“But Frank, you don’t understand,” Bill Clinton said. “I’ve always had to get A’s.”
Always. And now, eight months later, much of America knows the mixed consequences of such fierce determination. The positive side will be on display this week at Madison Square Garden: a remarkably skilled and resilient politician, a man of persistence and intelligence who has managed to survive a personal ordeal unlike any other in the history of presidential campaigning and showed more than his share of grace under pressure in the process. At the same time, though, Bill Clinton receives his party’s nomination perhaps the weakest, most grievously damaged Democratic candidate in history, with the support of little more than 30 percent of the electorate in most polls; for most Americans, his tribulations are far more familiar than his triumphs.
The trouble is, the same determination that brought victory invites ridicule. He is all too easily reduced to caricature: the generic American politician, straight out of Central Casting, a faux Kennedy with tin charisma, ever anxious to please, ever ready to say (or fudge on) anything to win a vote. His defining moment wasn’t so much the bedtime stories told by a flagrantly failed lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers or his pretzeled explanations about how he avoided the draft, but a silly thing– marijuana. Bill Clinton couldn’t just say, as Al Gore had said in 1988, " I smoked. " He had to finagle: " I never broke the laws of this country. " And then, when pinned (or, as he disastrously explained, when the question was “asked the right way”): yes, he had smoked but only a time or two in England. And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, he had to fill in all the details-to get his A in candor-with a
mind-boggling addition: “But I didn’t inhale.” For all but the most avid connoisseurs of American politics, the question was: where did they find this guy? The marijuana fiasco is instructive, though: it refutes the most commonly held impression of Bill Clinton-that he is “slick.” A slick politician, knowing the question was inevitable, would have had a marijuana sound bite worked out well in advance. Indeed, Clinton’s march to the nomination has been notable for the near-total absence of sound bites, the utter inability to reduce his purposes to a slogan, or two or three grand themes. He has insisted on getting his A’s instead, on describing every nuance of every issue. He has a clean, well-lighted mind, a virtuosity that seems almost bionic: there is no policy question he can’t answer seamlessly. But “when you can answer every question that way, it is almost as if you haven’t answered any question,” says a Clinton adviser who yearns to see his man roll up his sleeves, get a little passionate, anecdotal-personal
It rarely happens. Clinton has stubbornly refused to utilize another slick weapon most politicians would be unable to resist-his own biography, a childhood that began in poverty without a father (killed in a car accident three months before Clinton was born), and which grew markedly worse when his mother married a violent, abusive alcoholic who moved the family from the quiet country town of Hope, Ark., to the fast-and-loose spa of Hot Springs. He has talked about these things occasionally, but only when prodded; it doesn’t come easily. " We try to include some lines about his past in his speeches, but he usually crosses them out," says George Stephanopoulos, the campaign’s communications director. “He’ll say, ‘It wasn’t that bad’ or ‘C’mon, that sounds too self-pitying’.”
Last week, for example, Clinton spoke to the national convention of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was a tepid, passionless bit of business, filled with policy prescriptions and three-point programs. Another politician might have tried to make a personal connection-linking the troubles he faced in his youth with the sort of problems plaguing inner-city families today-but Clinton did not include a single sentence about his past, his roots, the experiences that motivated him to spend his life in government. His black audience, searching for a human being beneath all the hair and rhetoric, was underwhelmed. Later, Clinton wondered aloud: “Why do you think it’s so hard for me to talk about my childhood?”
Maybe because it wasn’t very pleasant. Clinton insists the unpleasant moments were relatively few, but, from an early age, he seemed propelled to get out from there, away from the speak-mies and casinos. The ticket out was excellence: it required not only A’s but that he be perceived as a good boy. The need to run a high-minded campaign, to avoid emotional appeals, to be taken seriously by serious people, may well be a residue of the same impulse that pushed Clinton to Georgetown rather than to the University of Arkansas, and from there to Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar, and Yale Law School. Clinton readily admits that his greatest frustration of the campaign so far has been his inability to “connect with” college-educated voters. His staff readily admits its greatest frustration is the candidate’s fixation on his inability to connect with college-educated voters. “He spent two hours with The Atlantic Monthly editorial board in late June,” says one adviser. “But he hasn’t gotten around to doing USA Today or Reader’s Digest, even though we’ve had requests from both. We keep telling him his coalition is bottom-up. He understands it-in theory. But I wish he’d just stop worrying about that damn Tsongas crowd.”
The irony is, Clinton’s best moments this year have come when he’s done just that. He rescued his candidacy in the bowling alleys and shopping malls of New Hampshire and rejuvenated it more recently on Arsenio and MTV. He enjoys human contact more than most politicians–shooting the breeze with average folks and, especially, visiting successful government programs. There is something defiantly wonky about Clinton: he gets the same sort of thrills from places like Vince Lane’s revived public-housing projects in Chicago that George Bush gets from G-7 summits. There is a pattern: each time his campaign has seemed to be sinking, Clinton has rescued himself by tossing away the playbook and getting down with the people. " This campaign has succeeded," says Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s press secretary, “when Hot Springs and Hope prevail over Oxford and Yale.”
There is near universal nostalgia among the Clinton staff for the first great crisis of the campaign-the rescue operation that salvaged a second-place finish in New Hampshire after the Gennifer Flowers and draft stories nearly destroyed his candidacy. “I’ll never forget calling the governor’s mansion on that Sunday night, a wee before the primary, with the news that we’d dropped 17 points in 48 hours,” says Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster. James Carville, the campaign’s top strategist, answered the phone. Then he turned to Clinton and said one word: “Meltdown.”
The next day brought worse news. ABC had discovered a letter Clinton had written from Oxford to the ROTC officer at the University of Arkansas in 1969. One of the first lines was " Thank you … for saving me from the draft." George Stephanopoulos, the campaign’s ranking pessimist, took one look at the letter and said, " We’re dead." Clinton certainly seemed so when he faced the press–which still wasn’t aware of the letter-that day, bleary-eyed and defensive, nervously reading from notes, complaining about Republican dirty tricks. Carville was convinced the only thing to do was take the offensive: “Look, let’s release the damn letter,” he argued. “It’s your best friend.”
They did, and Clinton threw himself into the campaign for the final week, appearing on every television show that would have him, buying two half-hours of local television time for “town meetings” with undecided voters, haunting the malls and bowling alleys. At one point, he stood in a Manchester mall, answering questions from voters for more than two hours, tiring out the press corps, which parked itself at a nearby McDonald’s till he was done. The emotional turning point may have come at a Nashua senior citizens’ home on the Friday before the election. An elderly woman began to cry as she described how difficult it was to pay for both medicine and food. Clinton dropped down, hugged her for a longtime and said, “I’m so sorry.” When he stood, the candidate was brushing away tears.
“We all cried a lot those last few days of New Hampshire,” says one aide. “The night of the last debate, all his friends–people who’d come up from Arkansas, college friends, maybe a hundred people-lined the road out from the Days Inn to -send Bill and Hillary off. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason [the producer of ‘Designing Women’] had given them a cassette and told them to turn it on when the van began to move: it was Dionne Warwick singing ‘That’s What Friends Are For.’ Both Bill and Hillary began to cry. It was like that in New Hampshire. I miss it: give me a crisis anytime.”
Clinton survived in New Hampshire because it was a lot like Arkansas: “It was 125,000 voters,” Carville says. “He got to meet most of them. If it had been a million, been dead.” Indeed, exit polls showed that Clinton received 45 percent of the vote from civilians who’d met him. Those who hadn’t met him knew only the image they’d seen on television–a smirky young guy, blow-dried hair, complicated answers on the draft and adultery, a politician. Tsongas, on the other hand, looked and sounded as if he’d just bitten into a lemon. He was selling pain; he had to be telling the truth (ironically, Tsongas was retailing the most spectacular untruth of the campaign: that his cancer hadn’t recurred since 1986). Tsongas the Pure drove Clinton crazy. “On the Saturday before Junior Tuesday [the Georgia, Maryland and Colorado primaries], he just exploded at a staff meeting in Denver,” says an aide. " Everything was wrong. Everything was terrible."
That night, in the Denver debate, the audience began to laugh when Clinton was asked if he’d want half his cabinet to be women and he said, “I might want more than that.“The campaign seemed to be sliding again–a second great crisis. “It was funny how that one turned around,” says Dee Dee Myers. “It was the day before Junior Tuesday. We had just visited a prison boot camp in Stone Mountain and we were driving through a poor area. A group of black people were waving and Clinton stopped the car to say hello. This fabulous little old lady came up to him and said, ‘I don’t care what they say about you. I’m lookin’ at you, and I know you’re for me.‘He went home to Little Rock that night, took Chelsea to school the next morning and announced to all of us,‘I know what I’m gonna say in this campaign’.”
He would attack Tsongas from the populist left as a trickle-down Democrat who wanted the rich to pay less (in capital-gains taxes) and the poor to pay more (in gasoline taxes). “After that, he was like a jet-fighter pilot,” Myers recalls. All thoughts of winning over the college-educated were put aside: " He was locked in on his target. When he blew up Tsongas, there was no one in his sights and the campaign began to drift again.” It drifted into New York, a sink beneath the clamor of the tabloids and hecklers and the suddenly semiserious Jerry Brown-yet another crisis. A schedule had been planned: a lot of special-interest groups, limited press access, not much mall work. Clinton scrapped it. He started working the talk shows, walking the avenues. He won, but not convincingly, and the campaign soon entered its fourth, longest and most frustrating crisis: there were no real opponents anymore. Just exit polls, and he always seemed to lose those … to himself. No one seemed interested in anything he had to say. He had become a joke: he didn’t inhale. Each Tuesday he won more primaries-he even beat Jerry Brown in California-but it was a Pyrrhic sweep. Perot was all the rage.
The last month has been better. Clinton’s mood began to lift when he played the sax and chatted on the Arsenio Hall show in early June. A new strategy emerged: a full-court press just like New Hampshire, but on the TV-talk-show circuit. At the same time he unveiled a responsible, if not entirely credible, economic plan-and last week chose a running mate. None of it was particularly dramatic, but none of it was awful, either-his first disasterless month as a candidate. Clinton began to seem more solid, safer, more plausible.
But he remains largely unknown, and very much untrusted. Many people who walk into Stan Greenberg’s focus groups still assume he’s a rich kid who inherited his Ivy League education and went into politics because it was. the line of work where his natural phoniness would prove most effective. But that’s Bill Clinton’s fault. He hasn’t yet told them who he is. He will have a grand opportunity to do that this week in New York. His future probably rides on his ability to summon the past and put it to good use; he desperately needs another A, this time in a subject where he’s never excelled-personal history.
NEWSWEEK POLL If the election were held today, who would you vote for? 32% Bush 31% Clinton 28% Perot In the past month have you become more likely to vote for Bill Clinton? 38% Yes 59% No (Newsweek Poll, July 9-10, 1992)
