The Last Campaign

By NANCY GIBBS

Like a weasel, Bill Clinton emerges from the drainpipe shinier than when he went in. He has spent a year in the dark, ever since that night last January when he called his slippery guru Dick Morris and asked him to take the country's moral temperature. When Morris' polling suggested that people could stomach an affair but not a cover-up, Clinton's response was his mantra. "Well, we'll just have to win then." Now, on the anniversary of that vow, the President seems to have made good on it.

After a year spent denouncing Clinton's character--the lies he told, the friends he betrayed, the garbage he collected in the campaign to save his skin--even his enemies last week were left wondering at the political skill that goes with it. The most hardened pros could scarcely imagine the assignment Clinton took on. He stood Tuesday night before an audience that included the Senators who are in the process of deciding whether all the ways he dishonored his office warrant stripping him of it--and then he flaunted its power and magic, bet the farm, promised the moon, massaged his approval ratings, and went out the very next day, even as his own lawyers were in the Senate defending him as a louse who still deserved a break, and thanked the roaring crowds of Buffalo, N.Y., for "one of the great days of my presidency."

Bill Clinton is now waging the last campaign--a multifront war to keep his job by appearing to do his job, a war in which he has enlisted lawyers, pollsters, policy advisers, Democratic lawmakers and celebrities. It doesn't matter that he will be long retired before the promises he lofted hit the ground; his poll numbers are his legacy. Even inside the White House, some heard an elegy Tuesday night. "It's like the speech you give when you know you're not getting anything passed, when you have no agenda," says an adviser. "So why not keep talking about the things you care about?"

The head-splitting spectacle--trial by day, triumph by night--inspired another round of commentary about the compartmentalized President. And so it was easy to miss the secret of his success. Maybe Bill Clinton is, in the end, the only person in this whole divisive drama who has remained intact, with a kind of wicked integrity all his own. One reason he can conduct Middle East peace talks in the morning and legal-strategy sessions at night, spray proposals on everything from digital mug shots to national parks, is that all the wild gestures and every last ploy work to the same goal--his survival, his popularity, his eternally orbiting polls.

Clinton's performance enthralled Senate Democrats to the point that Republican lawmakers conceded there was no longer a chance of finding the 67 votes needed to convict and threw open the question of whether this might all end sooner rather than later. "Clinton's won," said Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson on his 700 Club show, to the fury of many conservative allies. "They might as well dismiss the impeachment hearing and get on with something else, because it's over as far as I'm concerned." All that's left to argue is whether history will remember Clinton's gifts as reason to excuse the pain he's caused or as a reminder of how much promise he wasted.

The White House spin all year, repeated five times daily like a call to prayer, is that the President is going about the people's business, not obsessing about his legal defense. But he doesn't need to pull every lever and push every button in order to control the campaign machine. After two elections and a full year of fire by trial, says a top aide, "we know what he wants, when he wants it, and how he wants it."

The sharpest change in the President's defense last week was that after months of arguing the merits, the White House lawyers finally argued the facts--and that decision was pure Clinton. In the House proceedings, his team buried the evidence deep in their legal briefs, arguing in their rare public comments that the offenses, even if true, did not warrant impeachment. But once the prospect of a trial became real--and the President's lawyers got the time to make a variety of arguments--the direction of the defense came from Clinton himself. Lawyers Charles Ruff and David Kendall kept in touch with the President by telephone; meetings were avoided. Even upon their return from the Hill last week, Clinton simply called to thank them for their work. He was confident that his team knew how to make the most of the overall strategy. Plus, says a White House adviser of the case against the President, "he really doesn't believe he did it."

While Clinton stays focused on business during the day, he grows more expansive as the hours pass. Mornings are consumed by press events and policy briefings, the annual winter wonkathon that produces both the State of the Union speech and the budget; he can use the afternoon to think and read. White House aides are very careful to insist that he does not watch the trial as it's happening, but as one aide put it, "it's not that he's oblivious either." And at the end of the working day, the walls come down completely. Clinton carries upstairs to the residence the fat folder of policy questions and decision memos that accumulate in his In box every day, but the rest of his life is up there waiting for him. He channel surfs among news, sports and nonstop talk shows, thinks through the twisted case again and again, calls friends and supporters to gauge reaction to the day's events and, most important, checks in with his friends in the Senate.

His call list varies night to night, but among the regulars are Tom Harkin of Iowa, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, John Breaux of Louisiana and Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader. Every morning the cycle starts again, with his focus back tightly on his job, the fat folder in chief of staff John Podesta's hands, with Clinton's scribbling on every page.

The endless campaign has taken its toll, especially when it looked as if he was losing. A longtime ally recalls, only a week or so ago, a midafternoon phone call from the President. "There was a very down, discouraged sense and sound to his voice," the source says. Again and again, Clinton thought he might be home free, particularly in the joyous wake of the fall elections. But he underestimated Republican fortitude--How could they keep ignoring the polls he lives by?--and was stunned that he still hadn't managed to shut it all down. At recent public appearances, his eyes have teared up at inopportune moments--a lapse that's startlingly different from the calculated mawkishness he's known for. He has stood onstage staring into space while awaiting an introduction and has rushed from his public events at first opportunity.

But the long year's work finally paid off, especially on Capitol Hill. Democrats knew the attack on Clinton threatened them too, and that survival depended on getting past both their disdain for him and their history of mutual backstabbing. The armistice talks began after the 1996 election as an effort to heal the wounds of the divisive campaign, but it was the scandal that forced Clinton into his fellow Democrats' arms. Without them he could not survive.

So Clinton has worked the leadership hard, prescreening his proposals with Richard Gephardt and Daschle, burying porcupines like "fast-track" trade authority to maintain the peace. "A lot of this has been about keeping Gephardt happy," says a leadership source, "because they hope Gephardt will keep labor and other liberal groups happy." Every Friday senior members of the leadership staffs meet in Gephardt's conference room with White House advisers to talk about policy and message. Impeachment lurks but never sits down. "You talk about it before and you talk about it later, but the point of the meeting is to come up with an alternative message, something to put out there other than impeachment," says a participant. Says a Democratic strategist: "Defending himself against impeachment is just another part of the President's public relations operation. It's all clearly integrated."

The problem is that while the scandal may have helped Clinton generate policy ideas, it has drained his ability to get them passed. Former chief of staff Erskine Bowles has privately said that last year the White House was ready to make a swap with Republicans: Clinton would support their plan for vouchers in the D.C. school system if they would go for managed-care reform. But at the last minute he realized he couldn't, because doing so would enrage the Democrats, whose votes he needed for impeachment. And one suspects that Clinton will judge last week's State of the Union speech not by how much actually becomes law but simply by whether it gets him two more years in office.

The speech didn't linger much longer than it took to give it. But its vapors still wafted through the week as the Clintons and the Gores hit the road again to sweet, screaming, Election Day-size crowds. By the day after the speech, the Senate floor might as well have been on the ocean floor. The minister delivering the invocation at the rally in Buffalo on Wednesday extolled Clinton as "the greatest President for our people of all time." Hours later in Pennsylvania, Clinton was so jazzed by the rope line that he went back to the beginning and worked it again--four times. "We've had a good day," he told an aide late that night. "We've had several good days."

The broader Democratic Party machinery lost no time climbing aboard. People for the American Way sponsored anti-impeachment rallies in 23 cities and announced a $25,000 radio campaign in five states and in Washington to try to persuade moderate Republican Senators to join with the Democrats to shut the trial down. The Democratic National Committee organized 200 "State of the Union Watch" parties at people's homes to rally activist support. The scandal has been very good to the party: small-dollar direct-mail response in 1998 was up 53% over 1994, the last midterm year, and opinion polls have seldom shown a greater differential between the two parties in favor of the Democrats.

Those numbers were not lost on the Senators stapled to their seats as Clinton's lawyers launched their defense. The lawyers' presentation was more factual, more respectful and more effective than anything they managed in the House. The idea was to alternate sober, numbing presentations of exculpatory evidence with passionate appeals to common sense and American ideals. Ruff opened the defense with a grave dissection of the House managers' conspiracy theory. He argued that the chronology broke down--Vernon Jordan was already on a plane to Europe when Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that the Paula Jones team could question other women--so the ruling could not have triggered his meeting earlier that day to help Monica find a job. And Ruff offered the first of the week's rhetorical body blows. The former Watergate prosecutor, hunched in his wheelchair, took his case to the same battleground on which Henry Hyde had planted his flag the week before.

The House Judiciary chairman had summoned the ghosts of Normandy as witnesses to the sanctity of the "rule of law." Ruff's voice trembled as he turned that appeal back on its author. "I have no personal experience with war," he said quietly. "I have only visited Normandy as a tourist. But I do know this: my father was on Omaha Beach 55 years ago, and I know how he would feel if he were here today. He didn't fight, no one fought for one side of this case or the other. He fought, as all those did, for our country and our Constitution. As long as each of us--a manager, the President's counsel, a Senator--does his or her constitutional duty, those who fought for their country will be proud."

It fell to Gregory Craig on Wednesday to highlight the prosecution's overreaching. A perjury conviction, he argued, couldn't come down to whether Clinton lied when he said he and Monica had telephone conversations that included sexual banter "on occasion" when it was at least 17 times. He argued that the managers were coloring outside the lines when they tried to roll everything Clinton said in his January deposition into the perjury charge--even though the House specifically rejected the impeachment article charging Clinton with perjury in that deposition.

If Ruff was compelling and Craig meticulous, Cheryl Mills was a left hook. In Buffalo on Wednesday, Clinton asked top aide Doug Sosnik whether Mills had begun her presentation on the Senate floor. "Any minute," Sosnik replied. The President smiled as if he had a secret. "She's going to do great, and I think she's going to take a lot of people by surprise."

Her very presence there brought some electricity into the gaslit setting. All lemony charm and discipline, at times condescending, at times lethal in her sarcasm and breathtaking in her daring, she argued that the Senators need not fear that acquitting Clinton will harm women or civil rights; she would vouch for him. After Mills was through, Strom Thurmond, the old segregationist, came over to congratulate her. Mills' White House office quickly filled up with so many flowers from well wishers that aides joked it looked like a wedding chapel.

Like all good defense lawyers, Clinton's team sought to sow enough confusion into the House managers' case to grow a little reasonable doubt in the Senators' heads. But they could not completely smooth over some troubling parts of the case. It was hard to cast Clinton's conversations with Betty Currie as innocent refreshment of his memory rather than insidious coaching of a potential witness. As Senator Arlen Specter and others asked on Friday, how exactly would it help his memory to ask Currie questions that were all false--"I never touched her, right? We were never alone, right?"

And the conflict over what body parts he touched was not a trivial distinction: in that difference lay whether Clinton lied in his Paula Jones deposition, since under that tortured definition of sex, it did indeed matter which parts he had touched, and the President was very careful to keep his eye on the line. If the legal defense was strong enough to corral any restless Democrats, it was not enough to guarantee the six Republican votes the White House needs to adjourn the whole thing.

That job fell to Dale Bumpers, the four-term, just-retired Arkansas Senator who would come to the chamber to play the coda. The idea for his appearance, in fact, sprang from the Senate floor. Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin was troubled by how the Republican managers were like next-door neighbors who knew how to talk across the fence--even to Democrats. At the defense table, however, sat a bunch of strangers.

So Harkin spent last Sunday reaching out to old members of the club to recruit someone for the President's team. Bumpers seemed to be the perfect fit: he knows the Senators' moves and speaks their language, could give them the cover they needed to end the trial. Trouble was, Bumpers was not familiar with the minutiae of the charges. "He was very reluctant," says Harkin.

Harkin knew only the Captain could make the call. The problem was flagging Clinton on a holiday weekend. Harkin tracked down Terry McAuliffe, the President's moneyman and confidant, at his health club to run interference. Ten minutes later, McAuliffe got back to Harkin: "The President said it was a great idea, and he'll get right on it." Clinton put in the call from an AmeriCorps event on Monday.

"Dale, I need you on this," pleaded the President. Bumpers was the guy who could make all his arguments for him, channel him, excoriate him for his private shame, and then defend him for the public good. He could both embody and invoke the World War II generation in all its commonplace heroism and then gaze on its prodigal son, the generation it created that has messed things up and has to be forgiven anyway. His oration was the only part of the trial that the White House admitted Clinton watched in real time.

It took an old guy to force the audience to face the future, to remember the Speaker of the House who had voted to impeach Andrew Johnson--James G. Blaine--and later regretted how close he had brought the nation to chaos. The more Bumpers talked, from his self-mocking warm-up jokes to his seductive reminders that being a Senator is the greatest honor in the whole world, the more you could hear Clinton speaking through him, finally making the arguments he had not been able to make for himself.

This wasn't perjury and obstruction, Bumpers said; this was about concealing something Clinton was ashamed of. Nobody's perfect. Bumpers attacked the lack of proportion between crime and punishment, mocked the very notion that the President's conduct had cost him prestige around the world, rooted around the Constitution to remind them that impeachable crimes are supposed to be distinctly "political offenses against the state." The overreaching was, he scolded the House managers, the product of "wanting to win too badly."

Clinton was worried that the Senators would dismiss anything Bumpers said as the gesture of an old Arkansas crony. Bumpers took care of that by impaling him: Clinton's conduct was "indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless." He went where none of the lawyers could: into Hillary's heart, and Chelsea's, when he described a "decimated" family. And he went straight to the Senators' pride, as the body that extols reason over passion. This is the most important vote you'll ever cast, he said. "If you have difficulty because of an intense dislike of the President, and that's understandable, rise above it. He is not the issue. He will be gone. You won't."

Unless, of course, they fail to heed his advice. Earlier in the day, lawyer David Kendall had warned that extending the trial and calling witnesses would promise many more months of discovery and depositions. Bumpers held out both carrot and stick. If the Senators vote to acquit, he said, "you go immediately to the people's agenda. If you vote to convict...you're going to be creating far more havoc than he could ever possibly create. After all, he's only got two years left."

The combined defense arguments were compelling enough to trigger some quick shifting of strategy on both sides of the aisle. The clever Democratic ploy of enlisting West Virginia's Robert Byrd to offer a motion to dismiss "was a bombshell," as a Republican Senator put it. Any list of possible Democratic defectors always had Byrd's name at the top. "If Byrd is now offering a vote to dismiss, conviction really is dead."

Which leaves at least some of the 55 G.O.P. Senators wondering what they gain by pressing on much longer. But having lost the popular center long ago, they can at least keep their conservative base happy by insisting on a full trial. And so at week's end they linked arms with both the House managers and Ken Starr in the effort to debrief Monica Lewinsky even before the question of calling witnesses was resolved. Bipartisanship was shredding as the two sides bickered over all the procedural issues they had sidestepped when the trial began.

By then the Democrats were worrying about such luxuries as appearing graceful in the victory they now expect. The White House was careful not to start the victory dance; advisers were put on "gloat patrol" to avoid annoying wavering Republicans. Clinton, having again asserted his mastery of his craft, cannot be seen celebrating dismissal or acquittal in a trial that has left so much blood on the floor. "It is not our purpose to embarrass the Republican leadership," said New Jersey's Robert Torricelli. The only way out is a careful one. "This is a dance that everyone must do together," Torricelli observed, "and no one wants to step on anybody's toes."

--Reported by Jay Branegan, James Carney, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy, Viveca Novak, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington

With reporting by Jay Branegan, James Carney, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy, Viveca Novak, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington