A Woman in Charge (24 page)

Hillary's presence next to Bill at campaign events—and the vigorous support of each for the Equal Rights Amendment—further inflamed the Moral Majority right, still in its infancy but, in Arkansas, motivated increasingly by Bill's and Hillary's rise. At a campaign stop in Jonesboro, a woman wearing a Frank Lady T-shirt started hollering angrily at Bill, “Talk about the ERA! Talk about the ERA!” The Clintons' friend Diane Kincaid had recently overwhelmed Phyllis Schlafly, the country's leading ERA opponent, in a debate over a second attempt in the Arkansas legislature to ratify the amendment (which nonetheless failed there again). “Okay,” said Bill, “I'll talk about it. I'm for it. You're against it. But it won't do as much harm as you think it will or as much good as those of us who support it wish it would. Now let's get back to schools and jobs.” But his interlocutor was unwilling. “You're just promoting homosexuality,” she screamed. Bill looked back at her and smiled. “Ma'am, in my short life in politics, I've been accused of everything under the sun. But you're the first person who ever accused me of promoting homosexuality.” The crowd roared, Bill noted later.

On election day, Clinton became governor-elect with 63 percent of the vote and became the youngest governor in America since Harold Stassen in 1938 (not necessarily a good omen, given Stassen's repeated and eventually quixotic failure to reach the presidency). The
New York Times
covered Bill's triumph as a story of major importance and described him as “the 31-year-old whiz kid of Arkansas politics.” This was Clinton's first important national interview, with Howell Raines, then a thirty-five-year-old correspondent covering the South for the
Times.
There had been vague references during the campaign (not by the Clintons) to Camelot and the glamour of the Kennedys as a couple. In the interview with Raines, Bill described the people of his state in terms inspired by Hillary's often expressed view to him, in private: his victory, he said, represented the wishes of Arkansans to no longer “be perceived, especially by themselves, as being backward.” There was no way to retract what he had said once it was out of his mouth, and it gave the impression that he—and she—held a condescending and patronizing view of the people he had been elected to serve. The experience with Raines would be a harbinger: as the
Times'
s Washington bureau chief during the 1992 presidential campaign and in the Clintons' first year in the White House, Raines—a fellow progressive Southerner from Birmingham, Alabama, 370 miles from Little Rock—would send his reporters out on the White-water trail with what Hillary and Bill thought was a vengeance. Others in journalism attributed it to some sort of good ole boy competition with Bill Clinton that motivated Raines. In any case, when Raines was promoted to editorial page editor of the
Times
in 1993, he would crusade without mercy against the Clintons and what he believed their unforgivable ethics—though against Bill's impeachment—until they left the White House.

On election night 1978, when the votes confirmed the magnitude of his triumph, Clinton became emotional in accepting victory, cheered by thousands of supporters and campaign workers, including many friends from his days at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. Looking at Hillary, who was standing next to Virginia, he said, “I am very proud of the campaign we have run.”

The customary inaugural ball was preceded by an extravaganza of Arkansas entertainment they called “Diamonds and Denim,” not too distant a concept from “The People's Inaugural” invented by Hillary and others for Bill's inauguration as president thirteen years later. Both events were intended to symbolize a new era of generational and philosophical change in political power and its use. All the entertainers for “Diamonds and Denim” were from Arkansas, among them soul singer Al Green, country singer Jimmy Driftwood, and Bill Clinton on sax. “The whole theme of the evening was country come to town—we're just Arkansas folks, but we're kinda sophisticated,” said an aide to the new governor, but it came off less hokey than it sounded. Hundreds of Bill's and Hillary's friends, far more than on election night, from every phase of their lives since grammar school, had come to Little Rock for the festivities—and to watch the man many of them had long thought might someday be president take his first big step, with Hillary by his side.

 

T
HE
A
RKANSAS GOVERNOR'S
mansion, though reasonably commodious, is not one of the nation's more distinguished. Built in 1950 in downtown Little Rock, on the site of a former school for the blind, with Greek revival columns and a facade of red bricks retrieved from the demolished school, it resembles—inside and out—a rather grand suburban spec house.

When Bill took the oath of office, a limitless future seemed to stretch out before him. “Our vote was a vindication of what my wife and I have done and what we hope to do for the state,” he had said from the podium to cheers on election night. But the Clintons' first two years in the governor's mansion would be disastrous, marked by huge political mistakes, some of them a result of Hillary's tin ear, some the result of her refusal to act like a traditional first lady, some the result of Bill's tendency to want to do too much, too fast. Many of the same problems, especially those related to Hillary's role, would also occur in the first two years of the Clinton presidency. Later, Hillary would describe the years 1978 to 1980 as “among the most difficult, exhilarating, glorious and heartbreaking in my life,” which would fit as well her first two years in the White House.

What was so extraordinary about Hillary's failures in the White House more than a decade later was that she seemed to have learned almost nothing from her experience those first two years in the governor's mansion, though there were obvious differences in circumstances. Hillary's finely tuned sense of her own evolution, the ability to learn from her mistakes, to replay in her mind the macro-and micro-factors that moved a project from conception to realization or collapse and then rearrange them to get a more satisfactory result the next time, had always been part of her makeup. These characteristics were among the most valuable in her ability to help her husband, whose process and emotional constitution were so different from hers. But her experience those two years in Little Rock seemed to have hardly registered in her memory bank when she got to Washington.

 

H
ILLARY, AS THE WIFE
of the attorney general and (simultaneously) a corporate lawyer in the capital of the state, had managed with purposeful skill to keep comfortably below Arkansas's political radar. She could go almost anywhere in the state and few people would recognize her, even on the streets of downtown Little Rock. That was impossible as the governor's wife. Meanwhile, through her increasing work in Washington during Bill's governorship, she purposefully raised her national profile.

Rather than attend to the traditional ceremonial and social role of being first lady of Arkansas, she chose instead to work substantively with her husband, and until shortly before the birth of Chelsea in 1980, she hardly reduced her workload at the Rose Law Firm. “Hillary was very active in shaping public policy, but not in being a political wife,” recalled Bev Lindsey, who worked for Bill Clinton during part of his governorship, and was married to (and then, after the White House years, divorced from) Bruce Lindsey, Clinton's all-purpose factotum. “She thought then that Bill could be governor and she could shape policy and be a corporate lawyer, and not have to do the rest, not have to go to ladies' lunches, or travel with him and not speak.”
Arkansas Times
columnist John Brummett said that during the first term Hillary wanted to make “no concessions to any obligations of the office. She just went her own way and got a job, got involved in things she was interested in…. A lot of people thought she was remote, distant.”

Bill and Hillary quickly formed their routines. Hillary didn't read newspapers or watch television news. Instead, she listened to National Public Radio or classical music in the morning. If there was anything else she really needed to know she figured she'd be told about it early in her day, either by Bill on the phone or Vince in the office. But even in her earliest days as first lady of Arkansas, “she didn't want to read about things that would bother her and about which she could do nothing,” said Betsey Wright. “She saw it as an irritant.”

Rather than be chauffeured in an official car by a state trooper, Hillary preferred to drive her own Oldsmobile Cutlass. She'd be at her desk at the Rose firm for coffee with Vince or Webb by 7:30
A.M.
Bill awakened late, faded for a while in the afternoon, then got reenergized around the time Hillary was ready for bed; he stayed up until two or three conducting all manner of business, playing cards with friends, picking up the telephone, plowing through piles of paper—often simultaneously. Hillary didn't have his stamina, but she paced herself better. She knew when she needed rest and could easily fall asleep in a car or on a plane and wake up with her batteries recharged. Hillary didn't have her own staff in the governor's mansion. Instead, she was assigned someone from the governor's office to help her on specific projects. The mansion staff of five consisted of cook, assistant cook, maid, landscape-maintenance worker, and mansion manager, who, after Chelsea's birth, was enlisted to babysit so Hillary and Bill didn't have to pay a sitter out of their own pockets.

Clinton took office with enthusiasm, bold concepts (many from the dialogue he and Hillary had been embarked on since Yale), and an electorate that seemed relatively amenable to change. His agenda as governor was an ambitious extension of his campaign promises. But he was nowhere near as good governing—at least not yet—as running for office. His plans were full of ideas he'd been making notes on for years, based on the suggestions of academics, business people, friends ensconced in think tanks, and his voluminous reading from political economy to scientific tracts to day care manuals. But the ideas often clashed with budgetary realities, and with the priorities of legislators who were heavily indebted to the state's moneyed interests—just as Hillary's health care priorities would be at odds with the policies developed by his own presidential economic advisers, and put to death by moneyed interests and legislators in their thrall, and her own hubris.

The notion of Hillary and Bill Clinton as power-hungry acquisitors with little interest in the public weal save some sort of left-leaning ideology, however, has always been at odds with the facts. Even before they met, each believed fervently in the concept of public service, even the humble nobility of it, however unlikely the term might seem today in a declarative sentence that includes the names Bill and Hillary Clinton in it, however difficult this objective might be. The principles that they believed in upon Bill's election as governor are indicated by the programs he proposed, and the words he (and Hillary) spoke and wrote, especially in his inaugural address, even if a bit florid: “For as long as I can remember,” he proclaimed, “I have believed passionately in the cause of equal opportunity, and I will do what I can to advance it. For as long as I can remember, I have deplored the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by those in authority, and I will do what I can to prevent it…. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air and water of Arkansas, and I will do what I can to protect them. For as long as I can remember, I have wished to ease the burdens of life for those who, through no fault of their own, are weak or needy, and I will try to help them.” Bill, more than Hillary at first, believed also that his message needed to be informed by advanced models of economic development and fewer restraints on investment capital than traditional liberals had advocated. At the time of his accession in Arkansas, many governors and mayors, Democrats and Republicans, working at the ground level of American politics, not the Olympian heights of Capitol Hill in Washington, were trying to devise imaginative formulas that would break out of the old liberal-conservative stereotypes to deliver better services to constituents and bigger profits to business and industry, thus increasing jobs and the tax base to pay for civic improvement.

Bill's major spending priorities, he said, were meant to pull the old Arkansas into the modern era. Over the next two years Clinton would find himself walking a thin line between implementing policies that could dramatically contribute to improving the lives of his fellow Arkansans, and attempting not to rattle too hard the sensibilities of the ArkoRoman establishment and the good ole boys who ran the legislature. Indicative of his new-school approach (the term “policy wonk” had not yet been applied to Hillary or Bill), Bill used surplus funds from his campaign to hire Price Waterhouse to help him devise a budget and projections for its implementation. Other surplus funds went to Dick Morris to survey citizens about the ideas and programs called for in the budget. Bill wanted him to rank them in order of appeal to the voters, and then develop an overarching theme connecting them all. “He was left with a program that was thoroughly admirable but indescribable,” said Morris. There was no theme, but rather “a bit of everything. Like a kid in a candy store he wanted to do it all.” Because he had won election by so large a margin, Hillary and Bill both were convinced he had a mandate to initiate wholesale change. (The same mistake was repeated in 1993, largely at her instigation, though Bill had won the presidency without even a majority of the popular vote.)

The budget book he presented to the state legislature was impossibly thick, in number of pages and density of factoids. But there were identifiable priorities: education, reorganizing school districts; providing a rural health care system in a state where doctors and hospitals were many miles away from people with little means of transportation; establishing new departments of economic development and of energy. Some legislators dismissed the Clinton program as the idealistic over enthusiasm of a boy governor. But in his two years in office, Clinton made some progress: a $1,200 annual raise for teachers; a 40 percent increase in education spending; an extension of public transportation; the maintenance of a 10-cent pay phone call (most neighboring states were up to a quarter); a study on the ill-effects of clear-cutting by the big timber companies that were setting up in the state (and then succumbing to their interests by appointing a forestry commissioner to their liking).