The Political Interest

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?"