open fights. Hates being presented with personal confrontation.”

But I wasn't worried only about the president's psychological comfort. The whole White House had become dysfunctional. Faced with an aggressive Republican Congress, we were floundering, unable to formulate a coherent response to their ambitious agenda. The day shift, led by Leon, would push the president toward a confrontational stance. We had studied Harry Truman's 1948 campaign against the “Do Nothing” Republican Congress and hoped that Clinton would follow that fighting example. But that wasn't the president's style or Dick's strategy. On the night shift, Morris would pull Clinton back. Every presidential event, each radio address, had become a battleground. One draft would be prepared by the staff, a second would whir through the president's private fax. Clinton would take a little from column A, a little from column B, depending on the day, his mood, and whom he had talked to last. As Newt Gingrich was orchestrating House passage of the Contract with America, we were responding with a symphony of mixed signals.

By the symbolic “100 day” mark of the Republican Congress, we had reached a point of crisis. The entire administration had been mobilized for a weeklong series of events highlighting the president's commitment to education and the threat posed by the Republican Congress, which would be kicked off with a presidential address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Two days before the event, at an Oval Office meeting meant to lock him in on the strategy, Clinton signed off on the speech draft and the rollout plan, including parallel events by cabinet secretaries and other administration officials. The next night, in the residence, Dick convinced him to scrap the speech and deliver instead a point-by-point commentary on the Republican contract — a decision that was announced at the senior staff meeting the morning of the speech. Dick actually had the right idea, but it was done in the wrong way — and it wreaked havoc in the White House. Panetta confronted the president and demanded that the situation be brought under control.