First In His Class (78 page)

Clinton was back in power; but he was not picking up where he had left off a few years earlier. Everything was different this second time around. The youth crusade atmosphere of the first term was long gone. His staff was almost entirely recast in a more reassuring image, with a grandmotherly receptionist and a good ole boy executive assistant, old enough to be his father, and another senior aide whose duties included praying with fundamentalist preachers when they visited the governor's office. “
He realized
that he needed some older folks on his staff,” recalled Paul Root, who had been Clinton's high school world history teacher and was recruited at age fifty to work in the governor's office on education and church issues, which often intersect in the Bible Belt. “He said the first term he had some of the brightest people he knew, but
they were
all policy people, and if a right-wing preacher came in, he didn't have anyone to pray with him.” The emphasis this time was on how aides got along with the public, state agencies, and the legislature. To sharpen his focus and open up the decision-making process, Clinton began chairing staff meetings every morning at seven while the legislature was in session during the first few months of the year. They were freewheeling, open-door discussions at which interested legislators were welcome to get some coffee and take a seat.

The state's mood had also changed. In place of the pride-and-hope theme of his first inaugural, Clinton now spoke of a battle “with an old and familiar enemy: hard times.” Arkansas was in the midst of a recession, with three bad years on the farms and double-digit unemployment in the towns. He attributed the recession in part to the Republican policies of the Reagan administration in Washington, and in part to a larger state and national lethargy in adapting to a changing world economy through a renewed focus on education, information services, and worker retraining, themes that his Rhodes Scholar friend Bob Reich was expounding in his book
The Next American Frontier
. But the central parable of Clinton's inaugural speech came not from his generational experience but from Depressionera family folklore: the story of when Pappaw Cassidy fell to his knees and cried because he could not afford to buy young Virginia a two-dollar Easter dress.

If the public image Clinton conveyed was one of earnest determination, in private he feared that the state's condition, and his political situation, were more precarious than he had let on. In this moment of vindication, he was nagged by a sense of impending disaster.
The bad
news had started on the morning after the election, when Frank White's chief of staff had called Betsey Wright, who would be Clinton's staff director, and revealed that there was a $30 million shortfall in state revenues. Much of the transition had been consumed with targeting budget cuts. And there were other worries. In his comeback campaign, Clinton had pounded away at utility companies, portraying them as greedy villains and himself the returning champion who would give consumers a break on spiraling rates. The populist theme had helped him get elected, but now he had to deal with the raised expectations. He did not yet control the Public Service Commission, which set rates. Legislators and editorialists were lined up against his pledge to require that the utility commissioners be elected rather than appointed. A federal ruling on the state's financial obligations to a regional nuclear power consortium might force rates higher.
In the
end, he worried, he might appear no better on the issue than White.

An even more difficult predicament loomed. The Arkansas Supreme Court was considering a lower court ruling that had declared the state's system of financing public education unconstitutional because it denied
equal opportunities to students in poor districts. A final decision, almost certain to uphold the lower court ruling, was expected sometime during the new two-year term. Clinton's options looked unappealing. He could try to take money from rich districts and give it to poor ones, which would invite class warfare and be of minimal value since education was severely underfinanced in the entire state. Arkansas was at the bottom nationally in student spending and teacher salaries. He could make a concerted push for consolidation among the state's rural school districts, an effort that might reopen the old desegregation wounds and was sure to hurt him politically in areas that would lose their high school sports teams and school identities. Or he could raise taxes for education, the most likely alternative, yet a disturbing prospect for a governor who could not forget that he had lost his job attempting to get more money for better roads.

But among the things that had changed since his first term was Clinton's strategic approach. His political personality was largely unchanged: he was still restless, eclectic, intellectually hungry, eager to please. But this time he had a survival plan: the permanent campaign.

S
INCE
his period of exile, Clinton had been spending endless hours talking with Dick Morris about political theory and strategy. Morris was a nonstop plotter, constantly spinning out strategies and scenarios, calling his favorite clients late at night or flying in for intense, secretive head-to-head consultations in which he often left them mesmerized and reassured. He was competitive and contentious, always asking for his next check, and tended to drive other staffers crazy. To the extent that his flexible ideology was apparent, he was moderate and moving rightward. Of the politicians of both parties who dealt with him, none listened with more rapt fascination or engaged him in more debate than Clinton. Morris also established a special bond with Hillary, who shared his dark, untrusting perspective on politics.

Clinton's problem, Morris told him, was that in the past he had bisected means and ends with “
an almost
Catholic splitting of virtue and sin.” Candidate Clinton would do whatever it took to get elected, but Governor Clinton would “go about serving without any significant thought to the political connotations, with almost a shunning of that which would be politically useful.” Means and ends, pragmatism and idealism, had to be “completely interwoven,” Morris advised. “When you lead in an idealistic direction, the most important thing to do is to be highly pragmatic about it. And when necessity forces upon you a problem of great pragmatism, you need to use idealism to find your way out of the thicket.” This axiom became one of the three basic tenets of Clinton's permanent campaign.

A second arose from the benchmark poll Morris had conducted in 1981 in which the intensity of disillusionment with Clinton was measured to see whether a comeback was possible. The survey had found a widespread perception among voters that
Clinton had
probably done some good things in his first term but they could not remember any specific accomplishments. All they could recite were actions he had taken which they disliked. Morris, Clinton, Hillary, and Betsey Wright, the quartet that comprised the inner circle, decided that they would never again rely on the “free media”—newspaper, radio, and television reporters—to define Clinton and his programs. Interweaving means and ends, they would use paid media, commercials and grass-roots mailings, whenever they wanted to get their message to the public, even during a midterm legislative session. Individual journalists might be courted, especially the peskiest ones, such as
Arkansas Democrat
managing editor John Robert Starr, who would nip at the governor in his daily column unless he was made to feel like an insider. (Starr remembered Clinton calling him the day he got back to the governor's office and saying, “Okay, what do you want?”) But for the most part, the press was not part of the plan. “
His entire
strategy in governing the state,” Morris recalled, “was based on flanking the press through the paid media.”

The third aspect of Clinton's permanent campaign involved the use of voter surveys in similarly perpetual fashion, taking poll results to shape the substance and rhetoric of policy debates. The goal was to discover more than whether voters supported or opposed an initiative. Word by word, line by line, phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph, rhetorical options would be tested to see which ones were most effective in moving the public a certain direction. It was polling as a form of copy writing, as a way for Clinton to organize his thoughts.
Although Morris
conducted the polls, each of the four played a role in the process. Hillary Clinton was usually the one to articulate the larger problem. Wright was there to lay out the facts. Clinton and Morris would play endlessly with the words and arguments. Clinton became so hooked on the process that his rhythms could be charted by it. When polls were out in the field, he seemed passive and noncommittal. Wright and Morris discovered that Clinton was never happier than when he got the results.

Morris would read an answer, and Clinton would shout, “You know, I feel it! I feel it! I'm out there and that's just what I feel! That's absolutely right!” Then he would practice the rhetorical argument again, elaborating, rehearsing, seemingly overcome by joy as things that had been unclear became clear to him and he sang from a political score that he and the voters had jointly composed.

All of these elements of his permanent campaign were put to the test during Clinton's first year back on the job. It was a difficult stretch that
started slowly and ended in controversy, yet it was also the year of Clinton's greatest legislative triumph. On the surface it seemed at first that he had no better grasp of how to operate than he had displayed during his first term. His means and ends were snarled. The state press corps found his agenda unenterprising. The only apparent resolve he exhibited was on utility issues, which were going nowhere. One February day, Clinton spent ninety minutes beseeching the House Insurance and Commerce Committee to endorse his bill that would require the election of Public Service Commissioners: He brought in an expert witness from North Dakota to testify with him. When their presentations ended, not a single member of the committee made a motion to endorse the bill. A local columnist described it as “
one of
the most embarrassing defeats any governor has suffered.”

It was being said that Clinton was indecisive, reluctant to move on issues ranging from school consolidation to taxes. His maneuverings in the renewed battle between the highway lobby and the trucking-poultry lobby did nothing to enhance that image. First Clinton endorsed the highway commission's bill to impose a weight-distance tax to cover additional damage incurred by trucks weighing up to 80,000 pounds that were soon to roll down state highways. When that bill got through the Senate, leaders of the lobby, organized as the Forward Arkansas Committee, expressed outrage, saying they thought Clinton had told them that he opposed the measure because it raised more money than was needed. A few days later, the trucking forces pushed their less costly alternative through the House, this time with Clinton's endorsement and the help of his legislative aides.
The state
highway director was now shocked, calling the governor a “double-crosser.” Clinton eventually took a third position, saying that he supported both bills and that whichever one passed was fine with him. In an end-of-session interview with the Arkansas Gazette, published under the frontpage headline, “Wasn'
t Weak,
Vacillating, Clinton Says of His Stands,” he argued, without irony, that it was unfair to say that he tried to please everybody because “in reality the effect probably was that I ended up displeasing both sides.”

Although these apparent blunders might not have been deliberate ploys, they did fall into a larger strategy. Clinton and his inner circle had already chosen education reform, not utility reform or highway improvements, as the central issue of his governorship, the one for which they planned to put to full use the tactics of the permanent campaign.
Clinton was
eager to become known as the education governor. For all his romance about the regular folks of Arkansas, he was frustrated by the state's inferiority complex, a sense that “God meant for us to be last, that God meant for us to be poor.” Basic education was the “key to our economic revival and our
perennial quest for prosperity.” But the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the school-funding case. Morris had just begun testing the tax possibilities and the rhetoric that would shape the public debate. Hillary Clinton was preparing to serve her husband as chairman of the Education Standards Committee that would design the substance of reform. The serious work awaited a special legislative session.

Before that, during the regular legislative session, Clinton's essential objective had been to buy time. His goal with truck weights was to try to avoid being viewed as the central force responsible for a new tax, whichever way the tax went. He managed to do that, at the calculated expense of angering both sides and appearing equivocal. On utility reform, his aim had been to push hard in public so that he would not appear to be backing away from a campaign promise, while essentially conceding the issue in private. “
He knew
he couldn't succeed, but he had to show that he had tried and failed,” Morris recalled. “He had to keep up the rhetoric.” This strategy also had mixed results. While it enhanced Clinton's pro-consumer image, it infuriated some utility reform advocates who concluded that he had been grandstanding. One of his longtime energy advisers, Scott Trotter, finally turned on him, issuing a seven-page critique in which he said, “Clinton's actions on utilities during the current term have been phony and inconsequential. What is worse, this is not a mistake but a politically calculated policy.”
Trotter bitterly
cited a meeting in early summer at which he said Clinton told him that he no longer needed the utility issue because he was now focused on education reform.

F
EW
people in Arkansas were surprised when the state Supreme Court ruling came out in the final week in May declaring public education financing unconstitutionally inequitable. Here was a state with 367 school districts, more than twice as many districts as neighboring states, some so remote and poor and with such meager property tax bases that they could barely pay teachers a living wage or supply basic educational services.
In some
schools in southwest Arkansas, not far from Clinton's birthplace in Hope, teachers were making less than $10,000 a year and qualified for food stamps, with their own children in federally subsidized free lunch programs. The need for more money to spread around to those districts was obvious. But it was also Clinton's great practical dilemma. Even though Arkansas ranked next to last in the nation in the tax burden imposed on state residents, above only Alabama,
there was
a prevalent notion among Arkansans that they were poor and overburdened already. As the car tag revolt of 1980 had made clear to Clinton, any tax hike could be rejected as an unwarranted imposition, especially during economic hard times.