Read All Too Human: A Political Education Online
Authors: George Stephanopoulos
After our plates were cleared, Morris and I retreated to the back of the bar to discuss the terms of our engagement. I ordered a scotch, Dick a cognac. The maître d' delivered them personally, compliments of the house. “Oh, it's so good to be here with someone famous,” Dick said. “But I don't want any publicity. Being a man of mystery helps me work better. I just want to do the job.” Aware of his own frailties, Dick was basically talking to himself. But the unspoken subtext wasn't lost on me:
“You have fame, but you lost your power. Celebrity is double-edged. I have the power now — and I'm not going to blow it.”
The more I listened to Morris, the more I sensed that his position with Clinton was slightly more precarious than I had imagined. The president wanted Dick's ideas, but he couldn't afford open rebellion in the White House. Dick was essentially under orders to play nice. He knew that Harold was his mortal enemy, and that Leon could barely stand to be in the same room with him. I was part of their team, but the underlying purpose of tonight's dinner was to determine whether I could be a bridge between the two camps. Trying to draw me in, Dick started our private conversation with a stab at making me feel sorry for him, explaining that his Republican clients were furious at him for agreeing to work with Clinton: “You have no idea how much trouble I'm in with the people on my own side.”
You have no idea how little I care.
It was maddening enough that Clinton was relying on a consultant whose publicly stated professional goal was to “help the Republicans govern successfully and become a majority party.” Even worse were all the rumors we kept hearing from the Hill about how Dick was still feeding inside information from the White House to his most prominent Republican client, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. As Dick reeled off his woes of financial risk and lost friendship, I just stared back at him.
So he tried a new tack: veiled threat. Twisting his neck and working his jaw in a nervous tic that made him look like a cut-rate Cagney impressionist, he lowered his voice to a sotto voce hiss: “Now listen, George, I know you leaked all those stories on me in April. Don't say that you didn't. I don't care what you say. I know you did.”
“All those stories” consisted of a brief “Talk of the Town” piece in
The New Yorker
and a passing mention in the “Washington Whispers” section of
U.S. News and World Report.
I wasn't their source, but it didn't matter. Dick had me cornered here.
“Screw with me,”
he was saying,
“and I'll screw with you.”
I felt compelled to respond for the record: “Dick, you may not want to hear it, but I'll tell you anyway: I didn't do it and I wouldn't do it. Not because I care about you, but because I don't want to hurt the president.”
Nice-sounding sentiments, but they wouldn't do me much good if Dick continued to press this complaint with Clinton. Given the president's attitude toward me and leaks, an accusation was tantamount to a conviction. Back on solid ground, Dick outlined his view of the power equation in the White House. “Your basic power is the administration. They all look to you. You also have good ties to the press. But I have the president. We should work together.” He then started to list a series of policy proposals and presidential decisions that he wanted to “take off the table” by securing my agreement.
Though it was typically overstated, Dick's analysis wasn't far off. I could frustrate his night thoughts by raising questions in the morning senior staff meetings, or by getting a cabinet member or member of Congress to weigh in against one of his schemes. But he could do the same to me by working the president directly, and it was emotionally exhausting and politically debilitating to develop a strategy, build coalitions inside the administration, consult with the Congress, and prepare the ground with the press, only to have the whole approach upended in a late-night meeting where you didn't have a say. Dick needed me, and I needed him. Now we really started talking.
His big idea that week was a “national crusade” against domestic terrorism. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Morris didn't think that, politically, you could be too tough on the militias. While Dick's read of public sentiment was unassailable, his proposals reminded me of the advice his late cousin Roy Cohn used to give Joe McCarthy. Morris wanted to require militia groups to register their guns and their membership with the FBI, and he wanted the Justice Department to publish the names of suspected terrorists in the newspapers. I raised a civil liberties argument. “Oh, people don't care about that,” he said. So I countered with process, saying that if the attorney general wasn't on board (which she'd never be), Dick couldn't achieve his goal. Leaks from the Justice Department would only make Clinton look weak, and the paperwork would never emerge from the bowels of the bureaucracy unless the president typed it himself.
Next on his list of potential presidential targets was immigrants. Basically, he wanted to create a background-check system that would turn your average traffic cop into a member of the U.S. Border Patrol. If, say, a police officer spotted a suspiciously brown-skinned person driving a car with a busted taillight, Dick's scheme would give him the ability to dial into a computer and order immediate deportation if the driver's papers weren't in order. Though he brushed off my fears of potential abuse and political harm to our Hispanic base, I persuaded him to hold off on the practical grounds of prohibitive cost.
As we worked through his list, Dick became more and more excited. He didn't seem to mind having his ideas shot down; there were always more where they came from. More important to him was the fact that he thought he had figured out a way for the two of us to work together. “I got it, George, I got it,” he said as he began reeling off various metaphors for our relationship. “I do strategy, you do tactics. Together we have twenty-twenty vision: I see long, you see short. I'm the playmaker, you're parked under the basket.”
Whatever.
I still didn't trust him. Dick would get me fired if he could and would try to own me if he couldn't. I'd do the same to him. Meantime, I knew we had to work together. Whether I liked it or not, the president wanted Dick to be his strategist. If I didn't like it, I could leave. But that felt like surrender, and vaguely disloyal — a betrayal of the ideas and ideals we had fought for in the 1992 campaign. To serve the president I helped elect, I had to fight the president Dick was trying to create. If Clinton didn't like that, he could fire me. But that felt less likely now.
There must be a method to his madness. Clinton is pulling an FDR. He wants Dick's energy and ideas, but he wants us to check him too. He wants us to get along, but he doesn't want me to give up.
That's what I told myself, anyway. I knew I wouldn't win every battle, but I was glad the shadowboxing was over. Dick and I were finally in the ring together. Still ahead were the biggest bouts with the broadest political consequences and the most direct conflict between us. As Dick prattled on about our new partnership, I finally told him to stop. “The two things we need to talk about,” I said, “are affirmative action and the budget.” After a few minutes of debate, it was clear that these issues were still very much on the table. “Oh, I'm going to beat you,” he said with a dismissive shrug that made me even more determined to prove him wrong. But it was 1:30
A.M.
, the tables were bare, the lights were up, and our waiter was giving me a bleak look. Dick and I parted with a handshake and a promise to talk in the morning.
T
wo days after my dinner with Dick, I was in the Oval to help prep the president for an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio. (With the first primary of Clinton's final campaign only nine months away, we weren't taking anything for granted.) Wendy Smith, who covered New Hampshire for the White House, briefed Clinton on local issues like the Portsmouth Naval Base, while Gene Sperling and I stood by in case he needed some fresh budget facts. Not likely. At a cabinet room event earlier that morning, Clinton had already delivered our standard critique on the Republican budgets — that they cut too much from Medicare, Medicaid, education, and tax credits for the poor “to pay for tax cuts for upper-income Americans.” Our “message of the day” was set; all the president had to do was repeat it. When Wendy handed Clinton the phone, I left for lunch. Twenty minutes later, my beeper went off. It was Gene. “George, we got a problem. You gotta get back here.”
I knew I should've stayed. He stays on message when he's being watched.
Clinton hated repeating himself, and he was ambivalent about our budget, which continued deficit reduction but wasn't projected to reach balance. Morris was pushing him to scrap it and to match the Republicans with a balanced budget of his own, preferably on Sunday night in a prime-time televised address from the Oval Office. That wasn't going to happen. The entire economic team was opposed to such a precipitous move — the proposed cuts would eviscerate our commitment to “investments in people,” and we didn't even have a new budget to propose. But when the interviewer challenged Clinton's commitment to fiscal discipline, the president gave him the answer he was looking for, replying in a roundabout way that he owed the Republicans and the American people a “counter-budget” that reached balance by a fixed date. “I think it clearly can be done in less than ten years,” he said.
Owe it to the Republicans? What about the
Democrats?
Gene and I were off the wall. Panetta too. The former chairman of the House Budget Committee knew how tough it would be to produce a balanced budget that protected our priorities, and he understood the pace of the negotiating process. We accepted that Clinton would eventually have to compromise with the Republicans, but now was too early. They were just starting to pay a political price for their unpopular cuts; why let them off the hook?
We spent the whole afternoon trying to keep a lid on the story. The only regular White House reporter who'd heard the interview was National Public Radio's Mara Liasson, and I did my best to sell her the line that what the president said wasn't all that new, that it was more analysis than advocacy. It was a Friday afternoon, and the rest of the press corps was preoccupied with the pending Secret Service decision to close the two-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to cars and trucks. No need to distract them; we delayed general distribution of Clinton's New Hampshire interview transcript until after deadline. For another weekend, at least, our budget strategy would survive.
The stakes were high. For as long as I'd been in Washington, the budget deficit had defined the domestic-policy debate. Reducing it had become an economic and political imperative. But as Clinton always said, no good deed goes unpunished. He had defeated President Bush in 1992 largely because Bush had sacrificed his “no new tax” pledge for the sake of deficit reduction. Republicans had defeated Democrats in 1994 largely because, in 1993, Democrats raised taxes to reduce the deficit. The 1996 presidential campaign would turn on the budget showdown of 1995. But how? Would voters, as Morris believed, reward Clinton for cooperating with the Republicans and signing a version of their balanced budget and tax cuts into law? Or would they, as I believed, reward the president for vetoing the Republican budget and protecting core government programs against crippling cuts?
But the budget debate wasn't just about the president's reelection prospects. It also revolved around fundamental questions of philosophy, economics, and politics: What is the proper size, scope, and role of the federal government? What policies are most effective in creating economic growth and ensuring a fair distribution of its benefits? What are the responsibilities of a president in a divided political system? When is compromise honorable — and when is it cowardly? How much ground could we cede to the Republicans and still call ourselves Democrats?
Our initial budget strategy, conceived in December, when Morris was still in the shadows, was unapologetically partisan. It rested on the premise that the Republicans' 1994 campaign was fundamentally dishonest and the hope that we Democrats could make them pay for it. Right up until November, Newt Gingrich and his allies had adamantly denied our charge that their Contract with America pledge to balance the budget with huge tax cuts and higher defense spending would require cuts of up to 30 percent in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, student loans, environmental protection, and crime prevention. Rather than match their return to Reaganomics, we called their bluff. Our December budget basically extended the deficit reduction policies of our 1993 plan but didn't come close to balance. Deficit hawks derided it as a “slide by” budget; I liked to think of it as a “show me” budget, designed to draw clear lines in the sand and force the Republicans to specify the painful cuts it would take to pay for their popular promises.
At first, Clinton was enthusiastic about the strategy. He felt he had done the hard work of deficit reduction without any Republican help and that they had an obligation to do the same. But as the months passed, he became increasingly uncomfortable — and not just because of Morris. Clinton's a doer by nature, and an optimist; he believed there had to be a way to balance the budget without abandoning his principles or past promises. He doesn't like playing defense, and he was rankled by the consistent Republican critique that he was AWOL in the balanced-budget fight. “I'm president. I need to be
for
something,” he would tell us. “I can't just stand on the sidelines.” The New Hampshire interview was Clinton's way of sneaking off the bench.
By Monday, May 22, the press corps was buzzing. Although the president had couched his proposal in conditional terms, the reporters knew they had a story here: The president was breaking with his allies and advisers and striking out on his own. When Sperling tried to spin down the significance of Clinton's new pledge with David Broder of the
Post,
Broder dryly replied, “I hope you don't mind, Gene, but I'd rather use his words than yours on this one.” Tuesday morning, the clandestine budget debate inside the White House was front-page news.