The Long Road

ONLY 20 MONTHS AGO, GEORGE BUSH was basking in the glow of the Gulf War victory and enjoying the highest approval ratings ever recorded. That he might even stand a chance of losing the presidency seemed improbable; that he might lose to the young (just 44 at the time), virtually unknown Governor of one of the smallest and poorest states in the nation -- well, nobody would have believed it. Yet as the campaign moved into its final week, despite some tightening of the polls, that was precisely what seemed likely to happen.

That Clinton has in fact come so close might easily be ascribed primarily to luck. After all, the heftiest Democrats -- men like Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen and Dick Gephardt -- decided to sit the election out, leaving Clinton to battle a field of second-stringers for the nomination. Ross Perot, having done much to focus voter discontent with Bush, abruptly pulled out of the race in July, dramatically boosting Clinton's lead in the polls during the Democratic Convention. Bush helped Clinton by handing his own convention over to right- wing extremists and by running a clumsy, unfocused campaign until he hit his stride in the final weeks. Perhaps the greatest stroke of luck for Clinton is that the economic upturn that could have buried his candidacy never materialized.

But Bill Clinton's rise is also the story of a single-minded candidate with a strong sense of message, an indefatigable will and an intuition for the irrational in politics. He is, as adviser Harold Ickes says, "his own campaign manager." He deserves credit for wise decisions such as sticking with his centrist economic program rather than shifting to a more traditionally liberal appeal, and also deserves blame for blunders such as rejecting his aides' advice to call a let-it-all-hang-out press conference to defuse the issue of how he escaped the Vietnam draft. Clinton had many chances to blow it all, and came close to doing so at least twice: during the New Hampshire primary campaign, when he dropped 13 points in four days, to the edge of extinction; and in June, when he had the Democratic nomination locked up but was running behind Perot as well as Bush. In early February columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that "mainline Democratic politicians" considered Clinton to be "one of the walking dead who sooner or later will keel over." That sentiment would be repeated many times until the late-summer polls gave it the lie.

THE RESIDUE OF DESIGN

Instead of keeling over, Clinton went on to prove as few candidates ever have the truth of baseball mogul Branch Rickey's observation that "luck is the residue of design." And design is indeed the word: careful planning going back many years enabled the Governor to position himself adroitly even before his official entry into the race and to develop a strategy both for capitalizing on his breaks and for overcoming the assaults on his character and trustworthiness that, several times, nearly did him in.

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