All Too Human: A Political Education (6 page)

We took the El into town — not just to save time at rush hour, but also so that Kevin O'Keefe, a local pol and high school friend of Hillary's, could call the
Tribune
's political gossip columnist with a little nugget about the governor of Arkansas who was running for president. Riding the El was a nice tip of the hat to the city's working-class spirit, and all the little messages add up. We also made local news by announcing that David Wilhelm, a veteran of Mayor Daley's operation, would now be Clinton's campaign manager. He would give us an edge if, as Clinton expected, the March 17 Illinois primary really turned out to be the decisive contest.

The trick to speaking at party fund-raisers is to treat them like dinner theater. People are there to have fun and feel good. No heavy lifting. The postmeal speech has to be easy and light, with just enough inspiration to make people feel that being there is a kind of civic duty.

Clinton began his speech by working his way down the dais with a special word or inside joke for every politician there.
Nice stroke. People remember being remembered.
Then he made a couple of quips about how much Arkansas had given Chicago, including Scottie Pippen of the Bulls, and launched into his stump speech — a condensed version of his announcement speech on how we needed a president who would fight for the middle class and fix our problems here at home. When he tested a line we had worked on about how America needs a president who cares as much about the “Middle West as the Middle East,” the crowd rewarded him with laughter and applause. I made a note to remind him to use the line again — as if he needed reminding.

Kerrey arrived moments before the dinner and didn't work the crowd, just stood off to the side cracking jokes with his traveling aide. When he spoke about Vietnam, it was still moving, but there was an edge of bitterness beneath his words that he couldn't hide. And he made no real attempt to tailor his message to this particular crowd on this particular night. Over the course of a campaign, despite all of the artifice, the public usually picks up a reasonably true picture of a candidate, for better or worse. The Chicago crowd saw an engaged and optimistic Bill Clinton, a man who loved his work. He wooed his audience, forged a connection, and paid them the compliment of delivering a speech that didn't seem canned. Kerrey didn't work hard enough to win the room, giving people the impression that he expected them to support him because of who he was rather than what he would do for them.

After the speeches, Kerrey left right away. Clinton stayed for another reception with the local VIPs and greeted each one with a personal word while I stood off his left shoulder and collected their business cards for our field and fund-raising efforts. Pumped up by the people and the speech, Clinton fished for compliments as we hustled through the back hallways to our suite: “How'd I do? … You think it was OK? … Find out what Joe thinks.” Joe was Joe Klein, a short, bearded writer for
New York
magazine who had his eye on Clinton. I found him outside by the curb waiting for a cab, and we schmoozed for a few minutes. He was as high on the speech as I was, confirming that Clinton had cleaned Kerrey's clock. Good news to report.

Our campaign grew fast through the fall. We traded up headquarters, and Wilhelm built up our field organization, working back from Illinois to Florida, where the first symbolic votes would be cast at a straw poll in December. His buddy Rahm Emanuel came down from Chicago to run the money. All I knew about Emanuel at first was that he had once mailed a dead fish to a rival political consultant. But when the former ballet dancer arrived in Little Rock and leaped onto a table to scream his staff into shape, I knew the money side would be OK.

I divided my time between setting up shop in Little Rock and accompanying Clinton on the road. Bruce took care of the “body”; I concentrated on press and policy, briefing Clinton before interviews on likely questions and the reporter's angle, checking in with our consultants back in Washington, reading newspapers, magazines, and policy journals for news books and new facts to freshen the stump speech. When Clinton spoke, I took notes — partly so I could help explain his thinking and point out his best lines to the press, partly to help remind Clinton which riffs were especially effective. I was there to hear what worked and to help whittle away what didn't. On the plane, I tried to absorb the thoughts he revealed in snatches of conversation between catnaps and countless hands of hearts. Each hand was a tutorial: Either he was reaching across the table to teach me how to pass the cards, or leaning back into his headrest with a meditation on, say, the right way to confront David Duke: “You can't question his being born-again. … We Southerners believe in deathbed conversions. … Just say we can't go back to the days when his kind of thinking held us all back.”

On a late Friday night in November, Clinton expounded on that theme before his largest campaign audience yet — at the Church of God in Christ convention, in Memphis. Clinton was flying in from New Hampshire, but I had spent the week in headquarters and was missing the road. With Memphis only a couple of hours away, David Wilhelm and I decided to take a drive.

Entering the convention, I was struck by the sensation of never having been in a room like this before. David and I were about the only white faces in a crowd of men in immaculate suits and women in elaborate hats. Stray organ chords drifted over the murmurs of the congregation. The arena was alive with expectation, fellowship, spirituality, and a sense of fun — somewhere between a Sunday service and a rock concert.

But if I was at sea, Clinton was at home. He knew this place and its people, had prayed with them in tiny churches on the back roads of Arkansas. Here, too, he had made it his business to know who they were and what they cared about. If Chicago had been politics as theater, this was politics as liturgy.

He entered the hall, a lone white man surrounded by a cluster of black clergymen, looking like a heavyweight with his cornermen before being called into the ring. He was staring straight ahead, almost in a trance, oblivious to the crowd. I would soon learn the meaning of that look: Clinton was composing his speech.

As he moved toward the stage, I sat on a concrete step in the aisle, ready to be carried away. This was my guy, and I wanted him to succeed — especially here, in front of an African American audience, where he could preach his message of drawing black and white workers together in common cause. Just like Bobby Kennedy had tried to do before an assassin's bullet struck him down. Then came court-ordered busing, urban decay, the Democrats' drift toward identity politics, and a generation of Republican candidates from Nixon to Bush whose winning formula was crime, quotas, and welfare queens. By 1991, RFK's “black and blue” coalition was a distant memory.

Maybe Clinton could put it back together. That was his dream, and mine. I wanted him to be the Bobby Kennedy I first heard of in second grade, when our whole school was ushered into the auditorium to pray for the great man who'd been shot the night before and was fighting for life on an operating table. The Bobby Kennedy I read about when I first moved to Washington. Jack Newfield's elegy to RFK's 1968 campaign introduced me to a world of young men like Jeff Greenfield and Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky, who had hooked up with a Kennedy to help change the world — brash, tough-minded idealists who wanted to stop the war in Vietnam and start a war on poverty at home, from Bed-Stuy to Appalachia to the Indian reservations in the mountain west. Young guys who helped make history.

If Clinton could be Kennedy, maybe I could be one of them — and maybe tonight would be part of that process. Maybe this speech would pass into the realm of political myth, like John Kennedy's 1960 speech on church and state that put him over the top in West Virginia, or his younger brother's sermon against violence, delivered impromptu in Indiana the night Martin Luther King was shot. Or maybe, more likely, this would be just another Friday night in a campaign that would never be remembered at all. But campaigns are fueled by fantasy too.

Clinton delivered that night. After a hug for Bishop Ford, he started out slow, easing into the speech as if he were groping for words. Picking up speed, he praised the church, “founded by a man of God from my state,” and reflected on his own Baptist faith, making connections, drawing them in. With a lilt in his voice, he told this mostly black, mostly Southern crowd that he had flown here through the night from a very different place — New Hampshire, “almost all white, very Republican.” But for the first time in their lives, Clinton said, people in New Hampshire had something in common with “people like you who have known hard times.”

“Amen,” called the crowd.

“America is hurting everywhere tonight,” Clinton continued. “Our streets are mean.” More amens, more speed. Clinton picked up the pace, moving from a prayer for Magic Johnson to a condemnation for David Duke before settling on the heart of his message — the “new covenant, a solemn agreement which we must not break.” Government must provide opportunity; people must take responsibility. “If you can go to work, you ought to go to work.”

“Yes, sir. … Tell it now.”

Clinton was talking straight, and the crowd was responding. If anyone dared to attack Clinton for playing the race card on welfare reform, I had the perfect counterpunch:
“You don't know what you're talking about. When Clinton told twenty thousand African Americans in Memphis that people on welfare must work, he got the biggest applause of the campaign.”

But he didn't stop there. Clinton quoted Abe Lincoln, praised the “power of oneness,” and promised to take this same message of personal responsibility not only to this black audience in Memphis, but all over the country, from the “high-tech enclaves of Silicon Valley to the high-powered barons of Wall Street.” He was challenging, preaching, reminding all of us that “we're all in this together.”

Right as Clinton closed, I jumped up to catch him backstage before the next task of the evening — an interview with Dan Balz of the
Washington Post
. I had been talking to Balz nearly every day and had urged him to be there that night to see Clinton at his best.

During the formative weeks of a campaign, long before the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the candidates fight for scraps and angle for the slightest bit of coverage, especially in national newspapers like the
Post
. If Balz, the top political reporter at the country's top political paper, wrote about the Memphis speech, people would pay attention. Even what didn't make it into the paper might make a difference. At the beginning of a campaign, key reporters create a kind of bush telegraph, sending messages from one outpost to another. Balz would trade information with a source, who would tell his boss, who would chat with a big donor at a cocktail party. The buzz would begin.

My job was to help it along. In the holding room, I pulled Clinton aside to brief him on what Dan was working on and to suggest some points that would play into Balz's story line on the black vote. I felt a little bit like I was introducing two of my friends who didn't know each other, hoping they would get along. We needed this meeting to go well; people had to know how moving Clinton was that night. Before I left to get Balz, I urged Clinton to talk about Bobby Kennedy's example in the interview. He absorbed my mood and fed it back with his memories of 1968.

But I returned with Balz to a terrible sight. Clinton was shaking hands and having his picture taken with Gus Savage, an Illinois congressman infamous for his anti-Semitic views who had been reprimanded by his colleagues for hitting on a Peace Corps volunteer during an overseas junket. What made the moment even worse was that there was nothing I could do about it. If I tried to stop the photo, it would only call attention to the problem. It was awful: Balz was watching me watch the photo op, while I was watching Dan watch me. He could sense my discomfort, I just knew it, and he started to tease me, pretending — at least I hoped he was pretending — that Clinton posing with Savage was the real story in Memphis.
He's kidding, right? That's all we need: an article on Clinton the hypocrite. Talks about “bringing people together” on stage, curries favor with a sexist and racist congressman backstage.

Dan
was
kidding. The interview went well, and the evening couldn't have gone better. I saw the inspiring side of Clinton and felt I'd done my part. Before driving home, David and I stopped for eggs, grits, and country ham at an all-night diner near the arena. There was nowhere else I wanted to be just then, as the convention delegates streamed in well after midnight for food and talk. Wilhelm and I were jazzed up by the crowd and the speech and our candidate and the excitement that comes with being at the top of a new campaign for the first time, when it's early enough to know you have little to lose and everything to gain. Early enough to believe that anything is possible.

I wanted to wander from table to table to eavesdrop on imagined conversations.
“Who was that fellow Clinton? I liked what he had to say.”
But I knew from experience at church conventions that the delegates would be too busy catching up on family, friends, and church politics to pay much attention to a young politician they might never hear of again. So I just ate my ham and hoped for a good article in the
Post
.

Before New Hampshire, there are stretches in the campaign when nothing happens for weeks, and occasional days when it seems as if everything happens at once. Monday, November 18, was one of those days. The previous Friday, all the candidates had been in New Hampshire to roast Dick Swett, a Democrat running for Congress. Clinton and Kerrey were swapping jokes behind the dais before the official ribbing began, and Kerrey told Clinton a dumb and dirty joke about Jerry Brown and lesbians. Clinton laughed.

Three days later, as we flew to Washington, Richard Mintz called the plane from Little Rock to warn us that C-Span had a videotape of Kerrey telling the joke. Chris Matthews of the
San Francisco Examiner
also had the story and was staking us out in Washington to get Clinton's response.