“Thank you…for saving me from the draft,” the letter went. On it rambled, a stream of reflections from a worried college boy who didn’t want to go to Vietnam. It was no different from thousands of such outpourings from anxious young men back in 1969, the year Bill Clinton wrote the letter. But, surfacing eight days before the New Hampshire primary in 1992, it loomed as a death notice for Clinton’s campaign.
They had eight hours left until the nightly news. Already, the candidate’s polls were in a free fall. The governor’s own surveys had shown a 20-point drop in New Hampshire, from 37 to 17 percent, thanks to fresh allegations in The Wall Street Journal that Clinton had been a draft dodger. Clutching the new bombshell letter, Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and his principal aides, Stephanopoulos and James Carville, huddled in an airport waiting room. “Oh, Bill, it’s just you!” squealed Hillary with a kind of nervous good cheer. “You must have written it at 3 in the morning. It’s like those letters we all wrote-anguished, tormented. This is what a college student writes.” Clinton listened quietly. Then, biting his lower lip, he said softly, “It’s me. I remember it.” Stephanopoulos, who was 8 years old in 1969, felt mystified by Vietnam’s ghosts. He just wished the whole issue would go away.
It was Carville, the campaign’s wily strategist and a former marine, who took charge. Like the leatherneck general who described the 1st Marine Division’s bloody retreat from Chosin Reservoir in Korea as “advancing in a different direction,” Carville announced that the campaign would take the offensive. “We are going to release this letter to every newspaper in New Hampshire,” he told Clinton. “This letter’s your best friend.” Then he marched out to the waiting ABC crew and promised that Clinton would sit down with them later.
The strategy worked. Clinton even managed to talk ABC correspondent Jim Wooten into believing that the letter didn’t amount to much of a story. Clinton went on “Nightline” two nights later and the voters, or enough of them, seemed to understand. The polls leveled off. Clinton finished a respectable second in New Hampshire, anointed himself the Comeback Kid and stayed alive long enough to go South for Super Tuesday.
Today Clinton is poised to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. His return from near oblivion is a tale of personal fortitude and shrewd strategy. New Hampshire was a defining moment for his campaign, shaping the way he ran the rest of the primary season. The “character question” could still be Clintons undoing. But if George Bush expects his likely opponent to self-destruct before November, he should consider this story of political survival.
Clinton knew from the beginning that questions about marital fidelity could ruin him. His strategy was to get the issue out without actually admitting anything, so at a Washington breakfast with reporters in September-before he’d even declared his candidacy-he and Hillary acknowledged that their marriage hadn’t always been perfect. “That ought to be enough,” Clinton added pointedly. And for a while it was: strong on substance, charismatic, from the right part of the country, the Arkansas governor was crowned Most Electable by the press. But his front-runner status invited a level of attention that was sure to dredge up old stories.
James Carville knew the inevitable had arrived when he was awakened by a phone call from deputy campaign manager Stephanopoulos at 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 16. Stephanopoulos had been given a tip: the Star, a supermarket tabloid, was about to run a story alleging that Clinton had had a 12-year affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers. There had been rumors in the press before, but the Star claimed to have tapes of conversations. Carville immediately headed to National Airport, where Clinton’s small private plane stopped en route to New Hampshire to pick him up. By the time they got to the Holiday Inn in Manchester, the tabloid’s story was coming over the hotel fax machine.
Carville reached Hillary and told her the news. “How’s Bill?” she asked. There was no scorn or sense of betrayal in her voice; she had long since accepted her husband’s past and focused on winning a political future that would reward them both. The candidate himself seemed oddly serene. In the van on the way to a campaign event, he dozed and lazily leafed through “Lincoln on Leadership.” But Hillary was fighting mad, and wanted to go public. Already Ted Koppel was calling the Clinton campaign, offering the candidate time on “Nightline” to respond. The campaign said yes, then no. Hillary was campaigning in Atlanta, making it difficult for them to appear together–one of their conditions. But the real reason was that the Flowers story didn’t make the evening news. The Clintons won some valuable time to prepare a response.
The vehicle they chose-a special episode of “60 Minutes” right after the Super Bowl-was a huge gamble: many voters would get their first view of Clinton as a man accused of cheating on his wife. At first Clinton was reluctant, but only a dramatic move could rescue his candidacy. On a TV monitor, the campaign staff watched CBS reporter Steve Kroft tape a 45-minute interview with the Clintons at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton. The tension in the small anteroom was so high that several aides began to tear up. Carville, always high-strung, wept openly. Instead of the 15 to 18 minutes Clinton was promised on the broadcast, he got nine. Aides still smart about how the network “screwed” them, editing out, they say, some of Clintons best moments (like his explanation of why he wanted to be president). Even so, the Clintons-particularly Hillary-looked strong and composed.
Carville, meanwhile, set out to shame the press. He berated every reporter he saw about “cash for trash” journalism. At a New Jersey fund-raiser, he was surrounded by reporters and cameras as he ranted. After about five minutes, a bewildered reporter asked if he was with the Clinton campaign. Carville didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, and I’m a lot more expensive than Gennifer Flowers.” Under Carville’s lash, the media backed off. Clintons favorable ratings rose to 67 percent (mostly because he was now better known) while his negatives hung, acceptably, in the low 20s. But he had been weakened. One top aide compared the Flowers episode to an infection in Clinton’s immune system.
When disaster struck again-The Wall Street Journal’s draft dodger story–the candidate was literally sick. Fighting a fever, sweating profusely, he had barely made it through a speech at a Concord, N.H., high school the day before. Clinton’s answer to the Journal story seemed plausible enough. He claimed he’d done nothing wrong, that he had dropped out of ROTC but put himself back in the draft pool. He could not have known, he said, that he would get a high draft number sparing him from military service. That night, aides hurriedly tested Clinton’s answer on focus groups in Manchester. These voters believed Clinton and chastised his critics for being unfair. His aides believed it was safe for Clinton to go home to Arkansas for a weekend of rest.
They guessed wrong. Clinton plummeted in the polls while Paul Tsongas soared. “It was meltdown, I thought,” said Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg. Clinton had been reluctant to retreat home, telling his aides, “I’ve been through a lot more campaigns than you, boys. When you’re attacked, you’ve got to push.” Now, still coughing and wheezing, he announced that he would “fight like hell.” Back onto the campaign trail he dragged along a squadron of “character witnesses” former schoolmates and Vietnam vets.
It was on his return to New Hampshire that Monday that the ABC producer appeared with the letter to the ROTC recruiter. Clinton managed to fend off the report for a while. But, in a peculiar media twist, Wooten was scooped the next day by his own colleague at ABC, Ted Koppel. Independently of Wooten, Koppel had gotten hold of Clinton’s letter. He told Clinton he thought his source might have gotten it from someone at the Pentagon. This much, at least, was good news for Clinton. Now he could go on the offensive and blame the Bush administration for smearing him.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Clinton blasted the GOP for the leak. But at 4, Koppel sheepishly called back to say he was wrong; the letter had not come from the administration after all. He wouldn’t say where it was from. In fact, he had gotten it through dumb luck. Wooten’s original source was Col. Clinton Jones, the former ROTC man who had helped get Clinton off the hook. An ABC producer made the mistake of showing the letter to a hotel clerk-who promptly faxed it to an old business partner who in turn faxed it to one of his buddies, former air force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, the Iran-contra arms dealer. Secord tipped “Nightline,” where Koppel-knowing Secord’s pedigree-assumed he had gotten the letter from the Pentagon.
Now the campaign was in deep trouble: the draft letter was public and it was not a GOP plant. In the Day’s Inn in Manchester, aides quizzed Clinton about his story. Clinton had written the letter thanking Colonel Jones on Dec. 3,1969. The draft lottery had been announced, with great fanfare, on Dec. 1. “How could he not have known his own draft number, even if he was at Oxford?” an aide asked. Clinton stuck to his version of events, but some of his aides were deeply skeptical. “I’m remembering as best I can,” he told staffers.
Clinton has been running for office, in one way or another, ever since childhood. He has a deep longing for public recognition, and the passion to seek it. His drive showed in a hot, crowded Elks Lodge in Dover, N.H., the next day, just a few hours before his scheduled appearance on “Nightline.” “This is the work of my life,” he pleaded, his voice raw. Gone was the cocky veneer of “Slick Willie.” His voice was emotional, but the body language was direct. Here I am, it said. Come and get me. That night Koppel gave Clinton a break by reading the entire three-page letter aloud on “Nightline,” an unusual act in the age of five-second sound bites. Clinton appeared earnest and sincere. When he walked off the set, aides greeted him with high-fives. He had survived-again.
For the next six days, Clinton campaigned manically. He would, without warning, stop his motorcade and plunge into shopping malls, pressing the flesh. “Find me people,” he would rasp. He was always looking for another bowling alley or Dunkin’ Donuts to work. He was eating obsessively, too. After each stop, an aide was designated to snatch away the doughnuts. At a Derry yogurt factory, Clinton settled for peach yogurt, but the quote of the day was: “What, no ice cream?” The polls continued to wobble, and within the campaign, the mood swung with them. The night before New Hampshire voted, Hillary Clinton went to bed early. She didn’t want to hear any more bad news. Clinton remained relentless to the end. Running into former Bush administration drug czar Bill Bennett at a TV station, Clinton couldn’t turn off his spiel. Finally, the conservative Republican had to break in, “Bill, you know I’m not going to vote for you!”
Even Clinton had a low moment at midnight on primary eve when he learned the polls had taken a dip. After all that work, he felt he deserved better. Yet when he finished second, he characteristically declared victory. He praised his comeback-and never congratulated the true winner, Paul Tsongas.
Seared by the crises in New Hampshire, the campaign team was shellshocked as it turned south for Super Tuesday. The Clinton organization had mustered a formidable lineup of endorsements and fund-raisers, but for the next five or six days, aides flailed around trying to retrofit Clinton as a populist. The media jeered him for sounding like warmed-over Walter Mondale. In Atlanta, the stage literally collapsed under the weight of all the establishment pols. Clinton’s comeback claim would soon be undercut by his poor showing in Maine (behind “uncommitted”) and by Bob Kerrey’s win in South Dakota. The traveling team jockeyed with Little Rock, Ark., and Washington in what seemed like one floating conference call. At a rally in Maine, harried aides squabbled over scripts backstage as Clinton soldiered on, still sick and exhausted.
The next morning, after very little sleep, Clinton was up for breakfast with supporters. Frustrated because Clinton was not yet on TV in the state, they warned he could lose to Tsongas. Clinton blasted his aides for not listening to the locals. “It violates everything I believe in,” he fumed. “You’re not running this campaign the way I want it run. You’re too slow-moving and bureaucratic.” The tongue-lashing was familiar to staffers-including the fusillade of four-letter words-and it got them moving. Within 48 hours, Clinton was on the air with his first “comparative” spot (a euphemism for negative advertising), which slowed Tsongas’s momentum by tying him to Wall Street and nuclear power.
The day before Junior Tuesday was “black Monday.” Aides worried Clinton might get only 40 percent of the vote in Georgia-not enough rocket fuel for Super Tuesday. It was Clinton’s first push for black voters, and no one knew whether they would turn out for him, especially after he accused Jesse Jackson of “backstabbing” over an open mike. Employing their instant-response strategy, Clinton’s men recruited Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson to help put out the fire. But it was Georgia Gov. Zell Miller who delivered Clinton’s 57 percent win. “He’s our John Sununu,” crowed Carville, recalling Sununu’s win in New Hampshire for Bush in ‘88. Miller was critical in keeping Southern pols on board (including Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, who got “quivery” about the draft issue). The week before the primary, Kerrey divebombed into the state with a strong attack. Miller counterpunched with his own Vietnam hero–Dodge County D.A. Jim Wiggins, who called Kerrey “soft on drugs” (because of a Senate vote against forced interdiction). Clinton’s thumping win in Georgia was a “validation process,” said Greenberg, that made it OK for Super Tuesday voters to support Clinton. Florida was billed as the big battleground between Clinton and Tsongas, but the campaigns private polls-up 14 points after Georgia-showed it was no contest.
Clinton and his entourage steamed into the Baton Rouge Hilton well after midnight on the Friday before Super Tuesday. Buoyed by numbers showing he would win big, Clinton was in no mood to sleep. “Let’s go play hearts,” he proposed, grabbing three aides for a fast-paced game that lasted until at least 3 a.m. They had finally begun to roll. Clinton held his Super Tuesday victory party in Chicago, the next target on the calendar-a trademark move that showed he was always ahead of the game. The campaign team was in a good mood as it prepared Clinton for the next debate. Advisers found it hilarious that Tsongas and Brown had both declared they would not be Clinton’s running mate. One aide cracked: “That’s like saying, ‘I wouldn’t sleep with Madonna’.”
To counter the character doubts that persisted in the Midwest, Clinton adopted “the two Fords” strategy. As Carville tells it, when the legendary Earl Long ran for governor of Louisiana in l956, one of his opponents, a Baptist deacon, sold Ford cars for a living. He was a fine fella, the kind you’d want to buy a car from, the kind you’d trust to give you a loaner if anything went wrong. But if you wanted to buy two Fords, Long would intone, the fella’s not big enough to handle the deal. “The presidency is a fleet of Fords,” Carville would tell Clinton, cracking up the candidate and reinforcing their shared belief that the race is about bigger issues than Clinton’s personal past. It will take all the moves the campaign learned in the early primaries to keep voters focused on that. And Clinton knows there will be plenty of bad moments ahead: any minute now, he expects, “buyer’s remorse” will set in, when voters realize the deal is closed-and there are no returns, no guarantees.
title: “Testing Ground” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-30” author: “Anthony Mcnabb”
“Thank you…for saving me from the draft,” the letter went. On it rambled, a stream of reflections from a worried college boy who didn’t want to go to Vietnam. It was no different from thousands of such outpourings from anxious young men back in 1969, the year Bill Clinton wrote the letter. But, surfacing eight days before the New Hampshire primary in 1992, it loomed as a death notice for Clinton’s campaign.
They had eight hours left until the nightly news. Already, the candidate’s polls were in a free fall. The governor’s own surveys had shown a 20-point drop in New Hampshire, from 37 to 17 percent, thanks to fresh allegations in The Wall Street Journal that Clinton had been a draft dodger. Clutching the new bombshell letter, Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and his principal aides, Stephanopoulos and James Carville, huddled in an airport waiting room. “Oh, Bill, it’s just you!” squealed Hillary with a kind of nervous good cheer. “You must have written it at 3 in the morning. It’s like those letters we all wrote-anguished, tormented. This is what a college student writes.” Clinton listened quietly. Then, biting his lower lip, he said softly, “It’s me. I remember it.” Stephanopoulos, who was 8 years old in 1969, felt mystified by Vietnam’s ghosts. He just wished the whole issue would go away.
It was Carville, the campaign’s wily strategist and a former marine, who took charge. Like the leatherneck general who described the 1st Marine Division’s bloody retreat from Chosin Reservoir in Korea as “advancing in a different direction,” Carville announced that the campaign would take the offensive. “We are going to release this letter to every newspaper in New Hampshire,” he told Clinton. “This letter’s your best friend.” Then he marched out to the waiting ABC crew and promised that Clinton would sit down with them later.
The strategy worked. Clinton even managed to talk ABC correspondent Jim Wooten into believing that the letter didn’t amount to much of a story. Clinton went on “Nightline” two nights later and the voters, or enough of them, seemed to understand. The polls leveled off. Clinton finished a respectable second in New Hampshire, anointed himself the Comeback Kid and stayed alive long enough to go South for Super Tuesday.
Today Clinton is poised to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. His return from near oblivion is a tale of personal fortitude and shrewd strategy. New Hampshire was a defining moment for his campaign, shaping the way he ran the rest of the primary season. The “character question” could still be Clintons undoing. But if George Bush expects his likely opponent to self-destruct before November, he should consider this story of political survival.
Clinton knew from the beginning that questions about marital fidelity could ruin him. His strategy was to get the issue out without actually admitting anything, so at a Washington breakfast with reporters in September-before he’d even declared his candidacy-he and Hillary acknowledged that their marriage hadn’t always been perfect. “That ought to be enough,” Clinton added pointedly. And for a while it was: strong on substance, charismatic, from the right part of the country, the Arkansas governor was crowned Most Electable by the press. But his front-runner status invited a level of attention that was sure to dredge up old stories.
James Carville knew the inevitable had arrived when he was awakened by a phone call from deputy campaign manager Stephanopoulos at 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 16. Stephanopoulos had been given a tip: the Star, a supermarket tabloid, was about to run a story alleging that Clinton had had a 12-year affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers. There had been rumors in the press before, but the Star claimed to have tapes of conversations. Carville immediately headed to National Airport, where Clinton’s small private plane stopped en route to New Hampshire to pick him up. By the time they got to the Holiday Inn in Manchester, the tabloid’s story was coming over the hotel fax machine.
Carville reached Hillary and told her the news. “How’s Bill?” she asked. There was no scorn or sense of betrayal in her voice; she had long since accepted her husband’s past and focused on winning a political future that would reward them both. The candidate himself seemed oddly serene. In the van on the way to a campaign event, he dozed and lazily leafed through “Lincoln on Leadership.” But Hillary was fighting mad, and wanted to go public. Already Ted Koppel was calling the Clinton campaign, offering the candidate time on “Nightline” to respond. The campaign said yes, then no. Hillary was campaigning in Atlanta, making it difficult for them to appear together–one of their conditions. But the real reason was that the Flowers story didn’t make the evening news. The Clintons won some valuable time to prepare a response.
The vehicle they chose-a special episode of “60 Minutes” right after the Super Bowl-was a huge gamble: many voters would get their first view of Clinton as a man accused of cheating on his wife. At first Clinton was reluctant, but only a dramatic move could rescue his candidacy. On a TV monitor, the campaign staff watched CBS reporter Steve Kroft tape a 45-minute interview with the Clintons at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton. The tension in the small anteroom was so high that several aides began to tear up. Carville, always high-strung, wept openly. Instead of the 15 to 18 minutes Clinton was promised on the broadcast, he got nine. Aides still smart about how the network “screwed” them, editing out, they say, some of Clintons best moments (like his explanation of why he wanted to be president). Even so, the Clintons-particularly Hillary-looked strong and composed.
Carville, meanwhile, set out to shame the press. He berated every reporter he saw about “cash for trash” journalism. At a New Jersey fund-raiser, he was surrounded by reporters and cameras as he ranted. After about five minutes, a bewildered reporter asked if he was with the Clinton campaign. Carville didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, and I’m a lot more expensive than Gennifer Flowers.” Under Carville’s lash, the media backed off. Clintons favorable ratings rose to 67 percent (mostly because he was now better known) while his negatives hung, acceptably, in the low 20s. But he had been weakened. One top aide compared the Flowers episode to an infection in Clinton’s immune system.
When disaster struck again-The Wall Street Journal’s draft dodger story–the candidate was literally sick. Fighting a fever, sweating profusely, he had barely made it through a speech at a Concord, N.H., high school the day before. Clinton’s answer to the Journal story seemed plausible enough. He claimed he’d done nothing wrong, that he had dropped out of ROTC but put himself back in the draft pool. He could not have known, he said, that he would get a high draft number sparing him from military service. That night, aides hurriedly tested Clinton’s answer on focus groups in Manchester. These voters believed Clinton and chastised his critics for being unfair. His aides believed it was safe for Clinton to go home to Arkansas for a weekend of rest.
They guessed wrong. Clinton plummeted in the polls while Paul Tsongas soared. “It was meltdown, I thought,” said Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg. Clinton had been reluctant to retreat home, telling his aides, “I’ve been through a lot more campaigns than you, boys. When you’re attacked, you’ve got to push.” Now, still coughing and wheezing, he announced that he would “fight like hell.” Back onto the campaign trail he dragged along a squadron of “character witnesses” former schoolmates and Vietnam vets.
It was on his return to New Hampshire that Monday that the ABC producer appeared with the letter to the ROTC recruiter. Clinton managed to fend off the report for a while. But, in a peculiar media twist, Wooten was scooped the next day by his own colleague at ABC, Ted Koppel. Independently of Wooten, Koppel had gotten hold of Clinton’s letter. He told Clinton he thought his source might have gotten it from someone at the Pentagon. This much, at least, was good news for Clinton. Now he could go on the offensive and blame the Bush administration for smearing him.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Clinton blasted the GOP for the leak. But at 4, Koppel sheepishly called back to say he was wrong; the letter had not come from the administration after all. He wouldn’t say where it was from. In fact, he had gotten it through dumb luck. Wooten’s original source was Col. Clinton Jones, the former ROTC man who had helped get Clinton off the hook. An ABC producer made the mistake of showing the letter to a hotel clerk-who promptly faxed it to an old business partner who in turn faxed it to one of his buddies, former air force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, the Iran-contra arms dealer. Secord tipped “Nightline,” where Koppel-knowing Secord’s pedigree-assumed he had gotten the letter from the Pentagon.
Now the campaign was in deep trouble: the draft letter was public and it was not a GOP plant. In the Day’s Inn in Manchester, aides quizzed Clinton about his story. Clinton had written the letter thanking Colonel Jones on Dec. 3,1969. The draft lottery had been announced, with great fanfare, on Dec. 1. “How could he not have known his own draft number, even if he was at Oxford?” an aide asked. Clinton stuck to his version of events, but some of his aides were deeply skeptical. “I’m remembering as best I can,” he told staffers.
Clinton has been running for office, in one way or another, ever since childhood. He has a deep longing for public recognition, and the passion to seek it. His drive showed in a hot, crowded Elks Lodge in Dover, N.H., the next day, just a few hours before his scheduled appearance on “Nightline.” “This is the work of my life,” he pleaded, his voice raw. Gone was the cocky veneer of “Slick Willie.” His voice was emotional, but the body language was direct. Here I am, it said. Come and get me. That night Koppel gave Clinton a break by reading the entire three-page letter aloud on “Nightline,” an unusual act in the age of five-second sound bites. Clinton appeared earnest and sincere. When he walked off the set, aides greeted him with high-fives. He had survived-again.
For the next six days, Clinton campaigned manically. He would, without warning, stop his motorcade and plunge into shopping malls, pressing the flesh. “Find me people,” he would rasp. He was always looking for another bowling alley or Dunkin’ Donuts to work. He was eating obsessively, too. After each stop, an aide was designated to snatch away the doughnuts. At a Derry yogurt factory, Clinton settled for peach yogurt, but the quote of the day was: “What, no ice cream?” The polls continued to wobble, and within the campaign, the mood swung with them. The night before New Hampshire voted, Hillary Clinton went to bed early. She didn’t want to hear any more bad news. Clinton remained relentless to the end. Running into former Bush administration drug czar Bill Bennett at a TV station, Clinton couldn’t turn off his spiel. Finally, the conservative Republican had to break in, “Bill, you know I’m not going to vote for you!”
Even Clinton had a low moment at midnight on primary eve when he learned the polls had taken a dip. After all that work, he felt he deserved better. Yet when he finished second, he characteristically declared victory. He praised his comeback-and never congratulated the true winner, Paul Tsongas.
Seared by the crises in New Hampshire, the campaign team was shellshocked as it turned south for Super Tuesday. The Clinton organization had mustered a formidable lineup of endorsements and fund-raisers, but for the next five or six days, aides flailed around trying to retrofit Clinton as a populist. The media jeered him for sounding like warmed-over Walter Mondale. In Atlanta, the stage literally collapsed under the weight of all the establishment pols. Clinton’s comeback claim would soon be undercut by his poor showing in Maine (behind “uncommitted”) and by Bob Kerrey’s win in South Dakota. The traveling team jockeyed with Little Rock, Ark., and Washington in what seemed like one floating conference call. At a rally in Maine, harried aides squabbled over scripts backstage as Clinton soldiered on, still sick and exhausted.
The next morning, after very little sleep, Clinton was up for breakfast with supporters. Frustrated because Clinton was not yet on TV in the state, they warned he could lose to Tsongas. Clinton blasted his aides for not listening to the locals. “It violates everything I believe in,” he fumed. “You’re not running this campaign the way I want it run. You’re too slow-moving and bureaucratic.” The tongue-lashing was familiar to staffers-including the fusillade of four-letter words-and it got them moving. Within 48 hours, Clinton was on the air with his first “comparative” spot (a euphemism for negative advertising), which slowed Tsongas’s momentum by tying him to Wall Street and nuclear power.
The day before Junior Tuesday was “black Monday.” Aides worried Clinton might get only 40 percent of the vote in Georgia-not enough rocket fuel for Super Tuesday. It was Clinton’s first push for black voters, and no one knew whether they would turn out for him, especially after he accused Jesse Jackson of “backstabbing” over an open mike. Employing their instant-response strategy, Clinton’s men recruited Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson to help put out the fire. But it was Georgia Gov. Zell Miller who delivered Clinton’s 57 percent win. “He’s our John Sununu,” crowed Carville, recalling Sununu’s win in New Hampshire for Bush in ‘88. Miller was critical in keeping Southern pols on board (including Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, who got “quivery” about the draft issue). The week before the primary, Kerrey divebombed into the state with a strong attack. Miller counterpunched with his own Vietnam hero–Dodge County D.A. Jim Wiggins, who called Kerrey “soft on drugs” (because of a Senate vote against forced interdiction). Clinton’s thumping win in Georgia was a “validation process,” said Greenberg, that made it OK for Super Tuesday voters to support Clinton. Florida was billed as the big battleground between Clinton and Tsongas, but the campaigns private polls-up 14 points after Georgia-showed it was no contest.
Clinton and his entourage steamed into the Baton Rouge Hilton well after midnight on the Friday before Super Tuesday. Buoyed by numbers showing he would win big, Clinton was in no mood to sleep. “Let’s go play hearts,” he proposed, grabbing three aides for a fast-paced game that lasted until at least 3 a.m. They had finally begun to roll. Clinton held his Super Tuesday victory party in Chicago, the next target on the calendar-a trademark move that showed he was always ahead of the game. The campaign team was in a good mood as it prepared Clinton for the next debate. Advisers found it hilarious that Tsongas and Brown had both declared they would not be Clinton’s running mate. One aide cracked: “That’s like saying, ‘I wouldn’t sleep with Madonna’.”
To counter the character doubts that persisted in the Midwest, Clinton adopted “the two Fords” strategy. As Carville tells it, when the legendary Earl Long ran for governor of Louisiana in l956, one of his opponents, a Baptist deacon, sold Ford cars for a living. He was a fine fella, the kind you’d want to buy a car from, the kind you’d trust to give you a loaner if anything went wrong. But if you wanted to buy two Fords, Long would intone, the fella’s not big enough to handle the deal. “The presidency is a fleet of Fords,” Carville would tell Clinton, cracking up the candidate and reinforcing their shared belief that the race is about bigger issues than Clinton’s personal past. It will take all the moves the campaign learned in the early primaries to keep voters focused on that. And Clinton knows there will be plenty of bad moments ahead: any minute now, he expects, “buyer’s remorse” will set in, when voters realize the deal is closed-and there are no returns, no guarantees.
