Living History (47 page)

“Women have potential,” he said. “And access to credit is not only an effective way to fight poverty, it is also a fundamental human right.”

I sat under a thatched pavilion surrounded by Hindu and Muslim women, and they told me how they had all come together, defying the fundamentalists. I told them I was there to listen to them, and to learn.

A Muslim woman stood up and said, “We are sick of the mullahs, they are always trying to keep women down.”

I asked what sorts of problems they faced, and she said: “They threaten to ban us if we take loans from the bank. They tell us the bank people will steal our children. I tell them to leave us alone. We are trying to help our children have better lives.”

The women asked me questions to try to relate my experiences to theirs. “Do you have cattle in your home?” said one.

“No,” I replied, grinning at the traveling press corps, who by that time were like members of a large extended family, “unless you count the press room.”

The Americans laughed out loud, while the Bangladeshis pondered the meaning of my quip.

“Do you earn your own income?” asked a woman with a decorative red dot, or teep, on her forehead between her eyes, traditionally signifying that she was married.

“I am not earning my own income now that my husband is President,” I said, wondering how to explain what I was doing. I told them I used to earn more than my husband, and I planned to earn my own income again.

The children of the village put on a play for us, and a few women approached Chelsea and me to show us how to wear our own decorative teeps and how to wrap a sari. I was struck by the positive spirit of the people I met in this poor, isolated village who lived without electricity or running water, but with hope, thanks, in part, to the work of the Grameen Bank.

I wasn’t the only one moved by the village women. One of the American journalists who stood near me, listening to our discussion, leaned in and whispered, “Silence is not spoken here.”

“The first lady is sorry she can’t be with you tonight,” Bill Clinton told the crowd of Washington journalists and politicians in March 1995. “If you believe that,” he went on, “I’ve got some land in Arkansas I’d like to sell you.” It was another Gridiron dinner, but this time I couldn’t be there because I was traveling in South Asia, so I prerecorded a five-minute parody of the hit movie Forrest Gump to play at the end of the show.

As the tape rolled, a white feather drifted out of a blue sky and landed in front of the White House near a park bench, where I, Hillary Gump, sat with a box of candy on my lap.

“My mama always told me the White House is like a box of chocolates,” I said in my best Tom Hanks imitation. “It’s pretty on the outside, but inside there’s lots of nuts.”

The skit, written and directed by author and comic Al Franken of Saturday Night Live fame, was a send-up of both the movie and my life, featuring scenes from my childhood, college days and political career. Mandy Grunwald, Paul Begala and Tonight Show host Jay Leno contributed ideas. Each time the camera returned to me on the bench, I was wearing a different wig, poking fun at my ever changing hairstyles. At the end of the spoof, Bill did a walk-on cameo. He sat next to me on the bench and took my box of chocolates, offering me one piece in return, then asking if he could have some french fries.

When Chelsea and I called Bill to check in from the trip, he told me the performance had gotten a standing ovation. Few other things we tried to do in Washington went as smoothly.

By the time I returned from South Asia, the President and his administration were preparing to square off with the Republican Congress over the Contract with America.

Newt Gingrich pushed most of his Contract through the Republican-dominated House in the first hundred days of the 104th Congress, but only two measures had been signed into law. The legislative action moved to the Senate, where there were still enough Democrats to filibuster or sustain a presidential veto. Bill had to decide whether to try to reshape the Republican legislation through the veto threat or to offer his own alternatives. He ended up doing both. He also regained the momentum by confronting an opponent who had bluntly declared his Presidency “irrelevant.”

The White House had been stuck in a holding pattern since the midterm election, and it was time to set a new course. Bill is famously more patient than I am, and when anyone urged him to be more confrontational and even aggressive in taking on Gingrich, he’d explain that first people had to understand exactly where he and the Republicans differed on the issues. That way the fight would not be about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, but about their disagreements over cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education and environmental protection.

Bill has an uncanny ability to see down the road in politics, to gauge the consequences of each actor’s move and to plan for the long run. He knew the real battle would be over the budget later in the year and that, for him and his Presidency, 1996 was the target for success. At first Bill counseled patience because he assumed―rightly, as it turned out―that voters would tire of the Republicans’ overreaching and begin to fear the radical changes they proposed. But when Gingrich announced his intention to celebrate the achievements of the Republican Congress with an unprecedented primetime speech to the nation, Bill decided it was time to reclaim the initiative.

In Dallas on April 7, 1995, Bill transformed what was slated as a speech on education issues into a manifesto for his administration. He outlined what he had achieved in deficit reduction and job creation and where he wanted to go: a minimum-wage increase, incremental improvements in health care coverage and tax breaks for the middle class. He attacked the worst aspects of the Republican Contract, such as the welfare bill, as “weak on work and tough on kids.” He assailed cuts in education and programs such as school lunches and childhood immunizations. And he laid the groundwork for compromises that would avoid government gridlock. If the Republicans didn’t cooperate, responsibility for failing the American public would shift to them and to Gingrich. It was a great speech, laying out his vision but putting the opposition on notice.

Throughout the spring of 1995, Bill consulted endlessly with friends and allies, gathering and sifting opinions to formulate and develop his strategy. I encouraged Bill to include Dick Morris in his consultations about a new strategy, partly because Morris advised Republicans, and his insights into what the Republicans were thinking could be helpful as Bill tried to move forward. Morris also could be a useful back channel to the opposition when Bill wanted to plant an idea.

At first, Morris’s involvement was a closely held secret, but after the Dallas speech, Bill decided to introduce Morris to the staff. Bill’s West Wing aides were unpleasantly surprised when they found out that Dick Morris had been advising the President for more than six months. Harold Ickes was appalled, since he and Morris nursed an ideological and personal enmity that dated back twentyfive years to their days in the fractious Democratic politics of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. George Stephanopoulos was distraught that Bill would listen to a political turncoat like Morris and unhappy about having to compete with a rival adviser. Leon Panetta didn’t like Morris’s personality or the way he circumvented the West Wing hierarchy. Every one of their concerns was justified, but Morris’s presence helped in unexpected ways.

After the loss of Congress, many of Bill’s advisers were walking around the West Wing like shell-shocked soldiers. But nothing is more unifying than a common enemy. Not only did they now have the Republican Congress to motivate them, they had Dick Morris.

One of Bill’s greatest strengths is his willingness to invite disparate opinions and then sort them out to reach his own conclusion. He challenged himself and his staff by bringing together people whose experiences were varied and whose perspectives often clashed.

It was a way to keep everyone, especially him, fresh and alert. In a rarefied environment like the White House, I don’t think you can afford to surround yourself with people whose temperaments and views are always in sync. The meetings might run on schedule, but easy consensus can lead over time to poor decisions. Throwing Dick Morris into the mix of egos, attitudes and ambitions in the West Wing ratcheted up everyone’s performance.

For numbers and analysis, Morris depended on Mark Penn, a brilliant and intense pollster hired by the Democratic National Committee. Penn and his business partner, Doug Schoen, another veteran political strategist, provided the research used to help shape White House communications. They along with Morris began attending weekly Wednesday night meetings in the Yellow Oval Room. Bill and I had learned to take Morris’s opinions with a pound of salt and overlook his histrionics and self-aggrandizing. He was a good antidote to conventional wisdom and a spur to Washington bureaucratic inertia.

His influence on the Clinton Administration has frequently been exaggerated, sometimes by liberal critics, most often by Morris himself. But he did help Bill develop a strategy to break through the wall of obstructionist Republicans who were blocking his legislative agenda and promoting their own.

When opposing camps are in two polar positions and neither believes it can afford to be seen as moving toward the other, they can decide to move toward a third position―

like the apex of the triangle―what came to be called “triangulation.” This was essentially a restatement of the philosophy Bill had developed as Governor and as Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. In the 1992 campaign, he championed moving beyond the “brain-dead” politics of both parties to craft a “dynamic center.” More than old-fashioned political compromise of splitting the difference, triangulation reflected the approach Bill had promised to bring to Washington.

When, for example, the Republicans tried to claim ownership of welfare reform, an issue Bill had been working on since r 98o and one he was committed to act on before his first term was up, Bill would avoid saying no. Instead, he would support the objectives of reform but insist on changes that would improve the legislation and attract enough political support from more moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat the extreme Republican position. Of course, in politics, as in life, the devil is in the details. The details of welfare reform or budget negotiations were hard fought and difficult and sometimes resembled a Rubik’s Cube more than an isosceles triangle.

Though Morris brought energy and ideas to Bill’s initiatives, he was not responsible for implementing them. That fell to Leon Panetta and the rest of the Administration. Leon had become Chief of Staff in June of 1994, replacing Mack McLarty, who had done an excellent job under very difficult circumstances in the first year and a half. Panetta, a deficit hawk when he served in Congress from California, had been Bill’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, and he had played a leading role in devising the deficit reduction plan and then shepherding it through Congress. As Chief of Staff, he ran a tight ship, imposing greater control over the President’s schedule and preventing aides from dropping by the Oval Office whenever they felt like it. His expertise in Congress and with the budget would prove to be of crucial importance in the budget battle ahead.

The new Republican majority was looking for ways to legislate their radical agenda.

They started with the annual budget bill, trying to gut programs by denying funding.

They wanted to dismantle the regulatory functions of government, such as consumer and environmental protections, support for the working poor, tax enforcement and corporate regulations. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program―which resulted in Medicare, Medicaid and historic civil rights legislation―was denounced by Newt Gingrich as a “counterculture value system” and “a long experiment in professional government that has failed.”

Bill and I were increasingly disturbed by the fervor with which the GOP leaders spouted rhetoric that attacked government, community and even conventional notions of society. They seemed to believe that old-fashioned rugged individualism was all that mattered in late-twentieth-century America, except when, of course, their supporters wanted special legislative favors. I consider myself very much an individualist and somewhat rugged―perhaps a little ragged as well―but I also believe that as an American citizen I am part of a mutually beneficial network of rights, privileges and responsibilities.

It was in the context of this extreme Republican rhetoric that I pushed forward with my book It Takes a Village. Gingrich’s advocacy of orphanages for poor children born out of wedlock had energized me. After spending years worrying about how to protect and nurture children, now I feared that political extremism could sentence the poor and vulnerable to a Dickensian future. Although it wasn’t political in a partisan sense, I wanted my book to describe a vision different from the uncompassionate, elitist and unrealistic views emanating from Capitol Hill.

Despite the rightwing mantra denouncing “liberal media bias,” the reality was that the loudest and most effective voices in the media were anything but liberal. Instead, public discourse was increasingly dominated by reactionary pundits and TV and radio personalities.

I decided to convey my thoughts and opinions directly to the public by writing them myself. In late July, I began a syndicated weekly newspaper column called “Talking It Over,” following once again the footsteps of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had written a column six days a week called “My Day” from 1935 to 1962. My first columns covered topics ranging from the seventy-fifth anniversary of women’s suffrage to a celebration of family vacations. The exercise of putting my ideas on paper gave me a clearer sense of how to recast my role as an advocate within the Administration as I began to focus on discrete domestic projects that were more achievable than massive undertakings such as health care reform. On my agenda now were children’s health issues, breast cancer prevention, and protecting funding for public television, legal services and the arts.