Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America
Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 9:50 pm
Part 2 of 2
Hillary soon called back their talisman from the first statehouse victory, Dickie Morris. Between clients, many of them now right-wing Republicans in the vogue of the 1980s, Morris made his reappearance in Little Rock in 1981. By several accounts, he spent long hours at the law office and at the Midland Avenue house charting the campaign just as he and Clinton, at an easier time three years before, had plotted not only winning the governorship but Pryor's elimination of Tucker as well. Now Clinton was likely to face the jobless and still ambitious Tucker himself in the gubernatorial primary, and Morris and he discussed how to build on the attacks and negative images they had confected so effectively for Pryor.
But the consultant's advice, according to some who heard it as well as read internal memos, now went well beyond the primary or the general election. Morris was facing not the confident, trade-fluent politician who had unctuously dismissed him but a deeply shaken, unappeasably remorseful loser. With a sense of vindication and personal dominance he now pressed on a ready audience the most self-serving nostrums of the career politician. Clinton must make his use of every popular cause, even Republican initiatives, in order to shield himself from attacks and, if possible, find his own enemy to demonize, so as to deflect controversy to others and define himself in a safe middle. In the 1981-82 campaign some would call it "getting one's shots," inoculating oneself against any dangerous image or label -- in Clinton's case, acquiring immunity by admitting past mistakes and adopting some version of the conservative criticism of his record. Most crucial, Morris instructed him, he must do nothing in governing that he would not say or do in the midst of a political race, make no dispensation for policy or leadership in a term that was simply another phase of the endless campaign. "You're always running. That's all you do," one remembered as the kernel of the indoctrination. Heaped on top of Clinton's already frightful sense of vulnerability, the ultimately apolitical, antidemocratic cynicism of his acrid Manhattan handler further fixed the mode of a comeback and subsequent career.
Meanwhile, inside the camp and despite the relative anathema Dickie Morris represented to most of Clinton's close retainers, the new, softer, flossier Hillary continually "played 'bad cop,'" as Judith Warner put it, "to complement his often too-accepting manner." Again and again, many remembered, she struck out at what she saw as staff laxity and her husband's own gullibility or slackness. Friends found themselves making some casual observation in their presence, only to have Hillary suddenly seize on it to drive home her side of a private argument. Carolyn Staley recalled a time on Midland Avenue when Hillary burst out at hearing Staley take for granted a report about Clinton's record in the press. "She just screamed, 'See Bill! People do believe what they read in the paper!'" Clinton invariably responded sheepishly. "By now she ate him for breakfast," quipped a friend who grew up with him in Hot Springs. Some thought it another mark, too, of deeper differences of character between the two. "But facing opponents, standing on principle, defending himself on views that were possibly unpopular, wasn't Bill's strong point," Warner concluded. "It was hers."
If Bill Clinton tended to be politically craven and vacillating, too prone to expediency or unprincipled compromise, those traits were only reinforced by the tactics and people he and Hillary adopted together for the comeback -- as much at her insistence as out of his desperation. "Hillary ... was somewhat disturbed by Clinton's excessive self-flagellation, but apart from a few offhand comments she kept her peace," Warner reported. "It was her respect for what he chooses to do," Betsey Wright offered.
Temperamentally repugnant as Hillary might find some of his public remorse, whatever her "respect" for his choices, the essence of their crafted comeback was to be accommodation and concession -- like her own new eye shadow, hair tints, and tightly managed public persona. It was also, after all, the convention of their local advisers and of the national Democrats recoiling from the Reagan victory, the resort of the Blairs and the Vernon Jordans alike. "Hillary was always very, very comfortable as the Democrats went right," an old friend would say. "She had sold out corporate and yuppie as fast as any Washington lawyer." Who was to say where "principle" lay for a shattered young politician equating office with life and a far more composed wife, the Rose partner, untroubled in the cause of the firm's clients, of the old power and privilege she served in Arkansas? Their differences always a matter of style more than of character or root values, their mutual strong point would remain a single-minded dedication to their own inextricable advance.
Her discipline would have unintended, ironic consequences in the long run. To curb the philandering as well as make the early public comeback more efficient and discreet, she now hedged about his time and schedule as much as possible. When a driver was caught indulging Clinton's "campaign stops" at bars and clubs for the inevitable female "constituents," Hillary promptly fired the young man, adamant that Clinton be escorted by "professionals." Later, back in the mansion, she would insist for similar reasons that he have Arkansas state troopers as bodyguards and drivers, men whom she first trusted, then soon came to despise for what she saw as their dutiful good ole boy collusion in the governor's extramarital indulgences. Later still, as the Clintons were finishing their first year in the White House, a few of the same troopers would reveal glimpses of the couple's tortured private life in Little Rock, an expose that indirectly led to the media and legal inquiries into Whitewater.
Clinton himself seemed, as always, to shrug at the short-lived, ultimately ineffectual efforts to rein in his sexual habits. Aides remembered how much he welcomed his wife's much larger role in the campaign, comfortable now with Hillary as a media filter and political strategist, even more active and publicly prominent than in their earlier races. "Make no mistake about it," said one, "she ran things in those two years of his recovery at a level beyond Clinton or Betsey Wright." At the apparent nadir of their fortunes she found, too, a fresh authority and warmth with Clinton, speaking to his rawest vulnerabilities and feelings. Judith Warner recorded Hillary's coaxing and encouraging him, as one might a frightened and sullen child, to attend Little Rock's annual lampoon show for press and politicians in April 1981. "Make them laugh, and you'll see they love you again."
After the performances and applause for both of them, however, there was no doubt about the depth of her own submission. For their ambition, their comeback, she was "willing to knuckle under," as their Arkansas friend Brownie Ledbetter said with characteristic bluntness. "This new personality or person that I was developing," Hillary would say vaguely of the change begun in 1981-82. "She was a bit uncertain how to describe it," said another of her new exterior, "because whatever it was, it wasn't her real self."
On February 28, 1982, she stood next to Clinton holding Chelsea, now two, as he formally announced his reelection bid. "I don't have to change my name; I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton since the day we were married," she responded archly to press questions, admitting she would be "strictly 'Mrs. Bill Clinton' for a while," though still signing her legal briefs Hillary Rodham. Barely a month later, weeks before the primary, wearing her studied new wardrobe and hairdo, she pointedly changed her voter registration to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
***
On a chill Monday night in February 1982 Clinton performed for the entire state what he had been doing before smaller audiences almost constantly for more than a year. In a thirty-second television ad repeated throughout the week, viewers saw a sad-eyed Clinton biting his lip and staring intently into the camera. The focus was at such close range that the top of his newly styled hair and even the tip of his drawn-up chin were off the screen, his face looming with sudden intimacy in living rooms all over Arkansas.
Deeply apologetic for what he had been and done as governor, he asked their forgiveness, especially for those license fees. He had learned from defeat and from all the people he had talked to since leaving office, and he wanted and deserved a second chance. "You can't lead without listening," he summed up the bitter lesson. Crafted in part by Dickie Morris, by a Little Rock ad agency, and by other out-of-state political consultants and approved by old backers like Carl Whillock as well as by Hillary, Wright, and other advisers, it was still largely Clinton's own much-rehearsed script and emotion. "A humble pie advertising campaign," Starr called the matching spots on television and radio. "The airwaves," he noted, "were saturated with them."
Beyond public view his campaign was less contrite, often fierce and cynical. By the summer of 1981, only seven months after moving out of the mansion, Clinton was locked in battle for the 1982 gubernatorial nomination against the other defeated prodigy, thirty-eight-year-old Jim Guy Tucker. The Democrat reported that both candidates were "burning up Arkansas highways seeking support in the hinterlands." That autumn Wright ordered a poll showing enough Clinton popularity to raise major early money, financing the ubiquitous "humble pie" ads the next spring. Meant to reassure and solicit, however, the survey did not match him against rivals like Tucker and foreshadowed none of the slashing among the two young politicians in the primary, much of it echoing Republican rhetoric. When Tucker promised teachers a pay raise, Clinton attacked him for pandering to "special interests." For his part, Tucker deplored Clinton's "palace guard" of radicals in the governor's office and the way he coddled criminals, commuting so many sentences "I find it hard to imagine." Typically, Clinton reacted with television commercials apologizing for commuting sentences or for being "out of touch," implying he was misled by alien staff. Privately, he lashed out at the Arkansas Education Association for endorsing Tucker. "You are trying to end my political career," he told AEA leaders early in 1982, "and I will beat your brains out." Like his rupture with the labor unions in 1976, the episode began, despite public amenity from time to time, a bitter behind-the-scenes feud. Just as antilabor animus shaped his later governance, the rancor with teachers in the desperate 1982 comeback was a furtive influence for years to come in Clinton's educational policy and politics, including his much-advertised Arkansas school reforms.
Beyond Tucker and Clinton the primary field of five included Joe Purcell, a former lieutenant governor and attorney general who had run a losing race for governor in 1970; an obscure state senator; and the perennial gadfly turkey farmer Monroe Schwarzlose. Though Betsey Wright's vaunted organization was now "sputtering," as a reporter saw it that winter and spring, Clinton overwhelmed them all with money. By February, with Maurice Smith tapping heavily into contacts around the state and region, Clinton raised some $200,000 on top of the intensive, costly ad campaign already bought and begun. Altogether he took in nearly $800,000, then a record for Arkansas primaries and, at that, only part of the backing. As always, the money had come from wealthy individual backers, bond brokers and stockbrokers, oil and land fortunes, the state trucking, merchandising, and agribusiness giants, insurance companies, the medical industry, banks, corporations, and various other large interests as well as from the proliferating Arkansas lawyers, consultants, and agents who represented them.
To all of them he would repeat his ritual contrition, accepting the interests' characterization of his callow and misguided regime, implying a far more "mature" conservative rule to come. It had all been a matter of personal style and attention, something he could outgrow. "I made a young man's mistakes. I had an agenda a mile long," he said on the eve of the primary. "I was so busy doing what I wanted to do I didn't have time to correct mistakes." But whatever the public smears and apologies, it was in the suites and by checkbook that Clinton quietly eliminated Jim Guy Tucker, the only formidable obstacle to the comeback. Tucker ran without substance or program, his empty theme "the Arkansas way" and his comparatively few ads focused on images of him playing the guitar and hunting. In the end the former congressman had simply gone broke while Bill Clinton, as usual, cornered the market in political dollars. Starr found a dispirited Tucker at his headquarters days before the primary, "out of money, members of his staff . . . at each other's throats."
Clinton won his first political resurrection with only 41.7 percent of the Democratic vote and was forced into a runoff against Purcell, who extolled "clean" politics, called every opponent "my friend," and refused to criticize a rival. "How about the devil, Joe?" someone asked. "The devil is my friend," Purcell replied earnestly. His forbearance was little help in what followed.
Clinton's "organizational machine," as one account put it, "went into overdrive for the runoff." In the coda to the most expensive primary in Arkansas history, the barrage of Clinton ads and apologies ran constantly. Public attacks on a benign Purcell likely to appear unseemly, there was now a concerted whispering campaign about the fifty-eight-year-old candidate's health, false rumors so virulent that at one point reporters were sent scurrying to local hospitals after anonymous calls about "old Joe" collapsing on the campaign trail.
Even though Purcell had bravely stood up to a racist and red-baiting opponent in the 1960s and held a creditable civil rights record for an Arkansas politician, slurs about his racial views were bruited about in the black community and substantial money was dispensed to leaders and organizers in Little Rock and the Delta. "There was beau coup cash crossing the brothers' palms in that election. You better believe it," said an African American lawyer who witnessed the get-out-the-vote payments to ministers, funeral parlor owners, and other traditional "drops" for the money. Once more the cynical supposition and silence of the local press was numbing. "It was simply taken for granted that in some communities, particularly in the Delta, black votes were for sale and had been bought," Meredith Oakley of the Democrat wrote, explaining with embarrassingly unveiled racism the lack of reporting by her colleagues on the ubiquitous allegations of bribery and kickbacks in 1982. On runoff day, black voters appeared for Clinton in record numbers; Purcell was actually shut out in one large ghetto precinct.
The onslaught of smears and corruption broke even the loser's legendary equanimity. Despite a formal "do right" pledge among Democrats, despite a lifetime of party loyalty, in a farewell press conference an embittered Joe Purcell refused to endorse Clinton in the general election, many of his aides furiously offering to work for Frank White.
When it was over, Bill Clinton had the nomination by a margin of thirty-two thousand votes out of nearly half a million cast -- the slim, harshly won margin of a comeback, a career, and ultimately a presidency.
***
At a candidates' forum in North Little Rock in May 1982 Hillary Rodham appeared in her husband's place just after the governor delivered his familiar criticism of Clinton's first-term record. "Frank White, I hope you're still out there to hear this," she said, "lighting into" the florid Republican, according to a reporter, as he tried in vain to ignore her and mingle with the crowd. Afterward someone asked about the force and obvious emotion of her counterattack. "Well," she said matter-of-factly, "politics is conflict."
It was not a sentiment much associated with Bill Clinton then or later. Even some inside the campaign thought Hillary chiefly responsible for the aggressiveness in the primary and in the still harsher race against White in the general. Her sternness and discipline were unrelenting. On a campaign flight back from a tiring string of appearances by both of them in western Arkansas, Clinton had cheerily agreed to aides' suggestion that they all go out for an impromptu party that night at a favorite capital bar -- despite the fact that White, a teetotaler, had made a minor issue of drinking by the Clinton staff. Listening to the exchange, Hillary was livid. "I can't believe you'd say all right," aides heard her screaming at him above the roar of the small aircraft's engines. "She yelled at him all the way to Little Rock," one remembered.
Such scenes in front of staff or friends -- Clinton typically absorbing her sharp reproaches in embarassed silence -- tended to obscure how much he passively resisted, evaded, and himself aggressed in other settings and times, often on more serious matters. "He rebelled against the pressure in his own way," said a friend. Her withering temper also eclipsed his own anxious anger and venom in the comeback, always there beneath the happy or ingratiating politician's manner.
Out of office, struggling to come back, Clinton remained the darling of the Gazette, most of whose reporters and editors showed unconcealed enthusiasm for his reelection. Apart from occasional, usually tame editorial criticism, neither the respected Little Rock daily nor any other media in the state reported in depth on either of the Clintons, least of all on the Rose firm and the ganglion of political-business connections of which Hillary was an active part. Throughout the 1980s the Clintons would enjoy relative impunity from the scrutiny of investigative journalism, making the later uncovering of their provincial world by outsiders all the more unexpected. In 1982, though, there was still the right-wing and potentially troublesome Democrat, embodied in a vain, raspy John Robert Starr and his record of superficial but barbed "exposes" of Clinton and his first-term cabinet.
Their remedy was simple. Having met, carefully courted, and visibly impressed Starr at a political dinner early in 1982, Hillary pointedly began to have lunch with him, pressing on him the more conservative, more "responsible" bent of her husband's politics. "They knew that . . . Starr had a tremendous ego, that he was weak, that they could pander to him," said rival Gazette reporter and editor Ernest Dumas. "We found it nauseating." Frequent lunches with Hillary only began a routine of lavish attention to their onetime nemesis, including regular tips and calls from campaign press secretary Joan Roberts and others and "standing orders," as another remembered, "to check with Starr every morning, see what he wanted, and give it to him."
"It worked like a charm," a fellow editor said. Almost immediately, Starr was praising Clinton. "He is no longer a radical," Starr wrote on the eve of the runoff against Purcell. "He is still a bit of an idealist, but his idealism has been tempered by realism that one can learn only from rejection and defeat." They had "made a deal," the editor said later, that Starr would not remind voters of Clinton's old blunders if his comeback remained a "clean campaign." "Clinton is liberal, but he is not as liberal as he was and is more liberal than he plans to be," Starr wrote approvingly that October.
Whether liberal or conservative, Little Rock reporters almost never ventured into the uncharted wilderness of serious power and systemic corruption in Arkansas politics and economics. As it was, the fawning and feeding begun with Hillary's tete-a-tete at lunch in 1982 assured Starr's discretion in covering Clinton for the next ten years. "Nauseating" as the Gazette found the toadying to Starr, its own compromise and neglect were too much akin to the Democrat's, and together the two papers left it to others to unearth, only well after the 1992 election, the unseemly origins of the presidency -- in many ways too late for Arkansas, the Democratic Party, and the nation.
***
To the alternating delight and disgust of the press and the public, Clinton waged in the 1982 general election his own portion of what became one of the most acrimonious campaigns in state politics. "Bill Clinton was the dirty campaigner," Starr told a colleague years later, though he had tactfully withheld that conclusion at the time. "I hope you don't want me to try to out-Frank White Frank White ... to get down on that level," Clinton announced to a radio audience, describing vividly how the governor had set out to "poison the people's minds against me last time by being constantly critical." White, he maintained, was only a tool of special interests, a governor in the habit of "shaking down" those who did business with the state. ''I'm not kidding," he told a crowd in Magnolia. "He's got half a million dollars because the people who wanted decisions from the governor's office paid for them."
It was all "an outrageous abuse of public trust," Clinton repeated in speech after speech. He reminded audiences that White had watched the doubling of the price of prescription medicine for Medicaid recipients while giving an added $12 million tax exemption to big businesses. As a recession deepened nationwide and unemployment soared in poor Arkansas, utility rate hikes had cost consumers $130 million and boosted utility profits 50 percent, in some measure because Frank White had dismantled Clinton's energy office, removed its watchdogs, and packed regulatory bodies with industry flacks. At one point Clinton signed with a flourish a petition to vote on a constitutional amendment to make the state public service commission an elected rather than an appointed body, a proposal that unnerved many of his own powerful supporters before it was eventually struck from the ballot in an industry-backed legal challenge for "faulty" language. "He toyed with it, but he knew that one would disappear into the Bermuda triangle," said a journalist with a wink.
White proclaimed his 1980 election a "victory of the Lord" and sponsored a "creation science" act (promptly struck down as unconstitutional). Prone to accepting rides on corporate jets and asking business friends publicly "how to do the job," he soon became known by capitol reporters as "Governor Goofy" and was guilty of most of what Clinton charged. Like some in Arkansas politics, he had ties to the interests that were at once too naked and too artlessly explained. White tried to argue that Clinton's own close friends, contributors, and campaign officials -- most prominently, Mack McLarty of ARKLA and Richard Herget of AP&L -- were members of utility boards with the same connections Clinton now deplored. The governor of Arkansas would go on television with a live leopard to remind people that apologetic Bill Clinton wouldn't change his spots. His commercials featured twanging Texan actors impersonating Arkansans who declared that they were voting for good ole Frank.
Yet neither then nor later could the jowly, voluble Republican quite tar Bill Clinton with the same brush -- the corporate tax breaks, compromised regulation, favors to contributors, cozy rides on company jets, and more. "No matter how hard Frank hammered, he and other right-wingers couldn't have it both ways," said a state government attorney who worked for both men. "They couldn't say Bill was a radical and also a sellout to the big boys at the same time, and besides that there wasn't anything wrong with the big boys when Republicans ran with 'em too." It all amounted to an impenetrable hypocrisy, institutionalized in the state's unique politics of pride, submission, denial.
Through the autumn the two camps flailed at each other in what one observer characterized as "an unending series of negative spots threatening wholesale prisoner releases, massive utility rate increases, devastating harm to the elderly, and even mass gun confiscations should the other be elected." Against White the "interest-dominated plutocrat," as Diane Blair saw it, "Clinton was just a caring and concerned down-home Baptist family man who wanted nothing more than another chance to fight the fat cats in behalf of the little guy." The Gazette called his commercials "cute, sophisticated, and nearly always negative." Yet the sheer wealth and demagoguery of the campaign were reinforcing. Nervously, some thought even frantically, Clinton poured much of his gushing campaign money into five major polls and several lesser surveys in September and October alone -- and each seemed to indicate that he did better with the electorate, even raised more money, if he matched White blow by blow, charge by charge. "They were watching it like a prize fight," said a Clinton supporter, "and they loved to see blood."
Clinton would tell friends later, "If you have twelve good people who really believe in you, you can still carry a rural county." By the climax of the 1982 run, Betsey Wright and the richly financed campaign had in fact mobilized thousands around the state with what she called "a passionate mission." They organized telephone blitzes that in some counties reached every listed number, regardless of registration. With military precision they mobilized the African American vote. "You and I know there's no such thing as a real Democrat for White," Clinton reportedly told black audiences. "You and I both know what they ought to be called: 'White Democrats for White.'" One civil rights lawyer observed, "They waved everything in front of 'em but white sheets with eyeholes, and knowing Arkansas, it was enough to scare hell out of everybody anyway."
Still, no strategy was more decisive than the candidate's "new" wife. She would take a full year off from Rose to manage the race and in effect run herself, making almost as many stops as her husband did, taking their daughter with her when it was opportune but often leaving the little girl with Dorothy Rodham or sitters. The Little Rock press and others welcomed what they called her "major shift in attitude": "Eight years in Arkansas have almost totally eradicated most of those Yankee tendencies, leaving behind a first lady who embraces her adopted state with the characteristic fervor of a convert ... accepted by a remarkable number of Arkansans." Starr had it on reliable authority that "some of those who still don't think Clinton is a real person are now convinced that Hillary is." They "know her now as Mrs. Bill Clinton," a Gazette writer recorded approvingly, and "are already calling her by yet a different name -- Chelsea's Mommy."
In the final weeks of the race Bill Clinton took nothing for granted. "He shook every hand at every stop," a worker said of Clinton. "He worked like a demon." Woody Bassett remembered him standing in the freezing rain in the middle of the night as the shift changed at the Campbell Soup plant in Fayetteville and moving on to another plant at six in the morning, then to a dawn breakfast and reception as the campaign day was just beginning. Privately, he alternately cajoled and strong-armed Democratic county chairmen and trade associations as never before. Betsey Wright had talked about the "up-beat feeling" after a lengthy meeting with party officials. "More like beat-up," one remembered long afterward.
Three weeks before the election Bill Clinton, carelessly answering a questionnaire from the National Rifle Association, said he would favor the reporting of firearm sales to a central computer system for law enforcement, prompting White and the NRA to denounce his suggestion as dreaded gun control. Within hours Clinton had taped and was broadcasting a radio commercial denouncing gun control in principle; he "saturated the airwaves with it, up to and including election day," reported John Brummett.
In addition to the ads, he immediately circulated thousands of pamphlets repeating his dedication to the NRA position and, in the process, even managed to attack White's handling of sportsmen's license fees. The blanketing commercials and flyers were luxuries afforded by his swollen campaign chest. "It was a marvel of backtracking and recovery," said one aide who was involved. On a crowded, crucial Saturday of appearances, Clinton suddenly changed his schedule and went back home to Hempstead County for a Frontier Day Festival, to be seen and photographed, as a reporter noted, "admiring and fondling the antique guns that would be on display there."
On election eve he amazed aides by recalling his exact vote totals, county by county, in the 1980 race and by methodically, accurately predicting his likely numbers now. The next day he crushed White with nearly 55 percent of the vote, winning thirty-two counties lost two years before and becoming the first governor in Arkansas history to come back from defeat for another term.
There were several measures of the triumph. As in the primary and runoff, the decisiveness of his black support was graphic. In a race won by seventy-eight thousand votes statewide, the ninety thousand African American votes he took in Little Rock and the Delta were clearly the margin of victory.
So, too, was the more than $1.6 million he assembled for the richest campaign ever waged for the statehouse. Only later was the abiding reality of Arkansas power evident in a careful reading of the campaign finance lists: almost a fourth of Maurice Smith's big contributors to Bill Clinton represented major lobbies in the state, and they had given to Frank White as well.
For now, however, none of that seemed to matter among the once and future governor's jubilant volunteers, many of them still, as in that first race for Congress in 1974, hopeful idealists seeing their articulate, attractive champion as an exception to the state's gangrenous old politics. For scores of workers and supporters it was once more a triumph of youthful progressivism over the special-interest misrule of a buffoon Republican; it was a fresh challenge as well to the venal, torpid Democratic legislature. "AN OBSESSED CLINTON," the gratified Gazette headlined afterward, "LED THE DEVOTED IN NEAR-PERFECT RETURN TO POLITICAL GLORY."
In contrast to his morose seclusion and fugitive appearance two years before, Clinton came early to his headquarters on West Capitol as the initial returns heralded victory. When he entered, as the accommodating Starr recorded for posterity, the gathering "exploded in exultation."
Hillary soon called back their talisman from the first statehouse victory, Dickie Morris. Between clients, many of them now right-wing Republicans in the vogue of the 1980s, Morris made his reappearance in Little Rock in 1981. By several accounts, he spent long hours at the law office and at the Midland Avenue house charting the campaign just as he and Clinton, at an easier time three years before, had plotted not only winning the governorship but Pryor's elimination of Tucker as well. Now Clinton was likely to face the jobless and still ambitious Tucker himself in the gubernatorial primary, and Morris and he discussed how to build on the attacks and negative images they had confected so effectively for Pryor.
But the consultant's advice, according to some who heard it as well as read internal memos, now went well beyond the primary or the general election. Morris was facing not the confident, trade-fluent politician who had unctuously dismissed him but a deeply shaken, unappeasably remorseful loser. With a sense of vindication and personal dominance he now pressed on a ready audience the most self-serving nostrums of the career politician. Clinton must make his use of every popular cause, even Republican initiatives, in order to shield himself from attacks and, if possible, find his own enemy to demonize, so as to deflect controversy to others and define himself in a safe middle. In the 1981-82 campaign some would call it "getting one's shots," inoculating oneself against any dangerous image or label -- in Clinton's case, acquiring immunity by admitting past mistakes and adopting some version of the conservative criticism of his record. Most crucial, Morris instructed him, he must do nothing in governing that he would not say or do in the midst of a political race, make no dispensation for policy or leadership in a term that was simply another phase of the endless campaign. "You're always running. That's all you do," one remembered as the kernel of the indoctrination. Heaped on top of Clinton's already frightful sense of vulnerability, the ultimately apolitical, antidemocratic cynicism of his acrid Manhattan handler further fixed the mode of a comeback and subsequent career.
Meanwhile, inside the camp and despite the relative anathema Dickie Morris represented to most of Clinton's close retainers, the new, softer, flossier Hillary continually "played 'bad cop,'" as Judith Warner put it, "to complement his often too-accepting manner." Again and again, many remembered, she struck out at what she saw as staff laxity and her husband's own gullibility or slackness. Friends found themselves making some casual observation in their presence, only to have Hillary suddenly seize on it to drive home her side of a private argument. Carolyn Staley recalled a time on Midland Avenue when Hillary burst out at hearing Staley take for granted a report about Clinton's record in the press. "She just screamed, 'See Bill! People do believe what they read in the paper!'" Clinton invariably responded sheepishly. "By now she ate him for breakfast," quipped a friend who grew up with him in Hot Springs. Some thought it another mark, too, of deeper differences of character between the two. "But facing opponents, standing on principle, defending himself on views that were possibly unpopular, wasn't Bill's strong point," Warner concluded. "It was hers."
If Bill Clinton tended to be politically craven and vacillating, too prone to expediency or unprincipled compromise, those traits were only reinforced by the tactics and people he and Hillary adopted together for the comeback -- as much at her insistence as out of his desperation. "Hillary ... was somewhat disturbed by Clinton's excessive self-flagellation, but apart from a few offhand comments she kept her peace," Warner reported. "It was her respect for what he chooses to do," Betsey Wright offered.
Temperamentally repugnant as Hillary might find some of his public remorse, whatever her "respect" for his choices, the essence of their crafted comeback was to be accommodation and concession -- like her own new eye shadow, hair tints, and tightly managed public persona. It was also, after all, the convention of their local advisers and of the national Democrats recoiling from the Reagan victory, the resort of the Blairs and the Vernon Jordans alike. "Hillary was always very, very comfortable as the Democrats went right," an old friend would say. "She had sold out corporate and yuppie as fast as any Washington lawyer." Who was to say where "principle" lay for a shattered young politician equating office with life and a far more composed wife, the Rose partner, untroubled in the cause of the firm's clients, of the old power and privilege she served in Arkansas? Their differences always a matter of style more than of character or root values, their mutual strong point would remain a single-minded dedication to their own inextricable advance.
Her discipline would have unintended, ironic consequences in the long run. To curb the philandering as well as make the early public comeback more efficient and discreet, she now hedged about his time and schedule as much as possible. When a driver was caught indulging Clinton's "campaign stops" at bars and clubs for the inevitable female "constituents," Hillary promptly fired the young man, adamant that Clinton be escorted by "professionals." Later, back in the mansion, she would insist for similar reasons that he have Arkansas state troopers as bodyguards and drivers, men whom she first trusted, then soon came to despise for what she saw as their dutiful good ole boy collusion in the governor's extramarital indulgences. Later still, as the Clintons were finishing their first year in the White House, a few of the same troopers would reveal glimpses of the couple's tortured private life in Little Rock, an expose that indirectly led to the media and legal inquiries into Whitewater.
Clinton himself seemed, as always, to shrug at the short-lived, ultimately ineffectual efforts to rein in his sexual habits. Aides remembered how much he welcomed his wife's much larger role in the campaign, comfortable now with Hillary as a media filter and political strategist, even more active and publicly prominent than in their earlier races. "Make no mistake about it," said one, "she ran things in those two years of his recovery at a level beyond Clinton or Betsey Wright." At the apparent nadir of their fortunes she found, too, a fresh authority and warmth with Clinton, speaking to his rawest vulnerabilities and feelings. Judith Warner recorded Hillary's coaxing and encouraging him, as one might a frightened and sullen child, to attend Little Rock's annual lampoon show for press and politicians in April 1981. "Make them laugh, and you'll see they love you again."
After the performances and applause for both of them, however, there was no doubt about the depth of her own submission. For their ambition, their comeback, she was "willing to knuckle under," as their Arkansas friend Brownie Ledbetter said with characteristic bluntness. "This new personality or person that I was developing," Hillary would say vaguely of the change begun in 1981-82. "She was a bit uncertain how to describe it," said another of her new exterior, "because whatever it was, it wasn't her real self."
On February 28, 1982, she stood next to Clinton holding Chelsea, now two, as he formally announced his reelection bid. "I don't have to change my name; I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton since the day we were married," she responded archly to press questions, admitting she would be "strictly 'Mrs. Bill Clinton' for a while," though still signing her legal briefs Hillary Rodham. Barely a month later, weeks before the primary, wearing her studied new wardrobe and hairdo, she pointedly changed her voter registration to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
***
On a chill Monday night in February 1982 Clinton performed for the entire state what he had been doing before smaller audiences almost constantly for more than a year. In a thirty-second television ad repeated throughout the week, viewers saw a sad-eyed Clinton biting his lip and staring intently into the camera. The focus was at such close range that the top of his newly styled hair and even the tip of his drawn-up chin were off the screen, his face looming with sudden intimacy in living rooms all over Arkansas.
Deeply apologetic for what he had been and done as governor, he asked their forgiveness, especially for those license fees. He had learned from defeat and from all the people he had talked to since leaving office, and he wanted and deserved a second chance. "You can't lead without listening," he summed up the bitter lesson. Crafted in part by Dickie Morris, by a Little Rock ad agency, and by other out-of-state political consultants and approved by old backers like Carl Whillock as well as by Hillary, Wright, and other advisers, it was still largely Clinton's own much-rehearsed script and emotion. "A humble pie advertising campaign," Starr called the matching spots on television and radio. "The airwaves," he noted, "were saturated with them."
Beyond public view his campaign was less contrite, often fierce and cynical. By the summer of 1981, only seven months after moving out of the mansion, Clinton was locked in battle for the 1982 gubernatorial nomination against the other defeated prodigy, thirty-eight-year-old Jim Guy Tucker. The Democrat reported that both candidates were "burning up Arkansas highways seeking support in the hinterlands." That autumn Wright ordered a poll showing enough Clinton popularity to raise major early money, financing the ubiquitous "humble pie" ads the next spring. Meant to reassure and solicit, however, the survey did not match him against rivals like Tucker and foreshadowed none of the slashing among the two young politicians in the primary, much of it echoing Republican rhetoric. When Tucker promised teachers a pay raise, Clinton attacked him for pandering to "special interests." For his part, Tucker deplored Clinton's "palace guard" of radicals in the governor's office and the way he coddled criminals, commuting so many sentences "I find it hard to imagine." Typically, Clinton reacted with television commercials apologizing for commuting sentences or for being "out of touch," implying he was misled by alien staff. Privately, he lashed out at the Arkansas Education Association for endorsing Tucker. "You are trying to end my political career," he told AEA leaders early in 1982, "and I will beat your brains out." Like his rupture with the labor unions in 1976, the episode began, despite public amenity from time to time, a bitter behind-the-scenes feud. Just as antilabor animus shaped his later governance, the rancor with teachers in the desperate 1982 comeback was a furtive influence for years to come in Clinton's educational policy and politics, including his much-advertised Arkansas school reforms.
Beyond Tucker and Clinton the primary field of five included Joe Purcell, a former lieutenant governor and attorney general who had run a losing race for governor in 1970; an obscure state senator; and the perennial gadfly turkey farmer Monroe Schwarzlose. Though Betsey Wright's vaunted organization was now "sputtering," as a reporter saw it that winter and spring, Clinton overwhelmed them all with money. By February, with Maurice Smith tapping heavily into contacts around the state and region, Clinton raised some $200,000 on top of the intensive, costly ad campaign already bought and begun. Altogether he took in nearly $800,000, then a record for Arkansas primaries and, at that, only part of the backing. As always, the money had come from wealthy individual backers, bond brokers and stockbrokers, oil and land fortunes, the state trucking, merchandising, and agribusiness giants, insurance companies, the medical industry, banks, corporations, and various other large interests as well as from the proliferating Arkansas lawyers, consultants, and agents who represented them.
To all of them he would repeat his ritual contrition, accepting the interests' characterization of his callow and misguided regime, implying a far more "mature" conservative rule to come. It had all been a matter of personal style and attention, something he could outgrow. "I made a young man's mistakes. I had an agenda a mile long," he said on the eve of the primary. "I was so busy doing what I wanted to do I didn't have time to correct mistakes." But whatever the public smears and apologies, it was in the suites and by checkbook that Clinton quietly eliminated Jim Guy Tucker, the only formidable obstacle to the comeback. Tucker ran without substance or program, his empty theme "the Arkansas way" and his comparatively few ads focused on images of him playing the guitar and hunting. In the end the former congressman had simply gone broke while Bill Clinton, as usual, cornered the market in political dollars. Starr found a dispirited Tucker at his headquarters days before the primary, "out of money, members of his staff . . . at each other's throats."
Clinton won his first political resurrection with only 41.7 percent of the Democratic vote and was forced into a runoff against Purcell, who extolled "clean" politics, called every opponent "my friend," and refused to criticize a rival. "How about the devil, Joe?" someone asked. "The devil is my friend," Purcell replied earnestly. His forbearance was little help in what followed.
Clinton's "organizational machine," as one account put it, "went into overdrive for the runoff." In the coda to the most expensive primary in Arkansas history, the barrage of Clinton ads and apologies ran constantly. Public attacks on a benign Purcell likely to appear unseemly, there was now a concerted whispering campaign about the fifty-eight-year-old candidate's health, false rumors so virulent that at one point reporters were sent scurrying to local hospitals after anonymous calls about "old Joe" collapsing on the campaign trail.
Even though Purcell had bravely stood up to a racist and red-baiting opponent in the 1960s and held a creditable civil rights record for an Arkansas politician, slurs about his racial views were bruited about in the black community and substantial money was dispensed to leaders and organizers in Little Rock and the Delta. "There was beau coup cash crossing the brothers' palms in that election. You better believe it," said an African American lawyer who witnessed the get-out-the-vote payments to ministers, funeral parlor owners, and other traditional "drops" for the money. Once more the cynical supposition and silence of the local press was numbing. "It was simply taken for granted that in some communities, particularly in the Delta, black votes were for sale and had been bought," Meredith Oakley of the Democrat wrote, explaining with embarrassingly unveiled racism the lack of reporting by her colleagues on the ubiquitous allegations of bribery and kickbacks in 1982. On runoff day, black voters appeared for Clinton in record numbers; Purcell was actually shut out in one large ghetto precinct.
The onslaught of smears and corruption broke even the loser's legendary equanimity. Despite a formal "do right" pledge among Democrats, despite a lifetime of party loyalty, in a farewell press conference an embittered Joe Purcell refused to endorse Clinton in the general election, many of his aides furiously offering to work for Frank White.
When it was over, Bill Clinton had the nomination by a margin of thirty-two thousand votes out of nearly half a million cast -- the slim, harshly won margin of a comeback, a career, and ultimately a presidency.
***
At a candidates' forum in North Little Rock in May 1982 Hillary Rodham appeared in her husband's place just after the governor delivered his familiar criticism of Clinton's first-term record. "Frank White, I hope you're still out there to hear this," she said, "lighting into" the florid Republican, according to a reporter, as he tried in vain to ignore her and mingle with the crowd. Afterward someone asked about the force and obvious emotion of her counterattack. "Well," she said matter-of-factly, "politics is conflict."
It was not a sentiment much associated with Bill Clinton then or later. Even some inside the campaign thought Hillary chiefly responsible for the aggressiveness in the primary and in the still harsher race against White in the general. Her sternness and discipline were unrelenting. On a campaign flight back from a tiring string of appearances by both of them in western Arkansas, Clinton had cheerily agreed to aides' suggestion that they all go out for an impromptu party that night at a favorite capital bar -- despite the fact that White, a teetotaler, had made a minor issue of drinking by the Clinton staff. Listening to the exchange, Hillary was livid. "I can't believe you'd say all right," aides heard her screaming at him above the roar of the small aircraft's engines. "She yelled at him all the way to Little Rock," one remembered.
Such scenes in front of staff or friends -- Clinton typically absorbing her sharp reproaches in embarassed silence -- tended to obscure how much he passively resisted, evaded, and himself aggressed in other settings and times, often on more serious matters. "He rebelled against the pressure in his own way," said a friend. Her withering temper also eclipsed his own anxious anger and venom in the comeback, always there beneath the happy or ingratiating politician's manner.
Out of office, struggling to come back, Clinton remained the darling of the Gazette, most of whose reporters and editors showed unconcealed enthusiasm for his reelection. Apart from occasional, usually tame editorial criticism, neither the respected Little Rock daily nor any other media in the state reported in depth on either of the Clintons, least of all on the Rose firm and the ganglion of political-business connections of which Hillary was an active part. Throughout the 1980s the Clintons would enjoy relative impunity from the scrutiny of investigative journalism, making the later uncovering of their provincial world by outsiders all the more unexpected. In 1982, though, there was still the right-wing and potentially troublesome Democrat, embodied in a vain, raspy John Robert Starr and his record of superficial but barbed "exposes" of Clinton and his first-term cabinet.
Their remedy was simple. Having met, carefully courted, and visibly impressed Starr at a political dinner early in 1982, Hillary pointedly began to have lunch with him, pressing on him the more conservative, more "responsible" bent of her husband's politics. "They knew that . . . Starr had a tremendous ego, that he was weak, that they could pander to him," said rival Gazette reporter and editor Ernest Dumas. "We found it nauseating." Frequent lunches with Hillary only began a routine of lavish attention to their onetime nemesis, including regular tips and calls from campaign press secretary Joan Roberts and others and "standing orders," as another remembered, "to check with Starr every morning, see what he wanted, and give it to him."
"It worked like a charm," a fellow editor said. Almost immediately, Starr was praising Clinton. "He is no longer a radical," Starr wrote on the eve of the runoff against Purcell. "He is still a bit of an idealist, but his idealism has been tempered by realism that one can learn only from rejection and defeat." They had "made a deal," the editor said later, that Starr would not remind voters of Clinton's old blunders if his comeback remained a "clean campaign." "Clinton is liberal, but he is not as liberal as he was and is more liberal than he plans to be," Starr wrote approvingly that October.
Whether liberal or conservative, Little Rock reporters almost never ventured into the uncharted wilderness of serious power and systemic corruption in Arkansas politics and economics. As it was, the fawning and feeding begun with Hillary's tete-a-tete at lunch in 1982 assured Starr's discretion in covering Clinton for the next ten years. "Nauseating" as the Gazette found the toadying to Starr, its own compromise and neglect were too much akin to the Democrat's, and together the two papers left it to others to unearth, only well after the 1992 election, the unseemly origins of the presidency -- in many ways too late for Arkansas, the Democratic Party, and the nation.
***
To the alternating delight and disgust of the press and the public, Clinton waged in the 1982 general election his own portion of what became one of the most acrimonious campaigns in state politics. "Bill Clinton was the dirty campaigner," Starr told a colleague years later, though he had tactfully withheld that conclusion at the time. "I hope you don't want me to try to out-Frank White Frank White ... to get down on that level," Clinton announced to a radio audience, describing vividly how the governor had set out to "poison the people's minds against me last time by being constantly critical." White, he maintained, was only a tool of special interests, a governor in the habit of "shaking down" those who did business with the state. ''I'm not kidding," he told a crowd in Magnolia. "He's got half a million dollars because the people who wanted decisions from the governor's office paid for them."
It was all "an outrageous abuse of public trust," Clinton repeated in speech after speech. He reminded audiences that White had watched the doubling of the price of prescription medicine for Medicaid recipients while giving an added $12 million tax exemption to big businesses. As a recession deepened nationwide and unemployment soared in poor Arkansas, utility rate hikes had cost consumers $130 million and boosted utility profits 50 percent, in some measure because Frank White had dismantled Clinton's energy office, removed its watchdogs, and packed regulatory bodies with industry flacks. At one point Clinton signed with a flourish a petition to vote on a constitutional amendment to make the state public service commission an elected rather than an appointed body, a proposal that unnerved many of his own powerful supporters before it was eventually struck from the ballot in an industry-backed legal challenge for "faulty" language. "He toyed with it, but he knew that one would disappear into the Bermuda triangle," said a journalist with a wink.
White proclaimed his 1980 election a "victory of the Lord" and sponsored a "creation science" act (promptly struck down as unconstitutional). Prone to accepting rides on corporate jets and asking business friends publicly "how to do the job," he soon became known by capitol reporters as "Governor Goofy" and was guilty of most of what Clinton charged. Like some in Arkansas politics, he had ties to the interests that were at once too naked and too artlessly explained. White tried to argue that Clinton's own close friends, contributors, and campaign officials -- most prominently, Mack McLarty of ARKLA and Richard Herget of AP&L -- were members of utility boards with the same connections Clinton now deplored. The governor of Arkansas would go on television with a live leopard to remind people that apologetic Bill Clinton wouldn't change his spots. His commercials featured twanging Texan actors impersonating Arkansans who declared that they were voting for good ole Frank.
Yet neither then nor later could the jowly, voluble Republican quite tar Bill Clinton with the same brush -- the corporate tax breaks, compromised regulation, favors to contributors, cozy rides on company jets, and more. "No matter how hard Frank hammered, he and other right-wingers couldn't have it both ways," said a state government attorney who worked for both men. "They couldn't say Bill was a radical and also a sellout to the big boys at the same time, and besides that there wasn't anything wrong with the big boys when Republicans ran with 'em too." It all amounted to an impenetrable hypocrisy, institutionalized in the state's unique politics of pride, submission, denial.
Through the autumn the two camps flailed at each other in what one observer characterized as "an unending series of negative spots threatening wholesale prisoner releases, massive utility rate increases, devastating harm to the elderly, and even mass gun confiscations should the other be elected." Against White the "interest-dominated plutocrat," as Diane Blair saw it, "Clinton was just a caring and concerned down-home Baptist family man who wanted nothing more than another chance to fight the fat cats in behalf of the little guy." The Gazette called his commercials "cute, sophisticated, and nearly always negative." Yet the sheer wealth and demagoguery of the campaign were reinforcing. Nervously, some thought even frantically, Clinton poured much of his gushing campaign money into five major polls and several lesser surveys in September and October alone -- and each seemed to indicate that he did better with the electorate, even raised more money, if he matched White blow by blow, charge by charge. "They were watching it like a prize fight," said a Clinton supporter, "and they loved to see blood."
Clinton would tell friends later, "If you have twelve good people who really believe in you, you can still carry a rural county." By the climax of the 1982 run, Betsey Wright and the richly financed campaign had in fact mobilized thousands around the state with what she called "a passionate mission." They organized telephone blitzes that in some counties reached every listed number, regardless of registration. With military precision they mobilized the African American vote. "You and I know there's no such thing as a real Democrat for White," Clinton reportedly told black audiences. "You and I both know what they ought to be called: 'White Democrats for White.'" One civil rights lawyer observed, "They waved everything in front of 'em but white sheets with eyeholes, and knowing Arkansas, it was enough to scare hell out of everybody anyway."
Still, no strategy was more decisive than the candidate's "new" wife. She would take a full year off from Rose to manage the race and in effect run herself, making almost as many stops as her husband did, taking their daughter with her when it was opportune but often leaving the little girl with Dorothy Rodham or sitters. The Little Rock press and others welcomed what they called her "major shift in attitude": "Eight years in Arkansas have almost totally eradicated most of those Yankee tendencies, leaving behind a first lady who embraces her adopted state with the characteristic fervor of a convert ... accepted by a remarkable number of Arkansans." Starr had it on reliable authority that "some of those who still don't think Clinton is a real person are now convinced that Hillary is." They "know her now as Mrs. Bill Clinton," a Gazette writer recorded approvingly, and "are already calling her by yet a different name -- Chelsea's Mommy."
In the final weeks of the race Bill Clinton took nothing for granted. "He shook every hand at every stop," a worker said of Clinton. "He worked like a demon." Woody Bassett remembered him standing in the freezing rain in the middle of the night as the shift changed at the Campbell Soup plant in Fayetteville and moving on to another plant at six in the morning, then to a dawn breakfast and reception as the campaign day was just beginning. Privately, he alternately cajoled and strong-armed Democratic county chairmen and trade associations as never before. Betsey Wright had talked about the "up-beat feeling" after a lengthy meeting with party officials. "More like beat-up," one remembered long afterward.
Three weeks before the election Bill Clinton, carelessly answering a questionnaire from the National Rifle Association, said he would favor the reporting of firearm sales to a central computer system for law enforcement, prompting White and the NRA to denounce his suggestion as dreaded gun control. Within hours Clinton had taped and was broadcasting a radio commercial denouncing gun control in principle; he "saturated the airwaves with it, up to and including election day," reported John Brummett.
In addition to the ads, he immediately circulated thousands of pamphlets repeating his dedication to the NRA position and, in the process, even managed to attack White's handling of sportsmen's license fees. The blanketing commercials and flyers were luxuries afforded by his swollen campaign chest. "It was a marvel of backtracking and recovery," said one aide who was involved. On a crowded, crucial Saturday of appearances, Clinton suddenly changed his schedule and went back home to Hempstead County for a Frontier Day Festival, to be seen and photographed, as a reporter noted, "admiring and fondling the antique guns that would be on display there."
On election eve he amazed aides by recalling his exact vote totals, county by county, in the 1980 race and by methodically, accurately predicting his likely numbers now. The next day he crushed White with nearly 55 percent of the vote, winning thirty-two counties lost two years before and becoming the first governor in Arkansas history to come back from defeat for another term.
There were several measures of the triumph. As in the primary and runoff, the decisiveness of his black support was graphic. In a race won by seventy-eight thousand votes statewide, the ninety thousand African American votes he took in Little Rock and the Delta were clearly the margin of victory.
Former President Bill Clinton accused protesters of defending gang leaders and crack dealers, who killed the black lives protesters say matter, while stumping for his wife, Hillary, at a presidential campaign event in Philadelphia.
The protesters from the movement for black lives were present to call attention to Clinton’s crime policy, which increased sentencing minimums for federal offenses, and how young black Americans were criminalized as “super-predators.” They also called attention to the devastating impact of welfare reform and policies in the War on Drugs, which Bill Clinton strengthened.
Bill Clinton responded, “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders, who got 13-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out in the street to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t. She didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.”
-- Bill Clinton Says Black Lives Matter Protesters Defend Gang Leaders, Crack Dealers, by Kevin Gosztola
So, too, was the more than $1.6 million he assembled for the richest campaign ever waged for the statehouse. Only later was the abiding reality of Arkansas power evident in a careful reading of the campaign finance lists: almost a fourth of Maurice Smith's big contributors to Bill Clinton represented major lobbies in the state, and they had given to Frank White as well.
For now, however, none of that seemed to matter among the once and future governor's jubilant volunteers, many of them still, as in that first race for Congress in 1974, hopeful idealists seeing their articulate, attractive champion as an exception to the state's gangrenous old politics. For scores of workers and supporters it was once more a triumph of youthful progressivism over the special-interest misrule of a buffoon Republican; it was a fresh challenge as well to the venal, torpid Democratic legislature. "AN OBSESSED CLINTON," the gratified Gazette headlined afterward, "LED THE DEVOTED IN NEAR-PERFECT RETURN TO POLITICAL GLORY."
In contrast to his morose seclusion and fugitive appearance two years before, Clinton came early to his headquarters on West Capitol as the initial returns heralded victory. When he entered, as the accommodating Starr recorded for posterity, the gathering "exploded in exultation."