took it on. He needed an assistant. Because Paul Begala’s wife, Diane, was expecting their first child, he couldn’t come to Little Rock full-time, so reluctantly, I gave up George Stephanopoulos from the campaign plane. George had demonstrated a keen understanding of how the twenty-four-hour news cycle worked, and now knew we could fight bad press as well as enjoy the good stories. He was the best choice.
James put all the elements of the campaign—politics, press, and research—into a big open space in the old newsroom of the
Change vs. More of the Same
The Economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care
Carville also captured his main battle tactic in a slogan he had printed on a T-shirt: “Speed Kills… Bush.” The War Room held meetings every day at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. to assess Stan Greenberg’s overnight polls, Frank Greer’s latest ads, the news, and the attacks from Bush, and to formulate responses to the attacks and unfolding events. Meanwhile, young volunteers worked around the clock, pulling in whatever information they could get from our satellite dish, tracking the news and the opposition on their computers. It’s all routine stuff now, but then it was new, and our use of technology was essential to the campaign’s ability to meet Carville’s goal of being focused and fast. Once we knew what we wanted to say, we got the message out, not only to the media but to our “rapid- response” teams in every state, whose job it was to transmit it to our supporters and local news outlets. We sent pins with “Rapid-Response Team” on them to those who agreed to do daily duty. By the end of the campaign, thousands of people were wearing them.
By the time I got my morning briefing from Carville, Stephanopoulos, and whoever else needed to be on call that day, they could lay out exactly where we were and what we needed to do. If I disagreed, we argued. If there was a close policy or strategic call, I made it. But mostly I just listened in amazement. Sometimes I complained about what wasn’t going well, like speeches I thought were long on rhetoric and short on argument and substance, or the backbreaking schedule that was more my fault than theirs. Because of allergies and exhaustion, I griped too much in the mornings. Luckily, Carville and I were on the same wavelength, and he always knew when I was serious and when I was just blowing off steam. I think the others on call came to understand it too.
The Republicans held their convention in Houston in the third week of August. Normally, the opposition goes underground during the other party’s convention. Though I would follow the usual practice and keep a low profile, our rapid-response operation would be out in force. It had to be. The Republicans had no choice but to throw the kitchen sink at me. They were way behind, and their slash-and-burn approach had worked in every election since 1968, except for President Carter’s two-point victory in the aftermath of Watergate. We were determined to use the rapid-response team to turn the Republican attacks back on them.
On August 17, as their convention opened, I still had a twenty-point lead, and we rained on their parade a little when eighteen corporate chief executives endorsed me. It was a good story, but it didn’t divert the Republicans from their game plan. They started off by calling me a “skirt chaser” and a “draft dodger,” and accused Hillary of wanting to destroy the American family by allowing children to sue their parents whenever they disagreed with parental disciplinary decisions. Marilyn Quayle, the vice president’s wife, was particularly critical of Hillary’s alleged assault on “family values.” The criticisms were based on a wildly distorted reading of an article Hillary had written when she was in law school, arguing that, in circumstances of abuse or severe neglect, minor children had legal rights independent of their parents. Almost all Americans would agree with a fair reading of her words, but, of course, since so few people had seen her article, hardly anyone who heard the charges knew whether they were true or not.
The main attraction on the Republicans’ opening night was Pat Buchanan, who sent the delegates into a frenzy with his attacks on me. My favorite lines included his assertion that, while President Bush had presided over the liberation of Eastern Europe, my foreign policy experience was “pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes” and his characterization of the Democratic convention as “radicals and liberals… dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.” The polls showed Buchanan hadn’t helped Bush, but I disagreed. His job was to stop the hemorrhaging on the right by telling conservatives who wanted change that they couldn’t vote for me, and he did it well. The Clinton-bashing continued throughout the convention, with our rapid-response operation firing back. The Reverend Pat Robertson referred to me as “Slick Willie” and said I had a radical plan to destroy the American family. Since I had been for welfare reform before Robertson figured out that God was a right-wing Republican, the charge was laughable. Our rapid-response team beat it back. They were also especially good at defending Hillary from the anti-family attacks, comparing the Republicans’ treatment of her to their Willie Horton tactics against Dukakis four years earlier. To reinforce our claim that the Republicans were attacking me because all they cared about was holding on to power, while we wanted power to attack America’s problems, Al, Tipper, Hillary, and I had dinner with President and Mrs. Carter on August 18. Then we all spent the next day—both Tipper’s and my birthday—building a house with members of Habitat for Humanity. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had supported Habitat for years. The brainchild of Millard Fuller, a friend of ours from Renaissance Weekend, Habitat uses volunteers to build houses for and with poor people, who then pay for the cost of the materials. The organization had already become one of America’s largest home builders and was expanding into other countries. Our work presented a perfect contrast to the shrill attacks of the Republicans.
President Bush made a surprise visit to the convention on the night he was nominated, as I had, bringing his entire all-American-looking family. The next night, he gave an effective speech, wrapping himself in God, country, and family, and asserting that, unfortunately, I didn’t embrace those values. He also said that he had made a mistake in signing the deficit-reduction bill with its gas-tax hike and that, if reelected, he’d cut taxes again. I thought his best line was saying I would use “Elvis economics” to take America to “Heartbreak Hotel.” He contrasted his service in World War II with my opposition to Vietnam by saying, “While I bit the bullet, he bit his nails.”
Now the Republicans had had their free shot at America, and though the conventional wisdom was that they had been too negative and extreme, the polls showed they had cut into my lead. One poll had the race down to ten points, another to five. I thought that was about right, and that if I didn’t blow the debates or make some other error, the final margin would be somewhere between what the two surveys showed.
President Bush left Houston in a feisty mood, comparing his campaign to Harry Truman’s miraculous comeback victory in 1948. He also went around the country doing what only incumbents can do: spending federal money to get votes. He pledged aid to wheat farmers and the victims of Hurricane Andrew, which had devastated much of south Florida, and he offered to sell 150 F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan and 72 F-15s to Saudi Arabia, securing jobs in defense plants located in critical states. In late August, we both appeared before the American Legion Convention in Chicago. President Bush got a better reception than I did from his fellow veterans, but I did better than expected by confronting the draft issue and my opposition to the Vietnam War head-on. I said I still believed the Vietnam War was a mistake, but “if you choose to vote against me because of what happened twenty- three years ago, that’s your right as an American citizen, and I respect that. But it is my hope that you will cast your vote while looking toward the future.” I also got a good round of applause by promising new leadership at the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose director was unpopular with the veterans’ groups. After the American Legion meeting, I got back to my message of changing America’s direction in economic and social policy, bolstered by a new study showing that the rich were getting richer while poor Americans were getting poorer. In early September, I was endorsed by two important environmental groups, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. And I went to Florida a few days after President Bush did to observe the damage from Hurricane Andrew. I had dealt with a lot of natural disasters as governor, including floods, droughts, and tornadoes, but I had never seen anything like this. As I walked down streets littered with the wet ruins of houses, I was surprised to hear complaints from both local officials and residents about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency was handling the aftermath of the hurricane. Traditionally, the job of FEMA director was given to a political supporter of the President who wanted some plum position but who had had no experience with emergencies. I made a mental note to avoid that mistake if I won. Voters don’t choose a President based on how he’ll handle disasters, but if they’re faced with one, it quickly becomes the most important issue in their lives.
