Last Tuesday, Bill Clinton won a lock on the Democratic nomination, completing a primary season in which he won more contests than any other candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He now presides over an uncharacteristically unified and placid party.
Last Wednesday, “The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” included not a single image or sound bite featuring Clinton. The following day President Bush gave a press conference at which neither Bush nor the press managed to mention Clinton’s name more than in passing. The political press wondered whether to contact the missing-persons bureau.
As he works his way out of this twilight zone, Clinton must do more than worry about Bush and Ross Perot. He needs to figure out how to reintroduce himself to an American public that still doesn’t know much about him and doesn’t much like what it does know. The level of basic misinformation is high. The Clinton research shows, for instance, that many voters think he was born well off and isn’t especially well educated. In fact Clinton is the on one of the three candidates born to a family that had to struggle, and his level of educational achievement is unusual in a presidential contender. Not that being a Rhodes scholar from a broken home is itself worth many votes.
The truth is that the vast bulk of the American people know only that Bill Clinton has had marital problems, draft problems, marijuana problems and weight problems. On the plus side, they now know that he apparently can play the saxophone and is personally acquainted with Arsenio Hall. Beyond that, the public memory bank is rapidly depleted some education ideas here, some Arkansas accomplishments there. Wasn’t there something he said about the middle class? No catchy phrases, no issues clearly associated with his name, precious little political identity.
To address all of this, Clinton is scheduled to do something unprecedented for a candidate on the threshold of the nomination: buy half an hour of TV time (Friday, 8 p.m. EDT on NBC) to make his case in a town-hall-style conversation with voters. Clinton did the same thing when he ran into trouble in New Hampshire in February. Like his hourlong “Today” show call-in appearance this week, and call-ins last week with Dan Rather and Larry King, the Friday show highlights the campaign’s basic strategy. “The more they see him, the more they like him–which isn’t true of the other two candidates,” says Mandy Grunwald a media adviser. Indeed, during the primary season Clinton did best where voters knew him the longest. And the same has held true in Arkansas, where he has been re-elected five times.
But there are certain mechanics of national politics that Clinton still hasn’t absorbed. The advice of everyone from his own staff to former rivals to any barroom pundit–is essentially the same. Clinton needs to talk about three or four major issues (e.g., education, jobs, health) instead of 30 or 40. He needs to find the discipline to stick to the message he eventually develops (he still doesn’t have a crystallized one). He needs to cease trying to prove he’s more of an outsider than Perot (he’s not). And he needs to learn to explain himself in slower, human terms, not 78-rpm policy-speak. “He has to say something that reveals himself and moves people,” says one Democratic consultant not working for him. “It has to come from inside him, and it’s not a list of programs.” That connection could have come after the Los Angeles riots, but the campaign blew it. The candidate is such a conciliator by nature that he doesn’t seem to understand that in politics the only way to pierce the public consciousness is to create conflict. If he doesn’t start antagonizing someone (say, George Bush), he won’t break through, no matter how many town meetings he holds.
Much of the advice pouring in to Clinton involves Perot. Eventually he’ll have to go after him. He made a good start on “Larry King Live” by ridiculing Perot’s idea that he could balance the budget “without breaking a sweat.” Clinton’s next step will likely be to point out that while Perot says he’ll fix it, only Clinton has any real idea of how. Defining the election as a how question brings the discussion back to substance, where Clinton is more comfortable than he is on thematics. A useful piece of advice came last week in the form of a jab from a rival camp. In explaining why he was going to work for Perot, Hamilton Jordan complained that Clinton was too “incremental.” That is a telling word. There’s nothing incremental about 1992. Unless Bill Clinton recognizes that, he’ll continue to run a pleasant third.
