The Political Interest: The Self-Making of a Front Runner

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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.