All Too Human: A Political Education Read online

  On a late Friday night in November, Clinton expounded on that theme before his largest campaign audience yet — at the Church of God in Christ convention, in Memphis. Clinton was flying in from New Hampshire, but I had spent the week in headquarters and was missing the road. With Memphis only a couple of hours away, David Wilhelm and I decided to take a drive.

  Entering the convention, I was struck by the sensation of never having been in a room like this before. David and I were about the only white faces in a crowd of men in immaculate suits and women in elaborate hats. Stray organ chords drifted over the murmurs of the congregation. The arena was alive with expectation, fellowship, spirituality, and a sense of fun — somewhere between a Sunday service and a rock concert.

  But if I was at sea, Clinton was at home. He knew this place and its people, had prayed with them in tiny churches on the back roads of Arkansas. Here, too, he had made it his business to know who they were and what they cared about. If Chicago had been politics as theater, this was politics as liturgy.

  He entered the hall, a lone white man surrounded by a cluster of black clergymen, looking like a heavyweight with his cornermen before being called into the ring. He was staring straight ahead, almost in a trance, oblivious to the crowd. I would soon learn the meaning of that look: Clinton was composing his speech.

  As he moved toward the stage, I sat on a concrete step in the aisle, ready to be carried away. This was my guy, and I wanted him to succeed — especially here, in front of an African American audience, where he could preach his message of drawing black and white workers together in common cause. Just like Bobby Kennedy had tried to do before an assassin's bullet struck him down. Then came court-ordered busing, urban decay, the Democrats' drift toward identity politics, and a generation of Republican candidates from Nixon to Bush whose winning formula was crime, quotas, and welfare queens. By 1991, RFK's “black and blue” coalition was a distant memory.

  Maybe Clinton could put it back together. That was his dream, and mine. I wanted him to be the Bobby Kennedy I first heard of in second grade, when our whole school was ushered into the auditorium to pray for the great man who'd been shot the night before and was fighting for life on an operating table. The Bobby Kennedy I read about when I first moved to Washington. Jack Newfield's elegy to RFK's 1968 campaign introduced me to a world of young men like Jeff Greenfield and Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky, who had hooked up with a Kennedy to help change the world — brash, tough-minded idealists who wanted to stop the war in Vietnam and start a war on poverty at home, from Bed-Stuy to Appalachia to the Indian reservations in the mountain west. Young guys who helped make history.

  If Clinton could be Kennedy, maybe I could be one of them — and maybe tonight would be part of that process. Maybe this speech would pass into the realm of political myth, like John Kennedy's 1960 speech on church and state that put him over the top in West Virginia, or his younger brother's sermon against violence, delivered impromptu in Indiana the night Martin Luther King was shot. Or maybe, more likely, this would be just another Friday night in a campaign that would never be remembered at all. But campaigns are fueled by fantasy too.

  Clinton delivered that night. After a hug for Bishop Ford, he started out slow, easing into the speech as if he were groping for words. Picking up speed, he praised the church, “founded by a man of God from my state,” and reflected on his own Baptist faith, making connections, drawing them in. With a lilt in his voice, he told this mostly black, mostly Southern crowd that he had flown here through the night from a very different place — New Hampshire, “almost all white, very Republican.” But for the first time in their lives, Clinton said, people in New Hampshire had something in common with “people like you who have known hard times.”

  “Amen,” called the crowd.

  “America is hurting everywhere tonight,” Clinton continued. “Our streets are mean.” More amens, more speed. Clinton picked up the pace, moving from a prayer for Magic Johnson to a condemnation for David Duke before settling on the heart of his message — the “new covenant, a solemn agreement which we must not break.” Government must provide opportunity; people must take responsibility. “If you can go to work, you ought to go to work.”

  “Yes, sir. … Tell it now.”

  Clinton was talking straight, and the crowd was responding. If anyone dared to attack Clinton for playing the race card on welfare reform, I had the perfect counterpunch: “You don't know what you're talking about. When Clinton told twenty thousand African Americans in Memphis that people on welfare must work, he got the biggest applause of the campaign.”

  But he didn't stop there. Clinton quoted Abe Lincoln, praised the “power of oneness,” and promised to take this same message of personal responsibility not only to this black audience in Memphis, but all over the country, from the “high-tech enclaves of Silicon Valley to the high-powered barons of Wall Street.” He was challenging, preaching, reminding all of us that “we're all in this together.”

  Right as Clinton closed, I jumped up to catch him backstage before the next task of the evening — an interview with Dan Balz of the Washington Post. I had been talking to Balz nearly every day and had urged him to be there that night to see Clinton at his best.

  During the formative weeks of a campaign, long before the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the candidates fight for scraps and angle for the slightest bit of coverage, especially in national newspapers like the Post. If Balz, the top political reporter at the country's top political paper, wrote about the Memphis speech, people would pay attention. Even what didn't make it into the paper might make a difference. At the beginning of a campaign, key reporters create a kind of bush telegraph, sending messages from one outpost to another. Balz would trade information with a source, who would tell his boss, who would chat with a big donor at a cocktail party. The buzz would begin.

  My job was to help it along. In the holding room, I pulled Clinton aside to brief him on what Dan was working on and to suggest some points that would play into Balz's story line on the black vote. I felt a little bit like I was introducing two of my friends who didn't know each other, hoping they would get along. We needed this meeting to go well; people had to know how moving Clinton was that night. Before I left to get Balz, I urged Clinton to talk about Bobby Kennedy's example in the interview. He absorbed my mood and fed it back with his memories of 1968.

  But I returned with Balz to a terrible sight. Clinton was shaking hands and having his picture taken with Gus Savage, an Illinois congressman infamous for his anti-Semitic views who had been reprimanded by his colleagues for hitting on a Peace Corps volunteer during an overseas junket. What made the moment even worse was that there was nothing I could do about it. If I tried to stop the photo, it would only call attention to the problem. It was awful: Balz was watching me watch the photo op, while I was watching Dan watch me. He could sense my discomfort, I just knew it, and he started to tease me, pretending — at least I hoped he was pretending — that Clinton posing with Savage was the real story in Memphis. He's kidding, right? That's all we need: an article on Clinton the hypocrite. Talks about “bringing people together” on stage, curries favor with a sexist and racist congressman backstage.

  Dan was kidding. The interview went well, and the evening couldn't have gone better. I saw the inspiring side of Clinton and felt I'd done my part. Before driving home, David and I stopped for eggs, grits, and country ham at an all-night diner near the arena. There was nowhere else I wanted to be just then, as the convention delegates streamed in well after midnight for food and talk. Wilhelm and I were jazzed up by the crowd and the speech and our candidate and the excitement that comes with being at the top of a new campaign for the first time, when it's early enough to know you have little to lose and everything to gain. Early enough to believe that anything is possible.

  I wanted to wander from table to table to eavesdrop on imagined conversations. “Who was that fellow Clinton? I liked what he had to say.” But I knew
from experience at church conventions that the delegates would be too busy catching up on family, friends, and church politics to pay much attention to a young politician they might never hear of again. So I just ate my ham and hoped for a good article in the Post.

  Before New Hampshire, there are stretches in the campaign when nothing happens for weeks, and occasional days when it seems as if everything happens at once. Monday, November 18, was one of those days. The previous Friday, all the candidates had been in New Hampshire to roast Dick Swett, a Democrat running for Congress. Clinton and Kerrey were swapping jokes behind the dais before the official ribbing began, and Kerrey told Clinton a dumb and dirty joke about Jerry Brown and lesbians. Clinton laughed.

  Three days later, as we flew to Washington, Richard Mintz called the plane from Little Rock to warn us that C-Span had a videotape of Kerrey telling the joke. Chris Matthews of the San Francisco Examiner also had the story and was staking us out in Washington to get Clinton's response.

  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.