Part 9 (1/2)

At that time, the governor of Arkansas served only a two-year term, allowing for a miserably brief period to make a mark on policy before launching a bid for reelection. The brief cycle of a governor's term ensured that a successful chief executive would be forced to wage a constant campaign.

A mature politician would have realized that given such a short term and with such stubborn legislators, the best agenda would have been the shortest. A governor could hope to achieve one--at best, two--big items.

But Bill Clinton, like his fellow governor Jerry Brown of California, set out to change the world by making his state the s.h.i.+ning example of what a farsighted, liberal government could do. Rather than control the bureaucracy, Governor Clinton created new departments for economic development and for energy (as though a state of two million people could set its own energy policy). In a region rich in petroleum, coal, and natural gas, the governor's advisors envisioned solar panels proliferating around the state like daffodils.

The young governor and his wife also had a plan to remake Arkansas's system of health care. Governor Clinton and Hillary sought to reorganize school districts and change teaching methods.

His thirst for reinvention extended to the governor's office itself.

The young governor had no need for a chief of staff. Instead, the governor's office was run by a troika of bearded young idealists who often liked to show up at the capitol in T-s.h.i.+rts and ragged cutoffs.

Two of them, Rudy Moore, Jr., and Steve Smith, were self-styled Young Turks who had served in the state legislature, where their most notable achievements had been to antagonize and bewilder their older colleagues. They had earned the contempt of the Little Rock political community, baggage Governor Clinton readily a.s.sumed by hiring them.

Steve Smith was an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) activist and was openly dismissive of the Little Rock business community, referring to them as ”suits.” In a state where jobs and economic growth depended on attracting factories and manufacturing jobs, Smith argued for state subsidies for quaint cottage industries. One such example was a $500,000 payment by the state (that is, the taxpayers) to train fifty people to chop firewood. An ardent and outspoken critic of timber practices, Smith quickly made powerful enemies for Bill Clinton with major state employers like International Paper and the Weyerhaeuser Corporation.

Nor was Bill Clinton the only one to blame for his personnel selection. As has been the case ever since, Hillary's fingerprints were all over Bill Clinton's staff. Another aide, John Danner, was the husband of Hillary's Wellesley friend Nancy ”Peach” Pietrafesa.

A Berkeley lawyer, Danner outraged the legislature by spending federal money on staff seminars on such inane topics as ”How to Tell What Turns You On.” He astonished the state's civil servants by tacking butcher's paper to the wall during meetings and scribbling his stream-of-consciousness ideas as fast as he could write. Like Smith, Danner extolled a naive environmentalism that seemed to rule out the twentieth century.

It wasn't long before the Arkansas capitol crowd started referring to Clinton's office as the ”children's crusade” and the ”diaper brigade.” Danner and Peach were too outrageous to last, even in the Clinton administration. They were gone in fourteen months. But under the Young Turks Steve Smith and Rudy Moore, the staff operation still remained out of control, and most everyone knew it except Bill and Hillary.

On the outside looking in was d.i.c.k Morris, an Alinsky protege and New York street organizer turned political consultant. From the start, Bill Clinton was impressed by Morris's ability to spot the essential challenge of a campaign and chart a strategy. Over the years, his quick mind, acerbic expressions and talent for intrigue have made Morris scores of enemies among Clinton loyalists (most notably Harold Ickes, a long-time rival from New York politics). Also, Morris was suspect among many Clinton friends for his willingness to help Republicans like Ed King beat Michael Dukakis in Ma.s.sachusetts, or help Congressman Trent Lott win a Senate seat in Mississippi.

Morris recalls Clinton as his first and best client. The truth is, in the long political relations.h.i.+p between the two men, d.i.c.k Morris may have been the Clintons's most perceptive political consultant.

Morris had imported the Hollywood technique of using polling and focus groups to sharpen a story line. He taught the young politician and his eager wife that polls could not be read as static points, but as indicators of dynamic trends in constantly s.h.i.+fting public opinion. He would eventually teach the Clintons the efficacy of the continuous campaign, one in which governing and politics were inseparably fused and in which a candidate had to be ever on the lookout for a defining moment or an issue that would polarize a majority and keep it on his side.

In his first term, Bill Clinton listened but did not learn. Once in office, he ignored Morris and grew bored with his polls. When Morris showed the boy governor poll results that contradicted one of his cherished policy goals, Governor Clinton fired him.

The issue that Morris brought to Bill and Hillary's attention, an increase in fees for car and pickup registration and a hike in the fees for transfer of vehicle t.i.tle, seemed trifling to a governor engaged in widespread social revision. Morris recalled in his book that Clinton reacted, ”It's such a small amount of money, and why shouldn't the motorists pay for the roads?”*3 What Morris had tried to explain and what Clinton was unwilling to hear was how people felt about the whole system--how people felt about having their earnings eaten away at every turn by new taxes for everyday necessities.

”You went to the revenue office and took a number and waited through an interminable line--and then the lady told you you were missing one vital piece of proof,” Webb Hubbell wrote. ”She said you'd have to get in your car and drive over to the county clerk's office, where you would wait in another line to get a piece of paper that would ent.i.tle you to drive back to the revenue office and take another number.”*4 Nor was the doubling of the registration fee a trivial A first lady such as Arkansas had never seen before.

On the campaign trail in New Hamps.h.i.+re, 1992.

Campaigning for first lady of the United States, with a new look--a microphone.

Of one mind--inauguration day, 1993.

Taking charge on health care...

...and reading out her enemies.

Warding off reporters--jokingly here, but also with serious new restrictions on their access to the White House.

Exasperation has struck Hillary often in her roller-coaster White House years with so many of her pet projects, like socialized medicine, going down in defeat.

Beating the drum for children--and government's role in child-rearing.

Campaigning as a demure housewife in a pink dress.

Triangulation at work--co-opting. religion. In Arkansas...

...and with the Reverend Schuller at the State of the Union address in 1997.

Wife, counsel, co-conspirator. Hillary gives advice while President Clinton denies having had a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Global reach. Traveling in Slovakia...

...and addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Surprise, surprise. Hillary and Bill Clinton respond to a suggestion by Democratic Senator Chuck Robb that Hillary might run for the United States Senate. expense to many Arkansans subsisting on minimum wage jobs. Worst of all, the increase often came as an unpleasant surprise. Motorists often did not learn about the increase until they were already standing at the window. It was later publicized that the Clintons themselves had not had their car properly a.s.sessed. This alone was enough to crystallize the image of the young governor and his Yankee wife as arrogant and out of touch.

At dinner conversations in every home around the state, a price tag could be placed on the costs of allowing Arkansas to be run by a bunch of activists from the ivory tower. The car tax issue underscored that Clinton had become a world-cla.s.s talker and a third-rate listener.

Clinton made matters worse by appearing on the local bar scene, often with his brother Roger in tow. As ”Sat.u.r.day-Night Bill,” to use Morris's unforgettable phrase, made the rounds with his const.i.tuents of the night, more and more people remarked that his nose was positively glowing. Little Rock began to whisper that the governor's brother was a cocaine abuser, and that maybe the governor was, too.

The ridicule of the local press that had been directed at the governor's staff was now being heaped on the governor himself.

Editorial cartoons from this period often depicted Bill Clinton as a petulant baby.

The car tag blunder may have been survivable, but was soon coupled with another toxic issue. From Bill Clinton's days as a volunteer in 1976, he had sought to ingratiate himself with President Jimmy Carter and had been delighted to take Hillary to a state dinner at the White House. As the 1980 presidential reelection campaign approached and Carter found himself duped by Fidel Castro, President Carter was forced in turn to betray his young protege in Arkansas.

The issue was refugees from Communist Cuba. At first, Americans welcomed the Cuban ”freedom flotillas.” It soon became apparent, however, that among the ”boat people” expelled by Castro was a deluge of hardened criminals and violent mental patients.

President Carter could not afford to let these murderers and rapists loose on America. Nor could he humanely return them to the dictator from whom they had ostensibly fled. In a panic, the Carter Administration twisted the arms of governors to house these refugees at detention centers within their states. Clinton, promised by Carter that this would be a temporary measure, willingly took his share of Cubans at a center just outside of Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Clinton later had to call out the National Guard after hundreds of refugees escaped, panicking local residents and stoking a white hot fury in the more Republican western edge of the state.

The governor's fortunes suffered a final catastrophic slide when Carter broke the pledge to send no more refugees. The political arithmetic was simple: Big states like Florida had more electoral votes than Arkansas did. Carter closed refugee detention camps in other states and consolidated them in Arkansas.

HILLARY AND d.i.c.k.

Another issue was Hillary's decision not to take Clinton's name--a decision she eventually realized had become a political liability for her husband.

”To her, it was an act of self-worth,” her old Wellesley chum Eleanor Acheson told People magazine. ”Many people felt she was one of those pointy-headed, overeducated Yale types who had come to Arkansas to spread the word to the uninitiated. There was an att.i.tude of 'Who the h.e.l.l does she think she is?'”*5 Now the signs of calamity had become unmistakable. Hillary made an urgent call to d.i.c.k Morris in Orlando. According to d.i.c.k Morris, she pleaded, ”Bill needs you right now, and you've got to help him see how he can get his career back on track.”*6 At the time, Morris was sealing a victory for Paula Hawkins, a Republican riding high on the wave of anger over the Cuban refugee crisis, to become a United States Senator. Morris dutifully came to Little Rock, reviewed the numbers, and declared the campaign hopeless.

Bill Clinton was confident, despite having lost a third of the primary vote to a septuagenarian turkey farmer protest candidate.

Governor Clinton's opponent in the general election was Frank White.

Many Clintonites believed that White simply could not win. White had switched to the Republican party in a one-party Democrat state. He was not a particularly attractive candidate: a homespun banker with a pot belly and bulging eyes. The polls consistently showed Clinton ahead. White simply was not taken seriously by the Clinton camp.

But White had several potent weapons. One of them was his wife, Gay, an evangelical Christian, a gracious and polite woman with red hair and ruby red lipstick. Among Arkansas voters, she compared favorably to Hillary, the first lady who kept her own name and refused to shave her legs or arm pits. White conspicuously introduced Gay as ”Mrs.

Frank White,” while Bill Clinton received stacks of letters demanding to know, ”Doesn't your wife love you?”*7 Another weapon in White's a.r.s.enal was a keen understanding of the building anger against Clinton. White's ad campaign was based around the simple negative message of ”car tags and Cubans.”

”We've got to hit back!” Hubbell remembers Hillary saying. ”We can't let those charges go unchallenged.”*8 But perhaps the ultimate weapon in White's a.r.s.enal was the befuddled and ineffective Jimmy Carter, a Democrat in the White House who was the perfect impetus for the powerful Republican surge led by Ronald Reagan.

A photo from election day shows a haggard-looking Clinton between the parted curtains of a poll booth, gamely trying to smile and not succeeding at it. The boy governor went to bed that night declared a winner. He woke up in the morning to find out that he had, in fact, lost the governors.h.i.+p. The Clintons would soon move out of their mansion and into a modest frame house to one of the few houses ever paid for without taxpayer dollars where the former governor would complain about having to do his own laundry.