On Labor Day, the traditional opening of the general election campaign, I went to Harry Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri, to rally working people to our cause. Truman’s outspoken daughter, Margaret, helped by saying at the rally that I, not George Bush, was the rightful heir to her father’s legacy.
On September 11, I went to South Bend, Indiana, to deliver an address to the students and faculty at Notre Dame, America’s most famous Catholic university. On the same day, President Bush was in Virginia to address the conservative Christian Coalition. I knew Catholics across the country would take notice of both events. The church hierarchy agreed with Bush’s opposition to abortion, but I was far closer to the Catholic positions on economic and social justice. The Notre Dame appearance bore a striking resemblance, with roles reversed, to John Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Southern Baptist ministers. Paul Begala, a devout Catholic, helped prepare my remarks, and Boston mayor Ray Flynn and Senator Harris Wofford came along to lend moral support. I was nearly halfway through the speech before I could tell how it was going. When I said, “All of us must respect the reflection of God’s image in every man and woman, and so we must value their freedom, not just their political freedom, but their freedom of conscience in matters of family and philosophy and faith,” there was a standing ovation. After Notre Dame, I went out west. In Salt Lake City, I made my case to the National Guard Convention, where I was well received, because my reputation for leading the Arkansas National Guard was good, and because I was introduced by Congressman Les Aspin, the respected chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. In Portland, Oregon, we had an amazing rally. Over ten thousand people filled the downtown streets, with many more leaning out of their office windows. During the speeches, supporters threw hundreds of roses onto the stage, a nice gesture in Oregon’s City of Roses. For more than an hour after the event, I went up and down the streets, shaking hands with what seemed like thousands of people.
On September 15, the western swing got its biggest boost when thirty high-tech leaders in traditionally Republican Silicon Valley endorsed me. I had been working on Silicon Valley since the previous December, with the help of Dave Barram, vice president of Apple Computer. Dave had been recruited to the campaign by Ira Magaziner, my friend from Oxford, who had worked with high-tech executives and knew that Barram was a Democrat. Many of Barram’s Republican cohorts shared his disillusionment with the economic policies of the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the explosive potential of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs. A few days before my first trip, according to the
Among those who came out for me were prominent Republicans like John Young, president of HewlettPackard; John Sculley, chairman of Apple Computer; investment banker Sandy Robertson; and one of Silicon Valley’s few open Democrats at the time, Regis McKenna. At our meeting in the Technology Center of Silicon Valley at San Jose, I also issued a national technology policy, which Dave Barram had worked for months to help me prepare. In calling for greater investment in scientific and technological research and development, including specific projects important to Silicon Valley, I staked out a position at odds with the Bush administration’s aversion to government-industry partnerships. At the time, Japan and Germany were outperforming America economically, in part because government policy in those countries was targeted to support potential areas of growth. By contrast, American policy was to subsidize politically powerful, established interests like oil and agriculture, which were important but which had much less potential than technology to generate new jobs and new entrepreneurs. The hightech leaders’ announcement provided an enormous boost to the campaign, giving credibility to my claim to be pro-business as well as pro-labor, and linking me to the economic forces that most represented positive change and growth.
While I was garnering support for rebuilding the economy and reforming health care, the Republicans were working hard to tear me down. President Bush, in his convention speech, had accused me of raising taxes 128 times in Arkansas and enjoying it every time. In early September, the Bush campaign repeated the charge again and again, though the
The Bush campaign devoted most of the rest of September to attacking me on the draft. President Bush said over and over that I should “just tell the truth” about it. Even Dan Quayle felt free to go after me on it, despite the fact that his family connections had gotten him into the National Guard and away from Vietnam. The vice president’s main point seemed to be that the media weren’t giving my case the same critical scrutiny he had received four years earlier. Apparently he hadn’t followed the news out of New Hampshire and New York.
I got some good help in countering the draft attack. In early September, Senator Bob Kerrey, my Medal of Honor–winning primary opponent, said it shouldn’t be an issue. Then on the eighteenth, on the back lawn of the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, I received the endorsement of Admiral Bill Crowe, who had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan and briefly under Bush. I was very impressed by Crowe’s straightforward, down-home manner and deeply grateful that he would stick his neck out for someone he barely knew but had come to believe in.
The political impact of what Bush and I were doing was uncertain. Some of his convention edge had worn off, but throughout September the polls bounced back and forth between a lead of 9 and 20 percent for me. The basic dynamic of the campaign had been set: Bush claimed to represent family values and trustworthiness, while I was for economic and social change. He said I was untrustworthy and antifamily, while I said he was dividing America and holding us back. On any given day, a substantial number of voters were torn between which one of us was better.
Besides the issues dispute, we spent September arguing about the debates. The bipartisan national commission recommended three of them, with different formats. I accepted immediately, but President Bush didn’t like the commission’s debate formats. I claimed his objections were a fig leaf to cover his reluctance to defend his record. The disagreement continued for most of the month, which forced all three of the scheduled debates to be canceled. As they were, I went to each of the proposed debate sites to campaign, making sure the disappointed citizens knew who had cost their cities their moment in the national spotlight.
The worst thing to happen to us in September was far more personal than political. Paul Tully, the veteran Irish organizer Ron Brown had sent to Little Rock to coordinate the Democratic Party’s efforts with ours, dropped dead in his hotel room. Tully was only forty-eight, an old-school political pro and a fine man we had all come to adore and depend on. Just as we were entering the homestretch, another of our leaders was gone.
The month ended with some surprising developments. Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the HIV-positive former All- Star guard of the Los Angeles Lakers, abruptly resigned from the National Commission on HIV/AIDS and endorsed me, disgusted with the administration’s lack of attention to, and action on, the AIDS problem. President Bush changed his mind about the debates and challenged me to four of them. And, most surprising, Ross Perot said he was thinking of reentering the presidential race, because he didn’t think the President or I had a serious plan to reduce the deficit. He criticized Bush for his no-tax pledge and said I wanted to spend too much money. Perot invited both campaigns to send delegations to meet him and discuss the matter.
Because neither of us knew which of us would be hurt more if Perot got back in, and we both wanted his support if he didn’t, each campaign sent a high-level team to meet with him. Our side was uneasy about it, because we thought he had already decided to run and this was just high theater to increase his prestige, but in the end I agreed that we ought to keep reaching out to him. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Mickey Kantor, and Vernon Jordan went on my behalf. They got a cordial reception, as did the Bush people. Perot announced that he had learned a lot from both groups. Then a couple of days later, on October 1, Perot announced that he felt compelled to get back into the race as a “servant” of his volunteers. He had been helped by quitting the race back in July. In the ten weeks he was out of it, the memory of his nutty fight with Bush the previous spring had faded, while the President and I had kept each other’s problems fresh in the public mind. Now the voters and the press took him even more seriously because the two of us had courted him so visibly.
As Perot was getting back in, we finally reached an agreement with the Bush people on debates. There would be three of them, plus a vice-presidential debate, all crammed into nine days, between October 11 and 19. In the first and third, we would be questioned by members of the press. The second would be a town hall meeting in which citizens would ask the questions. At first, the Bush people didn’t want Perot in the debates, because they
