THE MYTH OF BILL CLINTON WAS THAT HE HAD BEEN plotting his climb to the presidency forever. The truth was that his real preparation had been mostly intellectual, and in the early going, his speeches showed it; they were like cold oatmeal, good for you, perhaps, but leaden and lumpy going down. The merit badges he won for being Mister Substance gave way with time and repetition to the complaint that he was a walking syllabus of solutions to all of America’s problems, some of which people didn’t even know they had. At his worst, one of his consultants fretted, he risked becoming Dukakis with a drawl–a technocrat so bloodless as to seem no more than the sum of his programs.
What Bill Clinton wouldn’t talk about was Bill Clinton. His aides’ attempt to humanize him kept bumping into the wall of his reticence about revealing his feelings or the boyhood traumas that had helped to form him. “I don’t know what to do about all this psychobabble,” he complained one day, exasperated at the press, He wasn’t going to go around parading his emotions, he said, or hand-wringing about his abusive stepfather. He hadn’t been brought up that way. His style instead was that of a salesman: grin, lock eyes, and keep talking about the product.
There were pages from his past, and Hillary’s, that they hadn’t even opened to their own team; the scary thing, one of his young aides lamented long before the mud started flying, was that his people didn’t know him themselves. They hadn’t asked him about his sex life or his family finances, and they weren’t aware of his gimme-shelter adventures avoiding the draft–not, at least, in any detail. As scandals kept popping, aides complained about how little the Clintons had told them about their private lives and personal finances. “We stand a chance of losing the presidency because of our research on ourselves,” James Carville said during one flap.
“It sucks? Hillary’s chief aide, Richard Mintz, agreed.
“It worse than sucks,” Carville said. “Sucks can be put in a positive light. This is a disaster.”
Neither had his advisers figured out how to use Hillary effectively. They talked among themselves about scheduling more joint appearances as a token that the robo-wonk was after all a flesh-and blood family man. But Hillary wouldn’t trivialize herself or her marriage, she said, by serving as a prop at his events in the Nancy Reagan manner, and she was even more adamant about not allowing Chelsea to be dragged into the campaign. Her insistence on these matters bought more space for herself and for her daughter. The cost was a certain hardening of her own image. By spring, a sizable number of voters would see her as the yuppie wife from hell, all career and no home life: the impression was widespread that she and Bill were childless.
Clinton was given to storms of temper, which his aides learned to live with, and bouts of self-pity, which they feared might damage his campaign. Heading into the Junior Tuesday primaries, he was in a state of acute distemper with everyone–the opposition, the press, his own team, himself. Paul Tsongas was beating him in Maryland, Colorado and Minnesota. Even Georgia was in some danger.
He had started the day at a subway stop in Maryland, smile in place, shaking hands in the early March chill and gamely telling reporters to forget the polls–“this thing is going in the right direction,” Out of their earshot, his mood was foul and his sense of direction the opposite of what he had claimed. He was growling at his strategists and. most particularly, his ads. “They have not captured the essence of my economic message,” he rafted; they were costing him Maryland and Minnesota.
His aides had taken the beating in glum silence, hoping that, as usual, the storm would blow over. It didn’t; on a flight from Baltimore to Macon, Ga., almost as soon as Clinton had buckled into his seat, the stage smile fell away, and he erupted again. His voice, raw with overuse, was a furious whisper. His fist pounded the armrest in time with each hoarse word.
At the top of his list that morning was the middle-class tax cut; it was both cause and symptom, he thought, of all that had gone wrong in his campaign. His complaint had a strong odor of denial about it, given his own complicity in the plan and his refusal to concede that the underlying problem was not his program but himself. But it was no good telling him that; the tax cut had become an obsession. All he had really wanted was a tax credit for children, he complained, “but I got talked out of it by too-cautious advisers who said not everyone has kids.” The tax cut had been a mistake and worse, he said, it had “destroyed the integrity, the vitality of everything I worked for the past ten years.”
“We have let Tsongas become the candidate of the future,” he rasped, thumping the armrest, “and that’s why we are losing. I am (thump!) very (thump!) angry. I’ve worked my butt off, I’ve raised all this money so I could be the candidate of new ideas.” He wasn’t; it was Tsongas who had become the darling of the editorial writers, and Clinton’s own team had let that happen without a peep of protest. “We need to beat them up.” he said. “This is war. This is conflict. My staff isn’t playing offense.”
To appease him, they cleared his schedule the next afternoon so they could shoot some new commercials. But what should they say? What could they say? The questions about Clinton’s character were like a great cloud blotting out everything else in his campaign; it was hard for him to be heard if people didn’t believe him.
IN MEMOS AND MEETINGS, HIS HANDLERS SPOKE WITH brutal frankness about what media consultant Mandy Grunwald called the “queasiness” about Clinton’s credibility. Clinton knew it was a problem: “All these people know about me is I’m a jerk,” he said in the days before the New York primary. His message, by then, had become a blur, a rote series of things he said when he wasn’t obliged to defend himself. Instead of a clear rationale for his candidacy, he had a bunch of programs and a freight car’s worth of baggage weighing down his forward progress; he couldn’t get any message across until he and his people better understood and addressed the questions about him.
And so was born what Grunwald dubbed the Manhattan Project, a top-secret program of research aimed at Clinton’s resurrection as a viable candidate. They had roughly three months, from the New York primary to the party convention, in which to find a cure for what ailed him–and a message powerful enough to carry him past George Bush and Ross Perot.
In the project’s early focus groups, voters called Clinton “two-faced” and “Slick Willie.” They said he would “shade the truth” and guessed that if you asked his favorite color, he’d say “plaid.” Those first exercises in deconstruction gave Clinton’s handlers a clear and somewhat scary view of what they were up against, His character problem no longer had much to do with the particulars of the case against him. It was the residue of all those things, and it was worse than any of them. Clinton was, in the public mind, a politician–one more smiling hustler who would promise anybody anything to win and could not be trusted thereafter.
In a memo, pollster Stan Greenberg, joined by Carville and media consultant Frank Greer, recommended “a fundamental remaking of your campaign . . . to address the debilitating image that is dragging us down.” The idea was to reposition Clinton from a self-seeking careerist into “a human being who struggled, pulled his weight, showed strength of character, and fought for change.” Clinton had to change his own demeanor as well, Greenberg said, “from self-absorption to caring about people.” He had to persuade people that he had a plan, and that its heart lay with the middle class. Most of all, he had to reassert the most basic premise of his campaign. “Right now, [voters] have no idea what he wants except to get elected.”
But Clinton’s handlers didn’t have a clear formulation either. After a month of research, the Manhattan Project was still struggling with high concept. They still didn’t have that single magic sentence, the words that could capture Clinton in a sound bite or on a bumper sticker.
“We need elements of moral language,” said Grunwald. “They did America wrong.”
“Put America right again,” Greenberg suggested.
“There you go,” Grunwald said. “Do right by our people.”
“I like it,” Greenberg said.
Bill Clinton was at the bottom of the polls looking up when he and Hillary received their senior strategists at the governor’s mansion that May afternoon, and his discouragement was plain in his long, somber silences. He was afraid.. one senior adviser guessed; too afraid to believe in his team or his prospects anymore. It was as if winning ranked about eleventh on his list, and finding someone to blame was number one.
The mission of his team was to find a clear, holistic statement of who he was and what he proposed to do as president. Their research had isolated some of the components. The buzz phrase “investment in our people” was one; it was a nice umbrella for Clinton’s idea about jobs, schools and health care. “Welfare and work” was another–not just moving the poor from the dole to jobs but putting the whole country back to work. “Getting us together” had power after the greedy ’80s. So did talking about “responsibility” and governmental reform.
“We have to explain to people that something’s wrong with the country,” Carville told the candidate. “But in everything that Bill Clinton exudes, he smiles. He’s an optimistic guy. People just have to sense we can turn this country around.”
Carville had brought along a list of eighteen dimensions of mind, belief and background on which the candidates would be judged and examined. The point was to meet the enemy on the ground most favorable to yourself. “Can we beat Ross Perot on Not A Typical Politician? No. Can we beat Ross Perot on being Independent? No–we’re a Democrat.”
“New Ideas? Yes,” Clinton said, speaking for the first time.
“Yes,” Carville agreed.
“Take Action? Yes,” Clinton said.
“Take Action, yes,” Carville echoed.
“When you’re asked about your life and bio, you worked for everything,” Grunwald said. “It’s a lifetime of commitment. When you talk about what they did wrong in the ’80s, they didn’t value work. They didn’t invest. They went for the shortcuts. What is the solution? Doing right by our people. Valuing work.”
“At least I can see the positioning,” Clinton said tentatively.
The session had crossed the line between show-and-tell to tutorial, an effort to get Clinton not just to understand the message but to feel it in his bones. But it was plain to the handlers in the room that he wasn’t there yet.
Clinton retreated into his shell for a while more, then he stood up and cut through the rhetoric like a buzz saw through balsa wood. What he had heard that day sounded to him like a 45-second rehash of his announcement speech. They should have started using it seven months ago. Now, after all this time, it was all they had. “So far as I’m concerned, we’re at zero,” he complained. “We might as well have been like any member of Congress -just kissed every ass in the world that the Democratic Party has. . . . I don’t think you can minimize how horrible I feel, having worked all my life to stand for things, and the American people don’t know crap about it after I poured $10 million worth of information into their heads.”
When he finally ran down, Carville tried to redirect his anger outward, back onto the battlefield. “Your attitude has to be, ‘I’m tired of people having these misconceptions. I’ve got all these so-called goddam bright people around me, and they haven’t come up with nothin’ but a 45-second version of what I started with. And I’m for doing that. Let’s get out and do it.”
Clinton looked grim. “We don’t have an option,” he concluded. “I think we will lose this whole election if we don’t.”
