Kersplat …
Is it going to happen again? That’s up to Bill Clinton, at least in part, since not all of the trouble he’s going to have to ward off in the next few weeks will come from outside from the media or the political opposition. Some will come from his own camp and concern his and his campaign’s own conduct. In fact, Clinton is entering the danger zone a little before most candidates do, because he appeared to have locked up the nomination so early.
Outside-generated assaults and challenges, of course, are something Clinton has been defending against for months. But he hasn’t seen the end of them. It is widely reported that conservative publications and Republican campaign staff are going to come at both Clintons with new charges of political derelictions in the past, and one would have to be awfully naive to suppose that there will not be a further stab at the personal stuff. True, the prospective Democratic nominee has proved pretty good at handling all kinds of assault so far. And he has also defied the predictions of imminent extinction that accompanied the primary contests in just about every state along the way. But make no mistake: Clinton has been scarred by his contests with other Democrats and by the revelations-the false, as well as the true–made in the primary season, and he will not be helped by another wave of attacks to fend off.
Still, I think at least an equal degree of risk comes not from outside, but from inside, from the process going on right now of trying to transform an individual’s candidacy for the nomination into a party’s candidacy for president. All the calamitous things that can happen in this process seem to be wanting to happen again this time.
Clinton will be the one who decides if they do.
The treacherous turf is familiar. First, there are the defeated contenders for the nomination to be propitiated, along with other party big shots who feel threatened by the nominee’s emergence. This dance–with Tsongas, Cuomo, Jackson et al.–is a classic political two-step required of successful nominees: they must manage to be seen at once as (1) magnanimous, gracious and respectful of the other party titans and defeated contenders (so as not to alienate their constituencies) and (2) acknowledged master of the heap, not pushed around, directed, toyed with or otherwise humiliated by these fellows.
Generally, winning candidates themselves are a whole lot better than their staffs at bringing off this delicate and all-important maneuver of assuming party leadership while maintaining good relations with those who think, one way and another, that they should have it. And there are at least wispy early signs that this could be the case with the Clinton campaign. Most of Clinton’s own recent statements have been much better on this score, more sure-footed, than the accompanying background gloats and glosses on his comments attributed to some of his staff. If he wants to avoid famous danger No. 1 of this classic post-primary period, he will have to lower the boom on those staff who may have their own agendas to fulfill, not to mention their own reputations to tend.
There is a real psychological barrier to overcome here. It impedes Republicans as well as Democrats who come to the nomination the way Clinton has: via a prolonged contest from, essentially, the outside. Like Ronald Reagan and, in some measure, Richard Nixon, as well as Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis, Clinton’s has been a campaign driven and run from outside Washington, staffed by people who identified with the candidacy rather than the party. In fact, Clinton had a relatively high degree of party establishment support in his campaign for the nomination. But even so, he comes to the difficult and politically fraught moment of trying to meld his campaign with the party and national apparatus while served by a staff that is subject to the same, inevitable impulses about giving up authority or even sharing it with others.
This is hardly surprising. You work for your tiger and beat the others and then you are expected to make nice to the people you decided to hate seven months ago and whom you have been bad-mouthing ever since, and to let others take over some of your functions and authority. If there is a person who enjoys that, he or she hasn’t been found yet. So it is, again, up to the candidate to make it happen, and for him that can’t be so much fun either: “By the way, my dear, faithful friend who has been with me in sleepless 25-hour days from the beginning, you are going to have to share your job and report to someone else.”
But it has to be. Original campaigners tend to guard their clout. All Democratic campaigns in recent times have been rife with stories about how some party elder who could help and wanted to was frozen out or ignored or just plain sassed by the campaign when his only offense was trying to get the nominee elected. Nominees mostly don’t even know about it. This is likely to be even more of a temptation this year, not because the Clinton staff has anything distinctively self-protective about it, but because there is so much generalized hostility to Congress this year, and so much abject fear of even being photographed in its shadow. It will be a true mistake if, in reflexive reaction to this, the Clinton staff ices the grown-ups on the Hill whose association would help him.
There is also, finally, the fact that with near-certain nomination and dreams, whether justified or not, of election, come a large number of main-chancers and loony tunes, who work their way into every campaign and make it worse, not better. Much of the jockeying among them is over who will end up where in an administration, and has nothing to do with helping a nominee to get there.
I think Clinton has as much to fear from such inevitable phenomena as these as he does from hostile, outside attack. For him, that’s the bad news. The good news is that it is within his power to assert control over his campaign and his relationship with the party as a whole and its more eminent enchiladas. He should be expected to do it. After all, the man is running for president.