Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/111692/1116999.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 44

ELECTION `92

The Final 48 Hours


He didn't need it, but Clinton's end game was a bleary-eyed,
sleepless blitz through 14 cities and 5,000 miles

By WALTER SHAPIRO/LITTLE ROCK


    Never again would Bill Clinton's horizons be this
constricted. For the final two days of the campaign, Clinton's
life was reduced to the bare essentials -- takeoffs, landings,
speeches and the near absolute certainty (though he would never
publicly admit it) that he would be the next President of the
United States.

    Presidential candidates had pushed themselves to the brink
before, but almost always in quest of a narrow victory or
fleeing from the ghosts of humiliation. Clinton was different;
he did it, regardless of the buoyant polls, largely because he
wanted to. Few political odysseys could rival Clinton's 48-hour,
sleep-defying, time zone-girdling, voice-croaking campaign
climax. From Cincinnati last Sunday morning to Little Rock at
10:30 a.m. on Election Day, the Clinton Exhaustion Tour covered
5,000 miles and 14 cities. An hour-by-hour chronicle:

    11:50 a.m. Sunday, Cincinnati, Ohio: The final gauntlet
began in the drizzle outside Riverfront Stadium a few hours
before a Bengals game. The previous night, the Clinton camp had
lost an almost irreplaceable resource: the candidate's voice.
By early Sunday morning Clinton was, as issues director Bruce
Reed put it, "the real candidate of the Silent Majority."
Taking the stage, he sounded like Marlon Brando in The Godfather
and spoke for 21 seconds, a personal record for brevity. "Bad.
It's bad," he gasped. "I'm going to let Hillary say something."
She delivered a brief speech filled with the pronoun "we."
Afterward a reporter cracked to a Clinton aide, "I thought Mrs.
Wilson's speech was fine," a snide reference to the last year
of Woodrow Wilson's second term when the invalid President ceded
much official power to his wife.

    2:50 p.m., en route to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania:
Campaign director Bruce Lindsey explained what the near mute
Clinton did when he was alone with aides. "He talks," Lindsey
said with bemused resignation. "He can't, but that's what he
does. He talks anyway."

    9:15 p.m., East Rutherford, New Jersey: Before Clinton
spoke at a star-studded rally at the Meadowlands, aides told the
press Hillary would go by herself to the final rally of the
evening at the Garden State Racetrack in Cherry Hill, New
Jersey. Strategist Paul Begala had tried to lay down the law:
"Governor," he told Clinton, "your voice is gone. Hillary can
do it." But no one could dissuade Clinton. Pumped up after
giving an eight-minute speech, with his voice hoarse but not
cracking, Clinton told Begala, "I want to go to the racetrack
thing. I won't talk. I'll only shake hands."

    12:15 a.m. Monday, Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Clinton's bus
brigade crossed the finish line at the Garden State Racetrack
as they drove into an exuberant fireworks-and-fanfare rally. As
promised, the candidate shook hands -- hundreds of them -- and
played a four-bar break on the saxophone with the Dovells, a
local 1960s group. But Clinton could not resist speaking for
five minutes. Before leaving the raceway, Clinton posed in the
cold rain with a two-year-old trotter named Bubba Clinton, who
had won a race earlier that week at the long-shot odds of 37 to
1. Asked what the horse had told him, Clinton said, "Just run
hard."

    2 a.m., Philadelphia: Bliss, rapture. Four (count them)
hours in the Warwick Hotel to indulge in exotic luxuries like
taking a shower or sleeping on a bed.

    7:50 a.m., northeastern Philadelphia: As Clinton shook
hands outside the Mayfair Diner, Begala marveled, "He's clearly
the hardest-working man in show business. That's my rule:
politics is show business for ugly people."

    2:30 p.m., en route to Cleveland, Ohio: Seated in her
front-row seat on the campaign plane, Hillary Clinton allowed
herself to talk about victory. "I've always been certain Bill
was going to win." Harking back to her first campaign as a
teenager (she was a 1964 supporter of Barry Goldwater), Hillary
explained, "I know enough about failed campaigns to recognize
the averted eyes and the missed handshakes." For both Clintons,
there is a symbolic importance in the relentless campaigning.
"The image of his resilience," she said, "his fighting for
change, working until the last minute, is the image he wants to
leave the country with."

    The Clintons had turned their reclining front seats (Bill
took the window) into a lilliputian hideaway, with a blue
sliding curtain for privacy and the kind of mementos a college
student might use to personalize a dorm room. Clinton had
decorated the crimson fabric that covers the plane's front wall
with dozens of campaign buttons, almost as a way of reminding
himself in private moments that the campaign was real. The small
floor area was filled with stuffed animals, the kind of cuddly
objects that provide comfort at moments of stress. On the
candidate's seat was his current paperback mystery, Private
Eyes, in which the detective is a child psychologist and
children's advocate.

    When Clinton returned to the plane from his latest round
of handshaking, he talked with aides about his chances of
equaling George Bush's 1988 rout of Michael Dukakis. "Bush took
40 states with 54%," Clinton rattled off like a small boy
recalling baseball averages. "I don't think we'll do quite that
well." Asked how he was feeling, he replied, "I feel fine.
Tomorrow I'll probably feel terrible."

    11:30 p.m., McAllen, Texas: Bush stopped campaigning two
hours ago, but Clinton still had five speeches to go. Toward the
end of this one, Clinton's voice started growing so
enthusiastic that he said, "I'm having a good time -- I might
give another speech."

    Instead Clinton wandered past the airplane's kitchen (the
dividing line between the Clinton area and the press) to chat
with reporters, periodically letting loose a yawn. He took the
Texas results personally (he lost) as a measure of his judgment
as a de facto campaign manager. His passion for Texas dates back
to 1972, when he managed George McGovern's campaign in the
state. "I always thought we had a chance here," Clinton said,
"but the weight of opinion in my campaign was that we had a
better chance in densely packed states like New Jersey."

    1:15 a.m. Tuesday, Fort Worth, Texas: Clinton delighted in
telling the crowd, "It will be nice for you not to have a
President who has an accent. When you hear me talk and Mr. Bush
talk, who's more like you?" Watching Clinton handshake his way
down a rope line, an irreverent thought gathered momentum: Why
does Clinton believe any voter who has come to the airport to
hear a speech at 1 a.m. on Election Day requires further wooing
with a handshake? If these are not sure Clinton voters, then
who was? Perhaps this whole sleep-deprivation experiment said
more about Clinton's need for adulation than it did for any
electoral-vote strategy.

    2 a.m., en route to Albuquerque, New Mexico: Clinton again
wandered back to chat with a knot of reporters. This time the
topic was primarily mango-chutney ice cream, a San Antonio
specialty Clinton loves. Somehow this candidate on the cusp of
victory conjured up the macabre memory that his first taste of
mango-chutney had come the night before he drove former House
majority leader Hale Boggs, campaigning in Texas for McGovern,
to the airport for what was to be a fatal airline trip to
Alaska.

    2:10 a.m.: The flight attendant announced, "The flying
time to Little Rock is . . ." Cheers filled the plane. Then she
corrected, "I'm sorry, it's Albuquerque." In the front of the
plane, Clinton, the late-night policy wonk, was actually talking
to aides about converting cars to natural gas.

    3 a.m.: The plane landed in 40 degreesF weather to the
sight of about 5,000 Clinton true believers at an airport rally.
Many had been waiting since midnight, but they would have to
endure another 28 minutes. Clinton had gone into the bathroom
to change his shirt, said an aide, "and I think he fell asleep
in there."

    "Thank you, New Mexico," Clinton began, as he sailed into
a greatest-hits reprise of his stump speech. But he also
sounded a new note that aides said was designed to lower voter
expectations of a Clinton Camelot after the election: "I'm here
to tell you we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't
get out of it overnight." By the time Clinton left Albuquerque
around 4 a.m., the first polls were open on the East Coast.

    6:30 a.m., Denver: This was unexpectedly an anticlimax;
the predicted five inches of snow turned out to be only a light
dusting, and the crowd, though intense, was small. In a poetic
sense, the 13-month Clinton odyssey should have ended in
Albuquerque before finally heading home.

    7:45 a.m.: The flight attendant announced, "I want to
welcome you aboard the final flight of the day aboard Air
Elvis." Begala exuded confidence that even if Clinton were to
lose all six toss-up states, he would still prevail in the
Electoral College. Then Begala mentioned Return to Earth, the
autobiography in which astronaut Buzz Aldrin discussed his
emotional problems after he left NASA. Referring to Aldrin,
Begala said, "What do you do when you achieve your life's
ambition at age 35?" Begala, 31, had just helped elect the
President of the U.S.

    10:30 a.m., Little Rock, Arkansas: Someone with a voice
uncannily similar to that of a certain large Governor of a small
state commandeered the internal p.a. system just seconds after
the Clinton plane landed. "We will be taking off again for
three more stops," the voice announced with an assumption of
authority. "It'll be a little awkward, since we are going to the
A's we missed. We are going to Alabama, then we're going to go
to Arizona, and then we're going to make one quick stop in Nome
before coming home to finally give you a rest."

    10:43 a.m.: Clinton, flanked by his daughter Chelsea (who
had just boarded the plane) and Hillary, came down the ramp
onto the tarmac in Little Rock. A practiced observer would
recognize that there was something altered in Clinton's stride,
perhaps more than just an effect of fatigue. He put his full
weight into every step, as if to underline the gravity of the
moment and the heavy burdens he expected soon to bear.