was there to clap, cheer, and hug me for my performance. At least in Arkansas, the Carson show had put the Atlanta debacle behind me.
Things seemed to be looking up for me, and the rest of America, too. CNN named me the political winner of the week, after dubbing me its big loser just the week before. Tom Shales said that I had “recovered miraculously” and that “people who watch television love this kind of comeback story.” But it wasn’t quite over. In August, Hillary, Chelsea, and I went to Long Island, New York, to spend a few days on the beach with our friend Liz Robbins. I was asked to umpire at the annual charity softball game between artists and writers who spend summers there. I still have a picture of myself calling balls and strikes on the pitching of Mort Zuckerman, now publisher of the New York
Neither my bad speech nor the good Carson show had much to do with the real work I did as governor, but the ordeal had taught me all over again that how people perceive politicians has a big impact on what they can accomplish. It had also given me a healthy dose of humility. I knew that for the rest of my life I would be more sensitive to people who found themselves in embarrassing or humiliating situations. I had to admit to Pam Strickland, an
Unfortunately, while things were looking up for me, they weren’t going so well for Mike Dukakis. George Bush had given a marvelous acceptance speech at his convention, offering a “kinder, gentler” Reaganism and telling us to “read my lips: no new taxes.” Moreover, the vice president’s kinder, gentler approach didn’t extend to Mike Dukakis. Lee Atwater and company went after him like a pack of rabid dogs, saying Mike didn’t believe in pledging allegiance to the flag or being tough on criminals. An “independent” group with no overt ties to the Bush campaign ran an ad featuring a convicted killer named Willie Horton, who had been released on a Massachusetts prison-furlough program. Not coincidentally, Horton was black. His opponents were performing reverse plastic surgery on Dukakis, who didn’t help himself by not responding quickly and vigorously to the attacks and by allowing himself to be photographed in a tank wearing a helmet that made him look more like
In the fall, I flew up to Boston to see what I could do to help. By then Dukakis had fallen well behind in the polls. I pleaded with the people in the campaign to hit back; to at least tell the voters that the federal government, of which Bush was a part, furloughed prisoners too. But they never did it enough to suit me. I met Susan Estrich, the campaign manager, whom I liked and who I thought was shouldering too much of the blame for Mike’s problems, and Madeleine Albright, a professor at Georgetown who had worked in the Carter White House. She was the foreign policy advisor. I was very impressed with her intellectual clarity and toughness, and resolved to keep in touch with her. Dukakis found his voice in the last three weeks of the campaign, but he never recovered the New Democrat image that the negative ads and his insufficiently aggressive debate performances had destroyed. In November, Vice President Bush defeated him 54 to 46 percent. We didn’t carry Arkansas either, though I tried. Dukakis was a good man and a fine governor. He and Lloyd Bentsen would have served our country well in the White House. But the Republicans had defined him right out of the race. I couldn’t blame them for sticking with a strategy that worked, but I didn’t think it was good for America. In October, while the campaign for President was in the homestretch, I was involved in two exciting policy developments. I began a new initiative with the governors of our neighbor states, Ray Mabus of Mississippi and Buddy Roemer of Louisiana, to revive our economies. Both were young, articulate, Harvard-educated progressives. To highlight our commitment, we signed a compact on a barge in the middle of the Mississippi River at Rosedale. Not long afterward, we took a trade mission to Japan together. And we supported the successful effort of Senator Bumpers and Congressman Mike Espy of Mississippi to establish a Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission to study and make recommendations to improve the economies of poor counties on both sides of the river, from southern Illinois to New Orleans, where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The all-white counties in the northern part of the Delta region were in about as bad shape as the heavily black counties in the south. All three governors served on the Delta commission. For a year, we had hearings up and down the river in small towns time had passed by, and we came up with a report that led to the establishment of a full-time office and an ongoing effort to improve the economy and quality of life in the poorest part of America outside the Native American tribal lands.
On October 13, I was invited to the White House for President Reagan’s signing of the long-awaited welfare- reform bill. It was a true bipartisan accomplishment, the work of Democratic and Republican governors; Democratic congressman Harold Ford of Tennessee and Republican congressman Carroll Campbell of South Carolina; House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski and Senate Finance Committee chairman Pat Moynihan, who knew more about the history of welfare than anyone else; and the White House staff. I was impressed by, and appreciative of, the way the Congress and the White House had worked with the governors. Harold Ford even invited Republican governor Mike Castle of Delaware and me to participate in his subcommittee’s meeting to “mark up” the bill into the final version to be presented for a vote. I hoped and believed the legislation would help move more people from welfare to work, while providing more support to their children. I was also glad to see President Reagan go out of office on a positive note. He had been badly battered by the illegal Iran-Contra affair, which the White House had approved, and which might have led to his impeachment had the Democrats been half as ruthless as Newt Gingrich. Despite my many disagreements with Reagan, I liked him personally, and I enjoyed listening to his stories when I sat at his table at the White House dinner for the governors and when a few of the governors had lunch with him after his last address to us in 1988. Reagan was something of a mystery to me, at once friendly and distant. I was never sure how much he knew about the human consequences of his harshest policies, or whether he was using the hard-core right or was being used by them; the books about him don’t give a definitive answer, and because he developed Alzheimer’s disease, we’ll probably never know. Regardless, his own life is both more interesting and more mysterious than the movies he made. I spent the last three months of 1988 getting ready for the next legislative session. In late October, I released a seventy-page booklet,
I was particularly excited about the literacy initiative, and the prospect of turning illiteracy from a stigma into a challenge. The previous fall, when Hillary and I went to a PTA meeting at Chelsea’s school, a man had come up to me and said he’d seen me on television talking about literacy. He told me he had a good job but had never learned to read. Then he asked if I could get him into a literacy program without his employer knowing about it. I happened to know the employer and was sure he’d be proud of the man, but he was afraid, so my office got him into a reading program without his employer’s knowledge. After that incident, I began to say illiteracy was nothing to be ashamed of, but doing nothing about it would be.
For all its sweep and new specifics, the program’s central theme was the same one I had been hammering away on for the last six years: “Either we invest more in human capital and develop our people’s capacity to cooperate or we are headed for long-term decline.” Our old strategy of selling Arkansas as a beautiful state with hardworking people, low wages, and low taxes had lost its relevance a decade earlier, due to the new realities of the global economy. We had to keep working to change it. After stumping the state for the rest of the year, I presented the program to the legislature on January 9, 1989. During the speech, I introduced Arkansans who supported it and the increased taxes necessary to pay for it: a school board president who had never voted for me but had been converted to the cause of education reform; a welfare mother who had enrolled in our work program and finished high school, started college, and gotten a job; a World War II veteran who had just learned to read; and the manager of the new $500 million Nekoosa Paper mill in Ashdown, who told the legislators he had to have a
