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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 28

BILL CLINTON

The Long Road


How a combination of luck, tenacity and a strong sense of message
turned Bill Clinton into the front runner of 1992

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- With reporting by Margaret Carlson/
Washington, Priscilla Painton and Walter Shapiro with Clinton


    Only 20 months ago, George Bush was basking in the glow of
the Gulf War victory and enjoying the highest approval ratings
ever recorded. That he might even stand a chance of losing the
presidency seemed improbable; that he might lose to the young
(just 44 at the time), virtually unknown Governor of one of the
smallest and poorest states in the nation -- well, nobody would
have believed it. Yet as the campaign moved into its final
week, despite some tightening of the polls, that was precisely
what seemed likely to happen.

     That Clinton has in fact come so close might easily be
ascribed primarily to luck. After all, the heftiest Democrats
-- men like Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen and Dick Gephardt --
decided to sit the election out, leaving Clinton to battle a
field of second-stringers for the nomination. Ross Perot, having
done much to focus voter discontent with Bush, abruptly pulled
out of the race in July, dramatically boosting Clinton's lead
in the polls during the Democratic Convention. Bush helped
Clinton by handing his own convention over to right-wing
extremists and by running a clumsy, unfocused campaign until he
hit his stride in the final weeks. Perhaps the greatest stroke
of luck for Clinton is that the economic upturn that could have
buried his candidacy never materialized.

     But Bill Clinton's rise is also the story of a
single-minded candidate with a strong sense of message, an
indefatigable will and an intuition for the irrational in
politics. He is, as adviser Harold Ickes says, "his own campaign
manager." He deserves credit for wise decisions such as sticking
with his centrist economic program rather than shifting to a
more traditionally liberal appeal, and also deserves blame for
blunders such as rejecting his aides' advice to call a
let-it-all-hang-out press conference to defuse the issue of how
he escaped the Vietnam draft. Clinton had many chances to blow
it all, and came close to doing so at least twice: during the
New Hampshire primary campaign, when he dropped 13 points in
four days, to the edge of extinction; and in June, when he had
the Democratic nomination locked up but was running behind Perot
as well as Bush. In early February columnists Rowland Evans and
Robert Novak reported that "mainline Democratic politicians"
considered Clinton to be "one of the walking dead who sooner or
later will keel over." That sentiment would be repeated many
times until the late-summer polls gave it the lie.


     THE RESIDUE OF DESIGN

     Instead of keeling over, Clinton went on to prove as few
candidates ever have the truth of baseball mogul Branch Rickey's
observation that "luck is the residue of design." And design is
indeed the word: careful planning going back many years enabled
the Governor to position himself adroitly even before his
official entry into the race and to develop a strategy both for
capitalizing on his breaks and for overcoming the assaults on
his character and trustworthiness that, several times, nearly
did him in.

     Some other qualities also helped enormously. An intuitive
feel for the popular mood enabled Clinton to sense early not
only that economics would dominate the race but also that
voters longed for a candidate who had thought long enough about
the problems to formulate detailed plans and talk specifics.
(The campaign thus marked a rare convergence of man and moment:
Clinton is a born policy wonk who spawns 5- and 6-point plans
as instinctively as other pols reach out for hands to shake.)
Sheer dogged persistence kept him slogging past low points at
which many another campaigner would have given up. In New
Hampshire, when the Governor's campaign looked like a collapsing
balloon, an aide reported that "his instinct is always to do
more": more speeches, more interviews, more TV talk shows, more
plunging into crowds. He did -- and it worked, then and later.

     Persistence was joined to a stern self-control. Under
constant fire, Clinton kept his cool. Throughout the seemingly
endless campaign he lost his temper only occasionally, such as
the time during the early primaries when Clinton received a
false report that Jesse Jackson had endorsed his rival Tom
Harkin and went ballistic into an open microphone. Most of the
time, Clinton remained ever affable and was never distracted
from hammering home, over and over again, the same message: The
nation demands change, and I'm the candidate with a plan to
produce it. Or, in the now famous wording of the sign that top
strategist James Carville hung on the wall of headquarters to
explain what the campaign is about: THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

     Moreover, the Governor, for all his policy-wonkness,
exhibited a genuine love for and total engagement in the
political process. His wife Hillary and aides were often hard
pressed to persuade him to catch some sleep. Clinton frequently
wanted to go on to yet another rally and make another speech
well past midnight, then sit up talking strategy with his
campaign team almost till dawn. He spoke so incessantly, even
while troubled with allergies, that much of the nation heard his
voice become increasingly hoarse. Preparing for the first TV
confrontation with Bush and Perot on Oct. 11, in fact, some
aides were worried that "Bill's voice will go in the middle of
the debate," as one put it. As tens of millions of viewers know,
it did not happen.


     PARADISE WITHOUT PAIN?

     Most of these traits will obviously serve Clinton well if
he does move into the Oval Office. But some others are more
useful for a campaigner than for a President -- and in fact are
giving Bush at long last an opening for attack. Clinton hates
to alienate anyone and has a pronounced tendency to promise
everything to everybody. His standard speech used to contain
this all-embracing passage: "We can be pro-growth and
pro-environment, we can be pro-business and pro-labor, we can
make government work again by making it more aggressive and
leaner and more effective at the same time, and we can be
pro-family and pro-choice."

     Lately this phrasing has been dropped. An aide explains,
"It sounds like we want to be all things to all people, and
voters just don't believe it." But though the words have
changed, the spirit has not. Clinton still tends to promise more
than the fine print of his own programs will support. He
generally shuns any talk of sacrifice -- despite a pointed
invitation from Jim Lehrer, moderating the final TV debate, to
do so. His speeches hold out a glittering vision of prosperity
and social progress to be attained with no pain for anyone
except the privileged elite earning more than $200,000 a year.
But a President cannot avoid making decisions that will alienate
some people, and the disappointment to some voters who buy his
vision of a painless paradise may be intense.

     A somewhat more ambiguous quality might be called either
adaptability or slipperiness. During the campaign, it has
enabled the candidate to emphasize different parts of his
message for different audiences, and occasionally switch
signals. Though Clinton chastised Paul Tsongas for suggesting
that a middle-class tax cut was the linchpin of the Governor's
economic program, Clinton made it sound exactly like that when
talking early in the campaign to the hard-pressed voters of New
Hampshire. Later, as it became increasingly obvious that the
size of the cut he first proposed could not be reconciled with
his promises to reduce the deficit, the Arkansan greatly scaled
it back.

     More recently still, questioners have asked whether the
Democrat's ambitious plans for spending on roads, bridges, job
training, welfare reform and other worthy projects would not
require a middle-class tax increase to finance. While refusing
to make any read-my-lips pledge, Clinton asserts that he will
instead scale back some of his spending plans if his defense
cuts and revenue measures do not bring in as much money as he
expects. In short, he will not necessarily be bound by the
specifics of his many proposals. That attitude could serve a
President well up to a point; it is certainly preferable to a
stubborn refusal to change come hell, high water or ruinous
deficits. But it could too easily degenerate into a confusing
and self-defeating backing and filling.

     It even could, at long last, deny Clinton the White House.
After getting nowhere with various other lines of attack, Bush
has begun, though possibly too late, to score with a new
charge: Clinton is a waffler who takes every side of every
issue, a spendthrift liberal who will eventually tax the
daylights out of the middle class because he cannot finance his
ambitious schemes any other way; altogether, a man who cannot
be trusted in the White House. The attack is overstated, but
Clinton has virtually invited it by putting forward plans whose
numbers do not always add up.


     THE MASTER STRATEGIST

     In any case, for good or ill, Clinton the candidate is
closer to Clinton the private man than almost any other
campaigner of recent memory. The image the Governor projects on
the stump and on TV is emphatically not designed by handlers.
Clinton himself, powerfully aided by his wife Hillary, is the
source of the message and the big-picture strategy. He employs
speechwriters but rewrites the speeches heavily. So much so that
despite the best efforts of the original drafters to shorten his
acceptance speech to the July convention, it still took 55
minutes to deliver. Main reason: Clinton kept rewording their
work, and every time he rewrote a passage it came out longer.

     By his own testimony, Clinton began thinking about running
for President as a teenager. Indications are that he started
seriously pondering what would be required for a winning race
early in 1987. As a successful Governor of Arkansas, he already
figured in speculation, and when he summoned his closest
advisers to Little Rock, he was widely expected to announce his
candidacy. Instead, he announced he would not run. Gary Hart had
just been driven from the race by the scandal over Donna Rice,
and Clinton well knew that rumors of womanizing had been
swirling around him too. By 1989 Clinton was considering the
pros and cons of running for a fifth consecutive gubernatorial
term in 1990: on the one hand, a sitting Governor could better
raise money for a presidential bid; on the other hand, he seemed
bored with state issues and worried about losing. "Every time
I've run for Governor," Clinton told a reporter at the time, "it
has been a referendum on the question of change versus no
change. Sooner or later, the forces in this state opposed to
change are bound to win."

     Clinton did run and win again in 1990, and that same year
he became chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a
centrist organization that gave him a platform for addressing
the national press as to what kind of Democratic candidate might
finally break the long Republican lock on the White House. The
picture -- surprise! -- was a kind of idealized self-portrait:
a nontraditionalist who could win back the alienated white
middle class by repudiating tax-and-spend, something-for-nothing
policies and stressing economic growth to be achieved by heavy
government investment in job-creating activities.

     In late August 1991, Clinton and Hillary decided to appear
together the next month at one of the weekly breakfasts hosted
by Christian Science Monitor columnist Godfrey Sperling, at
which influential Washington reporters question prominent
politicians. One reason: they thought the rumors of infidelity
might come up, and this would afford them a chance to start
defusing such stories. It happened as they foresaw; they readily
affirmed that their marriage had been through some shaky times,
but insisted it was now rock solid. Implicit message from
Clinton: Even if I did commit adultery, so what? It's in the
past, and so long as Hillary is satisfied about that and will
stick by me, it's no one else's business.

     Even before Clinton announced his candidacy on Oct. 3,
1991, parts of the national press were hailing him as a
potential campaigner who knew exactly what he wanted to say and
had a plan. Eager to impose a pattern on what then seemed a
shapeless race, some political reporters even began building up
Clinton as potential chief rival to New York Governor Mario
Cuomo, who was then expected to be the front runner. Some of
Clinton's aides wanted to launch a pre-emptive attack on Cuomo
as the kind of ultraliberal who always lost, but the Arkansan
vetoed the idea: the Hamlet of Albany might yet drop out, and
there was no point in saying anything that might rile him enough
to make him want to fight. When Cuomo did decide just before
Christmas to stay out, the press was stuck with anointing
Clinton as the new front runner more or less by default.


     THE SURVIVOR

     It nearly all came unglued in New Hampshire, though. When
Gennifer Flowers' charges that she had had a 12-year affair with
Clinton became public, the Governor ordered his entire staff to
gather in Manchester immediately. They turned the local Days Inn
into a kind of makeshift dorm. Staffers doubled up in rooms and
stuffed towels in the doors so that they would not lock; any
room could be opened for an impromptu meeting at any time. Aides
quickly began negotiating for TV time to answer the charges.
Clinton and Hillary went on 60 Minutes and in effect repeated
their Sperling breakfast performance. One incident that did not
get onscreen: while the interview was being filmed, a bank of
lights held high on a pipe came crashing to the floor about a
foot from Hillary. Clinton immediately grabbed his wife and
pulled her to him; they embraced for about 30 seconds. The
incident seemed to break the tension; both were more relaxed and
confident afterward. The campaign had also lined up an interview
spot on Nightline, which had been kept on hold until a spot on
60 Minutes was assured. Deciding it would be preferable not to
dispatch a white man to defend Clinton, aides instead sent
Mandy Grunwald, who was relatively new to the campaign but did
a poised and impressive job.

     Just as the campaigners were congratulating themselves on
surviving that flap, though, the first stories about how he had
stayed out of the draft in 1969 hit. On Feb. 12 Clinton suddenly
called a press conference in a hangar at the Manchester airport
and handed out a faded Xerox copy of the now famous letter
written by the young Clinton expressing his agony over the
Vietnam War. Someone had leaked the original to Nightline;
Clintonites had been able to get hold only of the one faxed
copy, which was hard to read in the dim light of the hangar.
Carville had argued vehemently that the campaign had to make the
letter public before Nightline did. "Guvnor," Carville insisted
in his Cajun accent, "this letter is your friend."

     Clinton was to go on Nightline that evening to defend the
letter. But he insisted on going through with a rally at Elks
Club Lodge No. 184 in Dover, New Hampshire, only three hours
before his scheduled appearance. Many another politician would
have canceled the appearance or mumbled through a standard stump
speech. Clinton, his voice hoarse, told an audience of about 300
supporters that if they would stick with him through that trial,
"I'll remember you until the last dog dies." It was a deeply
emotional appeal that those present recall with awe, and an
example of the sheer persistence and indomitable will that
enabled him to survive that crucial first primary.

     What Clinton did not accomplish, however, was to put the
draft issue to rest. His statements in New Hampshire were the
first of a long series of incomplete and sometimes conflicting
remarks that were to continue piecemeal throughout the campaign.
In April aides urged him to call a press conference at which he
would answer questions until reporters had nothing left to ask;
he refused, in what now appears to have been a major blunder.
Clinton did eventually develop a fairly effective answer of
sorts: right through the fall debates with Bush and Perot, he
has argued that voters should be far more concerned with how a
candidate proposes to heal the ailing economy than with
"character" issues. Many indeed are, and the Gennifer Flowers
episode has apparently settled into a larger perspective. But
the draft issue still continues to fuel a widespread distrust
of Clinton.

     Even in New Hampshire, Clinton only survived. Though he
described himself on primary night as "the Comeback Kid," he ran
second with 25% of the vote. The winner, Tsongas, went on to
victories in Massachusetts and Maryland, and for a while was
thought likely to come close in Georgia and possibly even win
Florida. Strategist Carville says that shortly after New
Hampshire "I was just as scared as I have ever been in
politics." Tsongas, however, was already running out of money
and energy; reporters who traveled on his campaign plane still
remember how utterly exhausted he looked.

     Clinton had always been favored to win the cluster of
Southern and Border State primaries in early March, since that
was his home region. In Florida he showed a harsh streak in his
character, assailing Tsongas most unfairly -- but effectively
-- for supposedly planning to cut Social Security benefits.

     Clinton also had learned from Al Gore's failure in 1988.
Gore had scored well in the Dixie primaries, Clinton told his
aides, but then faltered because he had not developed any plan
to follow up on that success. In contrast, Clinton from the very
first had poured money and organizational effort into Illinois.
Later, against the advice of some aides, he found time on six
critical days to stump in Michigan. If he could follow up a
Southern sweep with big March victories in those important
industrial states, he figured, he could sew up the nomination.

     Almost. That strategy did knock out Tsongas, leaving only
Jerry Brown to carry the Anybody-but-Clinton banner. Brown
himself was no threat, but if he could have bloodied Clinton
enough in New York and Pennsylvania, he might have kept many
uncommitted delegates from joining Clinton, prompted some
late-starting candidates to jump in, and kept alive the
possibility of a brokered convention. At this point, however,
Clinton proved the value of having developed and touted a
comprehensive economic program. Aside from some other stupid
errors, Brown pinned all his hopes on an eccentric proposal for
a flat tax that even some of his supporters had trouble
swallowing. Clinton trounced the Californian in New York and
Pennsylvania and in effect locked up the nomination.


     THE JUNE TURNAROUND

     The nomination, but certainly not the election. By June,
Clinton's campaign had hit rock bottom. Perot had entered the
race, and for a time drew so much attention as to push Clinton
almost out of sight. While Perot rocketed in the polls, Clinton
sank to a bad third, pulling only 25%. On top of that, the
campaign had run $4 million into debt. Somewhat surprisingly,
though, that proved the easiest problem to fix. Aides whomped
up a direct-mail campaign that quickly raised the money.

     Perot was, and became again, a tougher problem. The
Governor rejected any idea of adopting a more traditionally
liberal program in hopes of holding enough of the Democrats'
core constituency -- perhaps 35% of the vote -- to eke out
victory in a three-man race. Clinton insisted on sticking with
his broadly based centrist program and was quickly -- though
temporarily -- rewarded. Not only did Perot quit the race, as
some in the Clinton camp had rather wistfully predicted; he did
it on July 16, only hours before Clinton delivered his
acceptance speech to the Democratic Convention. For good
measure, the mercurial Texan praised the way the Democratic
Party had "revitalized itself." Even after he re-entered the
campaign on Oct. 1, Perot appeared to be helping more than
hurting Clinton, who returned the favor by not attacking him and
even praised Perot for focusing public attention on the deficit.
During the debates, the Texan aimed nearly all his sharpest
barbs at Bush, while in effect defending the Democrat against
the President's attacks on the draft issue by contending that
it really no longer mattered what Clinton had done in 1969.

     Clinton and his aides made a number of other critical June
moves that pulled the campaign out of its doldrums. The
candidate issued a new economic program, titled "Putting People
First," late in the month. It served to refocus public attention
on Clinton as the candidate offering specific ideas, at the
very time Perot was coming under increasing fire for talking
only vague generalities. "Perot's biggest mistake was not
releasing a plan of his own," says a Clinton insider. "If he
had, it's possible we might have ended up being the third
candidate in the race." (Perot's advisers did eventually produce
a highly detailed plan -- but only after the Texan's July 16
dropout.)

     It was also in June that Clinton (with heavy prodding from
Hillary) reorganized his staff. Until then, the campaign
structure had so many fancy titles and overlapping duties that
decisions had to be made by consensus -- or not at all.
Carville, who admitted that he had often been "disengaged" since
the New York primary, helped shape the re-organization by doing
what for him was the unthinkable: he wrote a memo. Titled "the
Clinton Action Team," the document outlined what would become
the famous quick-response war room, designed to crank out swift
replies to any Republican charges. Clinton belatedly made it
clear that the campaign's headquarters would continue to be in
Little Rock, despite the loud objections of some aides who would
have preferred any of several more cosmopolitan locations
(Carville's choice, for example, was Atlanta). The aides now
admit that remaining in the Arkansas capital was an inspired
idea; there the campaign team operated as a self-contained
community with a gung-ho, no-frills atmosphere that some have
likened to a boot camp.

     An important personnel shift involved Susan Thomases, who
had nominally been head of Hillary Clinton's personal staff but
had annoyed others by sometimes abrasive forays onto their
turf. For example, she blamed Stan Greenberg for a poll that
included questions about Hillary's liabilities, which had led
the pollster to write a memo about "the Hillary problem."
Thomases in June was given the powerful but narrowly defined job
of campaign scheduler.

     Two largely symbolic moves in June further helped Clinton
reappear on TV in a favorable light. Addressing a meeting of
Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Clinton denounced "racist"
remarks by rap singer Sister Souljah, who had been on a panel
the day before (the remarks, which appeared to advocate killing
whites, had actually been made in an interview somewhat
earlier). Jackson, who had not been informed of what Clinton
intended to say, was furious; he decried it as a "Machiavellian"
move intended to appeal to conservative whites. The strategic
appraisal, though not the overheated rhetoric, was sound.
Clinton was in fact emphasizing his independence from the
special interests, militant blacks among them, that had seemed
to exercise so much power in the party as to frighten away many
middle-class white voters who became the famous Reagan
Democrats. Jackson's interest in keeping the fight alive,
however, was one he could not make public; in a private meeting
between the two to iron out their differences over Sister
Souljah, Clinton told Jackson that he would not be considered
for Vice President.

     Clinton went on at the convention to deftly disarm Jackson
as a potential troublemaker. Here again, the Arkansan fell into
some luck. Jackson was another of the prominent Democrats who
decided early on not to run in 1992; had he made the race and
come into the convention with the masses of delegates he
commanded in 1984 and 1988, he might easily have caused Clinton
headaches as splitting as those he gave Walter Mondale and
Michael Dukakis. But with no delegates at all this year, Jackson
could rely only on his clout as a senior black leader, and it
was not enough to mount any challenge to Clinton or even wangle
a large role at the convention or in the campaign.

     Jackson this time would not be allowed to turn one night
of the convention into a rally overshadowing in enthusiasm any
demonstration for the candidate. Blacks did put on a "Don't Mess
with Jesse" rally, but it was held at the Apollo Theater in
Harlem, safely out of view of national TV. Jackson was further
informed that he could not, as in earlier conventions, withhold
his endorsement to bargain over a campaign role. Politely and
without making any threats, party chairman Ron Brown, who had
been Jackson's 1988 convention chief, and Clinton aide (and
Jackson friend) Harold Ickes told Jackson that he would have to
obey the same rule as all other would-be convention orators:
endorse Clinton formally and in advance. No endorsement, no
speech. Grudgingly, Jackson complied and has hardly been heard
from since.

     Mandy Grunwald, Clinton's advertising consultant, had long
been pushing unconventional media appearances for the
candidate, with Clinton's ready approval. In June, Grunwald
scored her greatest success by convincing skeptics in the
campaign that the candidate should appear on the Arsenio Hall
Show -- not only to talk but to play the saxophone. Hillary
Clinton, who had been impressed with Hall ever since she saw him
handle an audience of inner-city kids in the aftermath of the
L.A. riots, strongly backed the idea; her husband went along and
began rehearsing in secret. He slipped away from the Biltmore
Hotel in Los Angeles, his headquarters during the campaign for
the California primary, to the beachfront Loews Hotel in Santa
Monica, where he tootled away on a balcony. A controversy broke
out in his entourage over whether he should or should not wear
wraparound dark glasses on the show. The final decision was not
made until Clinton was actually striding onto the stage. Paul
Begala handed Clinton his own glasses then and the candidate put
them on. The act got Clinton badly needed front-page coverage
around the country and allowed him to show the friendly, relaxed
and engaging side of his personality, which had not been much
in evidence since the early primaries.

     Whatever the exact combination of causes, Clinton was
again on a roll as the July convention approached. Having
squelched any possible controversy well in advance (with the
minor exception of some showboating by Jerry Brown and his
delegates), the candidate turned the meeting, in New York City's
Madison Square Garden, into a display of a reformed party that
had healed its incessant factional splits. It was an even better
display of the Clinton camp's to-the-last-detail planning and
iron control. Some examples: "loser's night" was scrapped. At
previous conventions this had been one more moment of glory on
prime-time TV for past Presidents, failed nominees and those
defeated in the primary campaigns, but Clinton and his team
considered it an unwanted reminder of factionalism and failure.
This year all such speakers, and any others who might have been
embarrassing, were put on outside prime time or when much of the
nation was watching baseball's All-Star Game rather than the
convention. Delegates, as they arrived on the floor Monday, were
given cue cards listing "talking points" to be made in radio,
TV or newspaper interviews, so that all Democrats would be
putting out the same message.

     The convention also illustrated -- though far offstage --
Hillary Clinton's role as something close to a co-campaign
manager for her husband. While she is not in charge of anything
specific, she gets in on many decisions, frequently helping to
cut through confusion and bring rambling discussions to a focus.
Clinton has a tendency to listen to everyone interminably and
let discussions drag. Hillary, says one of her advisers, is
frequently the one to say, "O.K., we've had enough discussion,
let's get this resolved." Betsey Wright, long Clinton's chief
of staff and now a sort of "secretary of defense" for the
campaign, formulating quick answers to any attack on Clinton's
record, adds that while Bill usually determines what needs to
be done, Hillary is often the one who sees to it that someone
specific is assigned to carry out the task. Before the
convention, Bill asked Hillary to firm up the list of speakers.
She quizzed various party officials in her prosecutorial style,
wanting to hear good arguments to justify every choice. Says
Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a Hollywood producer and friend of
Hillary's: "She's very savvy about people. She's very savvy
about what makes [Bill] look good. And she's very savvy about
the people who make him look good."

     The big decision -- the choice of a vice-presidential
candidate -- however, was Bill Clinton's alone. How he made it,
says one aide, illustrates how he is likely to make decisions
in the White House -- if he gets there. His method is to solicit
ideas from many friends and aides and often virtually to assign
a particular associate the task of arguing for or against one
particular choice. The aide in question, who had for a time been
watching Tsongas on the campaign trail, began getting
late-night calls from Clinton, who would ask, "O.K., why should
Paul Tsongas not be my running mate?" Clinton would then merely
listen, without comment, while the aide made his argument.

     Tsongas did not make the final list of six candidates:
Harris Wofford, who had pulled an enormous upset by winning a
Pennsylvania senatorial election in 1991; Florida Senator Bob
Graham; West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller; Indiana
Congressman Lee Hamilton; Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, a
war-hero opponent of Clinton's in the early primaries; and Al
Gore. The Tennessee Senator seemed an unlikely choice. A
Southerner from a neighboring state, he hardly gives the ticket
much balance, and Clinton had refused Gore's bid for support in
Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. This time, though, Clinton
developed such deep rapport with Gore in a 90-minute meeting
that he picked the Tennessean immediately. It turned out an
inspired choice. Not only Bill and Al, but Hillary and Tipper
Gore, got along so well that they campaigned for a while as a
team, impressing friendly crowds as two engaging couples on what
looked at times like a happy double date.

     The final stress of the convention was on presenting a
virtual biography of Clinton in film and speeches. It was
necessary, says Carville, because focus-group research had found
that many voters had no idea that Clinton had come from a poor
family in Hope, Arkansas, and had had an alcoholic stepfather;
they thought that a rich father had got him into politics. The
bio might have seemed corny to some observers, but it and the
thunderous reception Clinton and his family received when they
paid a dramatic visit to the convention floor on Wednesday night
put the capstone on a remarkable transformation. The candidate
who a few weeks earlier had been drawing only about a quarter
of the total vote in polls now had a lead of more than 10
points, which quickly swelled to 24 points.

     Clinton was not satisfied. He remembered vividly that
Dukakis had come out of the 1988 convention with another
impressive lead (17 points), but suffered a fatal loss of
momentum by frittering away August without doing any effective
campaigning. Thomases and campaign manager David Wilhelm pushed
the idea of the bus tours; Clinton seized on it quickly as a
means of building on the convention momentum and furthering his
penchant for unconventional campaigning. Plans for the first
tour, a six-day jaunt from New York City to St. Louis, Missouri,
were being drawn even before the convention met.

     The bus tours, which will grow to seven this Monday, were
an enormous success. They drew an unsubtle contrast between the
patrician Bush's alleged loss of contact with heartland America
and the Clinton-Gore close-to-the-people pitch. The journeys
cemented the relationship between the candidates and their
wives; as Tipper Gore put it, "We were able to tell stories and
get to know each other." They also drew huge and enthusiastic
crowds, pumped up partly by local journalists who could not
afford to fly on a campaign plane but eagerly seized on a rare
chance to follow candidates around in the flesh. Some local
radio stations took to beginning broadcasts about the day's
schedule three hours before the first turn of the wheels,
updating continually with bulletins on the tour's progress. The
enthusiasm communicated itself to the candidates, who responded
in kind; not only Clinton but Gore, who can be wooden and
repetitious in a formal setting, relaxed and campaigned in an
easy, friendly manner.


     THE END GAME

     While the Democrats barnstormed Middle America, Bush
wasted August. The President was late getting organized, late
appointing James Baker to pull his floundering campaign
together, late settling on a theme -- a good three months behind
on almost everything. In contrast to the lift Clinton got out
of the Democratic Convention, Bush got almost none from the
Republican meeting. In fact, August set a pattern that held
until almost the end of the fall campaign and very nearly turned
it from main event to nonevent. Right through the first two
debates the story was Clinton holding a big lead, Bush flailing
about futilely in an attempt to catch up.

     Clinton's debate performance was equal to the demand, if
not much more. He managed to curb his pet-student tendency to
show off all he knows and try to cram six points into an answer
to a question that really requires only two. He was dignified
and well informed, had his points in order and managed to sound
and look at least as presidential as Bush. Though Perot's
witticisms clearly won the first debate, Clinton was equally
clearly the winner of the second, partly because it followed a
format that he suggested and had already mastered: questions
from an invited studio audience of selected uncommitted voters.

     But toward the end, the candidate who had run an almost
flawless campaign since June began to coast on his lead, doing
and saying nothing to stir things up. Smelling victory, aides
began to jockey more vigorously for position, and some eyed jobs
in a Clinton Administration. But when Begala crowed to
reporters after the first debate that "it's over," an angry
candidate chastised him. And in the third and final debate, Bush
finally found a focus and intensity that had eluded him and that
he has carried into the homestretch. Perot, as maverick as
ever, was scoring with what amounted to half-hour, chart-filled
TV commercials; Bush was coming up in the polls, though not
necessarily in likely electoral votes; Clinton was campaigning
hard again, warning his followers that they dare not become so
complacent as not to vote. Though the denouement seemed newly
uncertain, two things were relatively sure: to get even this
far, given where he started, Clinton has waged a remarkable
drive. And if he does hold on to win, his campaign will enter
the textbooks as a model of how to prevail on the road to the
White House.