First In His Class (77 page)

All that
changed on February 27, 1982, the day of Clinton's formal announcement, when Hillary referred to herself as “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” Was it really a change, and was it something that she wanted to do? Her answers that day left room for confusion. “I don't have to change my name,” she said. “I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I'll be Mrs. Bill Clinton. I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” But when asked whether she had legally changed her name and was now registered to vote as Hillary Clinton, she said, “No.” The press accounts of that exchange made it clear that she still had some convincing to do.

The
Times-News
of McGehee put it this way: “‘No,' came the ice cold answer from Arkansas' former first lady.”

T
HE
public reaction to Clinton's mea culpa ad was swift and sure.
People hated
it. In a three-way race in the Democratic primary for governor against Jim Guy Tucker and Joe Purcell, Clinton fell from the top spot, from holding about 43 percent of the vote, down to the mid-20s. Voters who said they held a favorable view of Clinton dropped. The number who held an unfavorable view doubled. Tucker, the politician he had conspired to defeat in the 1978 Senate race against David Pryor, was now ahead of him. And all because of a self-inflicted wound. Morris's polls showed that the mea culpa caused the precipitous decline in Clinton's ratings, reminding voters of the reasons they turned away from him in the first place. The consultant flew out to Arkansas to deliver the grim news, and met Clinton and Rodham in a small town where Clinton was giving a speech. He tried to put the best spin on the poll results. The apology was like a smallpox vaccination, he said. You get a little sick, but then you are immune. He said it, Morris recalled later, with “great bravado and self-confidence.” But he did not mean it. He thought he had destroyed his client.

The immunization theory was quickly tested. It was a bitter, unenlightening primary, with most of the enmity flowing between Tucker and Clinton, who were both in desperate, anything-goes moods, fighting for political survival. They attacked each other daily, each trying to prove
that he was tougher and more conservative. Tucker attacked Clinton for commuting or cutting the sentences of thirty-eight convicted murderers during the final weeks of his first term. Clinton attacked Tucker's poor attendance record in Congress and portrayed Tucker as a tool of labor and the special interests and as a bleeding heart on welfare issues. He criticized Tucker for supporting liberal food stamp standards. It was left to the
Arkansas Gazette
to point out that Tucker had merely voted against an amendment that would have eliminated food stamps for striking workers. In an editorial entitled “
Bill Clinton
on the Low Road,” the
Gazette
concluded of his food stamp attack: “It is an uncharacteristic place for Bill Clinton to take his stand, and in the sanctity of his own thoughts he must be ashamed.”

Shame was not foremost on Clinton's mind that year. His main concern was to stay alive. The intensity of his mood was revealed in April when he got into a dispute with the Arkansas Education Association (AEA). At a meeting with a screening committee for the teachers' union, Clinton was asked what kind of relationship he would maintain with the AEA if they did not endorse him. According to Larry Russell, a teacher at Lake Hamilton High who was chairman of the committee, Clinton “
said he
would tear our heads off and beat our brains out if we endorsed another candidate.” Russell and Lyle French, the president of the union, took Clinton's statement to mean that he might hold a grudge against them.

“Nothing could be further from the truth and I resent this!” Clinton bellowed during a rally in Hot Springs a few days later. In Clinton's version of the event, when the screening committee asked him how he would respond if he failed to get their endorsement, “I told them this is a political race and they would be trying to end my political career and that I would beat their brains out.” But, Clinton said, he left no implication that he would hold it against them. The teachers endorsed Tucker.

But Clinton's negative approach was working. The next round of internal polls found that all of Clinton's negative attacks on Tucker scored, driving his poll ratings down fifteen points, while none of Tucker's attacks hurt Clinton. It seemed that Clinton had indeed been immunized. “
The polls
showed a tremendous backlash of sympathy for Clinton because he had already apologized,” Morris recalled. “People said, ‘What's Tucker dumping on him for? He already apologized. It's a rare man who can admit his mistakes.' The immunity was so palpably there that it was a tremendously useful thing to have gone through.” Clinton and Rodham filed it away in their briefcase of effective political tactics, to be pulled out now and again when Clinton got caught in uncomfortable situations. The calculated act of contrition: when in trouble, go directly to the people and confess on your own terms.

As often happens when two candidates bury each other in mud during a three-way primary, the voters became interested in the third candidate. Joe Purcell, a soft-spoken former lieutenant governor, made it into a runoff with Clinton, while Tucker was eliminated. Clinton and his strategists would have preferred to have faced Tucker again. “
Tucker had
a record we could run against,” Betsey Wright said later. “Joe Purcell was a lovable old slipper. We didn't know what to do with him.” Purcell was in the Judge Holt mold, a dignified man who refused to make personal attacks against his opponents. Clinton could not claim that someone was going at him with a hammer, but he was forced to use the meat cleaver anyway. Morris's first poll during the two-week runoff showed Purcell ahead, with most of the Tucker vote going to him. They put up one negative ad and spread the word that Republicans were interfering in the runoff on Purcell's behalf. Luckily for Clinton, runoffs, with traditionally low voter turnouts, depend largely on campaign organizations, and Purcell did not have one. The results on June 8 gave Clinton 54 percent of the vote. “We want Frank! We want Frank!” Clinton's supporters shouted that night. They got Frank. The rematch with Governor White was at hand.

T
HE
general election of 1982 was almost completely devoid of the internal bickering of many other Clinton campaigns. It combined the optimism and freshness of his 1974 congressional campaign with the technical skill of his later efforts. With Hillary, Betsey Wright, and Dick Morris at the head of the campaign organization, there were enough decisive people to offset Clinton's indecisiveness, which was less noticeable than usual anyway because of the urgency of his cause. He had a clear mission: redemption.

“Hell,
he knew
what was at stake,” Woody Bassett, who organized Washington County for him, later recalled. “He knew that if he lost, it was the end for him in elected politics.”

His supporters had various missions of their own. Some hated Frank White. Some thought Clinton deserved another chance and felt guilty that they had not worked harder for him in 1980. Some were embarrassed that the state had regained a backwater image with the enactment of fundamentalist legislation requiring public schools to teach creationism along with evolution.
Young black
professionals who moved back to the state at the start of the 1980s saw Clinton as the conduit for their rise. The vibrancy of a political campaign can be measured by the ratio of volunteers to paid staffers. In 1980, Clinton struggled to find volunteers. This time, the headquarters overflowed with volunteers and there were only a handful of paid staff members. Betsey Wright called it a crusade—her first, and her best—in Arkansas. If the volunteers were the soul of the campaign, the computer system was its brain. The dedicated computer room in the campaign
headquarters near the Capitol ran around the clock, churning out Glad-to-Meet-You letters, fund-raising solicitations, special letters for black supporters, for first-time supporters, for teachers, for the elderly. Letters to friends of Bill went out in an endless stream. No other politician in Arkansas had anything comparable. The computer became the mechanical extension of Clinton's tireless personality. What else. What else. What else.

The airwaves were glutted with negative advertising from both sides, but White's ads made little difference. With every exchange of the hammer versus the meat cleaver, Clinton's numbers rose. “It got to be almost a joke,” Morris recalled. “
We felt
like we were behind bulletproof glass watching somebody aim at us and pull the trigger and watch the bullets splatter harmlessly.” He started to call Clinton “Achilles without the heel.”

Clinton narrowed his message. He talked constantly about jobs and utility rates. He had needed a villain against which he could assume a populist pose, and a calculated decision was made to cast the utility companies in that role. Other villains were considered, according to Morris, including the trucking-poultry lobby, but Clinton did not want to refight a lost battle of the first term and in fact had promised to support the industry's bid for an increase in truck weights to 80,000 pounds. Utility companies were better villains in the sense that they were less feisty and threatening. He promised that in a second term he would work to make the Public Service Commission, which controlled utility rates, an elected body accountable to the people. He brought in old-line, middle-of-the-road Democrats to help him raise money, including W. Maurice Smith, a wealthy farmer and banker from Birdeye, and George Kell, a former third baseman for the Detroit Tigers. He raised and spent more money than any candidate in Arkansas history. He spent most of his Sundays in black churches, and recruited three black organizers to help him with the black vote: Rodney Slater, Carol Willis, and Bob Nash, all of whom would become part of his team for the next decade.

Willis, a former law student of Clinton's in Fayetteville, had developed a militant reputation in the impoverished Delta region of southeast Arkansas. He called Clinton one day and said, “They'
re about
ready to run me out of McGehee, Bill, I need work.” To which Clinton responded, “Well, shit, I ain't got no jobs unless I get elected. Come on and help.” Willis, Slater, and Nash split up the state, Willis taking the Delta, Slater the Little Rock area, and Nash the southwest. They called themselves the three amigos: Willis the radical, Slater the moderate, and Nash the technocrat. “And we humped,” Willis recalled later. “We worked twenty-four hours a day, Saturday and Sunday. If there was an event involved black people, we were there. And we would get Clinton there.” No one in Arkansas political annals locked up the black vote the way Clinton did in 1982.

On election night, everything was different from the way it had been in
1980. Rodham and Clinton and Betsey Wright were superstitious. They stayed away from the Camelot Hotel.
They set
up a stage on the street outside the headquarters on Central Avenue. Clinton watched the results in a back room with Hillary and his mother and brother Roger, who was wearing an open-necked Mexican shirt and gold chains. Wright ran the tally board. She tried to stay cool, but could barely contain her excitement. Every few minutes, she emerged from the room and shouted out new numbers. “Craighead County by fifty-four percent. Complete!” she barked, denoting another county that Clinton had lost two years earlier but carried this time. Clinton had won. He pumped his clenched left fist high into the air and rushed out the front door of the headquarters, out into the street, where his army of supporters, intoxicated by victory, chanted his name as he disappeared in the delirious sea of outstretched hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
 
THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN

T
WO MONTHS LATER
, on the afternoon of January 11, 1983, the faithful and curious waited single-file in a queue that circled from the second floor of the Arkansas Capitol down to the rotunda and out the steps into the warm winter wind. It was the largest crowd that had ever gathered for an inauguration in Little Rock, there to celebrate the return of the favorite son. Bill Clinton stood in the receiving line inside the governor's conference room, surrounded by portraits of his predecessors, one of whom was himself.
Already that
day he had belted out redemptive hymns with his Immanuel Baptist Church choir. He had swept back to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony in the House, the click of his heels echoing in the marble halls as he moved through his old haunt. He had delivered his inaugural address on the Capitol steps and felt the applause wash over him. Now the welcome-back handshakes and bearhugs made the restoration complete. He was blessing and being blessed in the sacred rite of Arkansas politics.