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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.6 KB | 210 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

THE POLITICAL INTEREST

The Self-Making of a Front Runner


By Michael Kramer


    Only the brave or the foolish play golf in 30 degrees
weather, but Bill Clinton needed some release -- nine quick
holes at the Little Rock Country Club last Wednesday. In jeans
and a windbreaker, Clinton raced around the course, offering a
running (and occasionally profane) commentary on his erratic
game and long stream-of-consciousness rambles about health care
and tax policy, two of the issues he hopes to master well enough
to carry him to the White House. As he recharged himself
physically, his mind remained squarely on the prize, and
especially on how exactly he intends to get it.

    It is a rule of journalism (and of life itself, I suppose)
that you do not ask hard questions at the top of a man's
backswing. So I waited until Clinton had parred the 440-yd.
eighth hole, where the green had been spray-painted with the
words CLASS WAR. THE POOR WILL RISE. Clinton's comment, "I hope
they do," seemed like a decent opening, and I asked if he knew
that the wife of a Bush Cabinet member had told some friends
that the Republicans had "the goods" on Clinton's alleged
womanizing but wouldn't pounce until the general election
campaign. "Yep," said Clinton, who then detailed every other
"bogus, smoking bimbo" allegation he's heard for over a decade.
Clinton and his wife Hillary have already described their
16-year marriage as less than "perfect" (an admission of
something), but the most interesting part of Clinton's analysis
involved a political calculation. "I wish I could find a way to
get all these stories out early so I don't have to deal with
them after I'm nominated, when they can be so distracting."

    Clinton's prayer was answered a day later, when the Star,
a supermarket tabloid, revived old charges by Larry Nichols, a
former Arkansas state employee fired for misusing his official
telephone to assist the Nicaraguan contras. In 1990 Nichols
named five women Clinton allegedly slept with, but all five
denied the rumors again last week, and Nichols himself was
recently quoted as saying, "I have my own agenda. ((Clinton))
roasted me" and now "everything I do will be done to run him out
of the state." Having "it come out again now is fine," says a
Clinton aide, "and the refutations inoculate us. Unless someone
has a video, you have to see us home free."

    In considering the timing rather than the substance of
negative charges, Clinton revealed his essence. Beyond being
both the candidate and his campaign's top policy analyst,
Clinton is also chief strategist and tactician, the
nuts-and-bolts mastermind of his own race for the presidency,
an office he has been preparing to occupy for "at least 10
years," largely by learning from the losses of Democratic
wannabes. So while luck has played a role -- Clinton's
competitors have yet to catch on, heavy hitters like Jesse
Jackson and Mario Cuomo chose not to run, and the end of the
cold war makes it less important that a candidate demonstrate
foreign policy expertise -- the fact that Clinton leads the
Democratic pack in New Hampshire is hardly accidental. Clinton
may not win, and he may not deserve to; he has yet to prove that
he would be a competent President. But if he stumbles, whoever
emerges could do worse than hire Clinton as his manager. Here,
then, is the candidate as calculator.

    Clinton's first tactic was to elevate substance over
personality: "I decided it was critical to deal with the
`Where's the beef?' question before trotting out my personal
life story." Clinton realized that a recession-plagued nation
was "eager for specific answers" and that Nebraska Senator Bob
Kerrey, whom he considers his main opponent, was "taking the
other tack, running on his biography before even attempting to
detail what he would do. He's doing what Al Gore did in '88.
Gore entered the race without having his message down, so he was
pigeonholed as having none. By the time he got it together, he
was seen as just a Southern candidate who didn't know what he
wanted to do."

    Clinton's other insight involved insurance. "We all make
mistakes and hit rough patches," he says. "If you have a
detailed program that causes people to believe you have a core,
then when you make mistakes or have to account for past ones,
they will let it slide. They'll even let you add two-and-two to
five now and then. If you can't point to some heft behind you
as a cushion, the voters think you're just the sum of your
advisers' rhetoric and that you can't even get that right.
That's why I'm often too specific. I know I have to work more
to connect with an overarching vision, but I need the specifics
in back for when things don't go well."

    Minor but significant moves were equally well planned.
Clinton released his year-end fund-raising report weeks before
the law required. Forced to do the same, the other candidates
published tallies that showed Clinton far ahead in the money
race, further feeding the impression of a Clinton surge
following his victory in the Dec. 15 Florida straw poll. Clinton
has also encouraged hostile questions simply to strut his
dexterity. At a November meeting of Democratic state leaders,
the Washington state chairwoman, after speaking with a Clinton
adviser, asked if the candidate was a neo-Republican. The
unsurprised Clinton drew strong applause by evoking his
grandfather's near religious devotion to Franklin Roosevelt.

    As the custodian of his own image, Clinton pores over the
text and visuals for the television spots currently blanketing
New Hampshire. The first was "easy," he says. "It conformed to
the strategy." The 60-second spot ran through Clinton's
proposals for reviving the economy and invited voters to visit
their libraries to read the "Clinton Plan." He is now going
further. The 15-page paper is being mailed to every registered
voter in New Hampshire.

    His issues and positions are the product of careful
polling. For the most part, they are strikingly congruent with
the concerns most people say they are interested in, like
requiring able-bodied people on welfare to work for their
assistance and offering college loans in return for community
service. Fashioning an easily understood plan for national
health insurance is the last major volley in Clinton's blitz.
To defuse an anticipated attack from Kerrey, who has made health
care his strongest issue, Clinton was expected to release his
program this week.

    Strategy for the debates has also been carefully
calculated. "In the first, where some said I was too laid back,
it was my intention to have people begin to conceive of me as
sitting in the Oval Office," says Clinton. "That required not
fighting with the other guys and trying to keep my answers short
and cogent." Now, he says, "it's time to change. With everyone
hitting me, it's time for hardball, to show that I can stand up.
This is especially crucial since you're hearing that I am too
cautious." Beating the "too-cautious" rap explains why Clinton's
second TV strike is a 30-second attack on congressional pay
raises, a thinly veiled jab at Kerrey and Iowa Senator Tom
Harkin, both of whom voted for the salary increases.

    Pouring resources into Illinois, whose March 17 primary
comes a week after Super Tuesday, where Southern contests
predominate, further reflects Clinton's having gone to school
on Gore's failure. "Gore couldn't show any foot outside the
South," says Clinton. "I have to, and the decision had to be
made before things began to break well in New Hampshire. The
Michigan primary is also on that day, but I figured Harkin, with
his auto-workers support, would take that one. So Illinois was
it" -- and Clinton's is the best organized operation there.

    The most impressive example of Clinton's influencing luck
was his decision to avoid bashing Mario Cuomo after Cuomo
struck at Clinton's hard-nosed welfare-reform stands. "Everybody
wanted me to go after Cuomo to define myself as the
alternative," he says, "but that risked my being tagged as the
conservative candidate. Besides, while all the evidence
suggested that Mario would run, I wasn't absolutely sure that
he would, and I didn't want to do or say anything that might
goad him into the race."

    Clinton is as superstitious as most politicians, but he
has already considered the possibility of an early lock on the
Democratic nomination. "The trick would be to keep the campaign
expanding when I've won mathematically," he says. "The tendency
is to close down and exclude those whose support you'll need in
the fall," primarily because the original members of a winning
candidate's team never want to share power. "You've got to guard
against that," says Clinton, "but it's manageable." The
downside? "If you win quickly, you've probably not been
sufficiently tested, and then you're even more vulnerable to the
Republicans' negative blitzkrieg later. You should have every
negative in your record explored during the primaries." More
importantly, he adds, "adversity helps. People want to see how
you handle yourself when things blow up."

    The general campaign is a distant dream, but Clinton is
assiduously pursuing his centrist lines so he can avoid being
perceived as tacking back from a more liberal stance. "You're
killed if you look expedient," he says, "and killed if you're
caught too clearly tailoring your message for different
audiences" -- which explains why Clinton tells the Republicans
he's courting that he will pay for a middle-class tax break by
raising the wealthy's tax rates.

    Clinton identifies his main worry simply: "Against a
sitting President, and as someone from a small state who isn't
well known, the big deal is having people become comfortable
with someone who's just come into their lives." But it is
obvious that Clinton can't wait. Last week Clinton read a New
York Times piece detailing George Bush's foray into New
Hampshire, replete with examples of the President's tortured
rhetoric. After seeing Bush's answer to a question about
extending unemployment benefits ("If a frog had wings, he
wouldn't hit his tail on the ground -- too hypothetical"),
Clinton said, "Oh it'll be fun. Sometimes I have to remember
I've got to beat the other guys first."

    Whatever strategy Clinton pursues in a race against Bush
-- and he probably wrote a hundred-page scenario years ago --
it isn't hard to conceive of a debate in which, after listening
to a Bushism, the candidate turns a practiced, quizzical look on
the President and drawls, "Say what?"