All Too Human: A Political Education (7 page)

Not good. Slow news day. Two leading candidates in the. race. Sex, feminism, and political correctness all rolled into one. Matthews has a scoop, and we're stuck right in the middle of it
. By this time we were using a Learjet, and when I leaned across the lap table to tell Clinton what was going on and ask him to tell me the joke, he smiled over his reading glasses and said he couldn't remember exactly how it went. If he was bluffing, it was probably for the best. The fewer details coming from our side, the better.

Our mission was tricky: How did we extricate Clinton from this embarrassing incident without exonerating Kerrey? This story was both an opportunity and a threat. A threat because any sentence containing the words
Clinton
and
sex
would always be bad news. Opportunity because Kerrey was our main rival, and getting caught telling an offensive sexist joke would cut against his soulful image. It was time to apply a corollary to Napoleon's rule: “Never get in the way of your enemy when he's heading for a cliff. But give him a push if you can get away with it.”

Of course, we couldn't pretend that Clinton had been offended by a joke he had obviously enjoyed. Explaining that he was laughing just to be nice was disingenuous, and it would call too much attention to the fact that Clinton had laughed at the joke rather than focusing fire on our rival who told it. So we would try to keep Clinton out of the story. Our official response was this statement from me:

“What Governor Clinton has said is that he and Bob Kerrey are good friends. …”
The opening phrase sends a double message: Not only is the story old news, but it's not even important enough for Clinton to make his own statement. “Good friends” is a signal to Kerrey's people that we won't go out of our way to hurt him, which is not to say that we will go out of our way to help him.

“Senator Kerrey clearly thought it was a private conversation, and Governor Clinton is going to respect that. …”
This is Senator Kerrey's problem; Clinton is merely a forgiving observer. Our guy just
listened
to the joke, as opposed to the poor sap who told it. But we do “respect” Senator Kerrey's right to lose sight of the fact that he's in the middle of a presidential campaign, where everyone knows there's no such thing as a private conversation.

“There were a lot of bad jokes flying around that auditorium … some more tasteless than others.”
We're not saying Clinton's never told a bad joke; you press guys probably have one on tape. But yes, if you insist, Kerrey's joke was worse. It was — and this is the key word, the most vivid word in the statement, the one that turns the knife — “tasteless.”

I was pretty happy with the language. Even better news for us was the fact that Kerrey was in San Francisco just as this was breaking. That alone guaranteed a second-day story, and Kerrey prolonged his agony by going on a binge of self-recrimination. Telling this joke, he said, had caused him to confront “an unpleasant side” of himself. It was time, he continued, “for me to evaluate my own behavior.”

There is such a thing as apologizing too much. Kerrey's response kept the story going and made him look weak. At a stage in the campaign when even the most trivial incident is dissected by the punditocracy to distinguish between the candidates, Kerrey was sending the message that he wasn't yet ready for prime time. While his blunder wasn't the talk of the nation, it was the subject of no less than four stories, plus a column in the
Washington Post
.

The joke drowned out any coverage we might have gotten on Clinton's congressional testimony advocating D.C. statehood. But the real point of our visit to Washington was a private meeting later that night with Jesse Jackson. Jackson had just announced that he wouldn't run for the Democratic nomination, so the black vote was up for grabs, and Clinton's relationship with Jesse could make the crucial difference.

A few of us accompanied Clinton to a dinner meeting on Jackson's turf— the private room on the second floor of a restaurant in his Northeast Washington neighborhood. It felt like the meeting of two gang leaders, each with a small entourage, sitting down to see if there was an alliance to be formed or a battle to be fought. This was the first time I had seen Clinton and Jackson together, and I was struck by their size, their huge hands and oversize heads.

Clinton and Jackson needed each other. Clinton wanted Jackson's endorsement and the votes that went with it, but without appearing to ask. As the titular leader of African American Democrats, and a man who'd won more primary votes in the past than anyone now in the race, Jackson expected to be courted — and to play the role of kingmaker. Jackson probably also calculated that Clinton was the only other candidate in the race who could cut into the campaign of the only African American in the race, Virginia governor Doug Wilder. Wilder and Jackson were more rivals than friends. If Wilder did well in the primaries, it might threaten Jackson's preeminent position in the black community.

Dealing with Jackson was a delicate task, which we had muffed in the Dukakis campaign. The only strategy that would work in 1992 was tough love. Clinton had to treat Jackson with the respect Jackson had earned and craved, but he couldn't kowtow to him or enter a no-win public negotiation for his endorsement that would only add to Jackson's power and cost us some white votes. Clinton's leverage was increased by his independent relationship with a new generation of black leaders, such as Congressmen Bill Jefferson, John Lewis, Mike Espy, and Bobby Rush.

Clinton struck the right balance that night. Over baked chicken and sweet potato pie, he talked policy and politics: statehood, civil rights, justice, and jobs — both in the country and within the campaign. Jackson didn't say much at first, just took it all in. Then he weighed in with expectations expressed as opinions. I was impressed not so much by what they were saying as by how they said it, circling each other with their words, half showing off, half holding back. This was not the time for promises or threats, although both were palpably in the room, like a pair of bodyguards at the door.

So this is it. This is how the big guys talk to each other
. I'd been behind my share of closed doors on Capitol Hill, but this was different — more self-conscious, almost cinematic, as if everyone was aware of playing a part in a drama that was being written as they spoke. This was the classic smoke-filled room, minus the smoke. I watched and listened and tried to look cool, too dumbstruck to say a sensible word and half convinced that somebody would look up any minute and say, “Hey, what are
you
doing here?”

Clinton and Jackson could have talked all night, but we had to leave for the last meeting of the day — a late-night rendezvous with James Carville and Paul Begala at the Grand Hotel on M Street.

Theodore H. White's
The Making of the President, 1960
described the major political advisers of the day as a few dozen Washington lawyers, “who in their dark-paneled chambers nurse an amateur's love for politics and dabble in it whenever their practice permits.” By 1991, that description had the dated feel of a sepia-toned photograph, harking back to an era when political consultants, like tennis players in long pants, were not paid for their work. There were still amateurs who loved the game in 1991, but campaigns were now run by professionals.

The professionals with the hot hands that fall were Carville and Begala. Earlier that month they had guided former JFK aide Harris Wofford to an upset landslide victory in his Pennsylvania Senate race against Bush attorney general Richard Thornburgh. Every Democrat in the country hoped the race was a harbinger for 1992, and most of the candidates wanted to hire the men who had helped make it happen.

Paul Begala and I were friends from our days together on Gephardt's staff. I spent most of my day on the House floor, but whenever I got back to the office, there he was, at the desk across from me, having more fun in front of a word processor than I thought was humanly possible. Watching him write a speech was like watching Ray Charles play the piano. He would rock back and forth and talk to the screen, groaning one minute, laughing the next. The speeches he produced had perfect populist pitch: pithy, funny, aimed straight at the lazy Susans of middle-class kitchen tables. With his lizardlike looks and colorful patois, Carville was the better-known partner, but James wouldn't have been James without Paul.

James had his own gift — a sixth sense about politics, a down-home genius that can't be taught. He was the first person I heard say that President Bush could be beat. It was in May 1991, at Paul's thirtieth birthday party. We met by the bar, where James was pouring himself a bourbon. He filled my glass too, while assuring me that Bush was going to lose if we had the right candidate. I remembered the prediction because I wanted it to be right but was sure it was wrong.

We went to the bar, where Clinton ordered decaf and the rest of us had a drink. Within minutes Carville and Clinton were competing. Who knew more about politics, who was the real Southerner, who had the most sophisticated take on Super Tuesday's primary chessboard. Everyone agreed that the black vote could make the difference for Clinton — and that New Hampshire was a crap-shoot. After Carville and Begala left, Clinton turned to me in the elevator and said, “Those guys are smart.” Which meant, of course, “They agree with me.” They signed up with us a couple of weeks later, and the
Post
reported that we treated it “as the December equivalent of winning the New Hampshire primary.”

True — and that wasn't the only good news coming our way at the end of 1991. Clinton was catching on, even with liberals who had been suspicious of him. At the early cattle calls, he'd tell the crowds, “I'm a Democrat by instinct, heritage, and conviction. My granddaddy thought he was going to Roosevelt when he died.” The party regulars would stomp and yell, oblivious to the unspoken yet unmistakable “but” at the end of the sentence. Clinton was establishing his bona fides, rallying skeptics with words he knew they wanted to hear. But the fact that he had to do so out loud was an implicit warning: “
I come from your world, but if you don't change with me and cut me some slack, we'll never get anything done, because we'll never win.”

Most liberals knew this, understood that Clinton wasn't really one of us. But it felt good to get lost in the partisan reverie, to be carried back to a time when photos of FDR graced Democratic mantels like the icons of a patron saint, a time when the Kennedy brothers epitomized the best and the brightest, a time long before McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis were caricatured into a sadly comic Mount Rushmore, symbols of a party out of touch and doomed to defeat. It felt good, again, to think about winning.

Only one other Democrat could still stir the party faithful in the same way, and he was the cloud over our heads as 1991 drew to a close. No matter what we said or did, the campaign wouldn't feel entirely real until the eternally ambivalent front-runner finally declared his true intentions. Nobody knew what Cuomo was going to do. He was teasing the press, the party establishment, his potential opponents — and the longer he took to make up his labyrinthine mind, the more frustrated we got. He had frozen the race.

Reporters were dying for Cuomo to jump in. It seemed as if every time the governor of New York scratched his nose he received more fawning coverage than we could get with a series of substantive speeches. What could be better than an enigmatic and eloquent intellectual who quoted Saint Francis of Assisi and didn't dirty his hands by actually entering the race? Few figures are more appealing than the reluctant statesman untroubled by ambition but willing to accept the burden of office for the good of all. “Cuomo Sapiens,” the
Post
called him. “The Thinking Man's Non-Candidate.”

Although I had shared those feelings, I was ready to engage. Clinton resisted most of our efforts to draw clear lines with Cuomo, but we got an opening when Cuomo took the first shot. Joe Klein was stirring the pot. In a
New York
magazine interview with Cuomo, he got the governor to criticize Clinton's plans on welfare and national service. Schmoozing on the phone with E. J. Dionne of the
Post
, I saw we had the opportunity we'd been waiting for. Maybe if we lobbed the grenade back to Cuomo, E. J. would have enough material to write a story and frame the debate.

I scratched out a statement and drove my battered Honda to the mansion to show it to Clinton. In his makeshift basement office, Clinton edited the statement and stood over me while I dialed the phone, wishing, I knew, that he could pick up the phone and talk to E. J. himself but knowing it wouldn't be smart: Candidates don't debate noncandidates. But by attacking Clinton's signature issues, Cuomo was helping define him — as the un-Cuomo, the new Democrat who wasn't afraid to challenge party orthodoxy. An attack from Cuomo was also a sign that we mattered. Maybe he was hearing footsteps.

Dionne wrote a small story that included a quote from me defending Clinton's ideas and challenging Cuomo to “let the debate begin.” Any ambivalence I felt about taking on one of my political idols was balanced by my frustration at the way Cuomo was toying with the race, by my convincing myself that Cuomo was criticizing a caricature of the Clinton proposals rather than the ideas themselves, and by Dionne's observation that the Clinton campaign “fired back immediately.” E. J. was sending a signal to the political world, telling it, I imagined,
“If you hit Clinton, he hits back. His campaign won't repeat the mistakes of the past.”
But I couldn't help wondering what Cuomo thought when he read my words, or what I would have thought and said had I been working for him instead.

Cuomo was telling people that he couldn't decide about the race until he finished work on his budget in Albany. Thankfully for us, an external deadline forced his hand: the final filing date for the New Hampshire primary was December 20.

The twentieth was a Friday, and that entire week felt like one long election day, waiting for results you could no longer pretend to control. Work was impossible; all we cared about was information about Cuomo's intentions. We scrutinized every statement, rumor, and hint for possible clues. Cuomo chartered a plane for a flight to Manchester —
must be getting in
. But Republicans in his state senate were holding firm in budget talks —
maybe he can't get in
. We seemed to have the most to lose if Cuomo entered the race, which is why we were desperately trying to convince ourselves that we wanted him in, that his entry, which was probably inevitable, would actually work to our advantage. “The only way to be a heavyweight is to beat a heavyweight” was our new mantra.