Bill Clinton: The Long Road

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In any case, for good or ill, Clinton the candidate is closer to Clinton the private man than almost any other campaigner of recent memory. The image the Governor projects on the stump and on TV is emphatically not designed by handlers. Clinton himself, powerfully aided by his wife Hillary, is the source of the message and the big-picture strategy. He employs speechwriters but rewrites the speeches heavily. So much so that despite the best efforts of the original drafters to shorten his acceptance speech to the July convention, it still took 55 minutes to deliver. Main reason: Clinton kept rewording their work, and every time he rewrote a passage it came out longer.

By his own testimony, Clinton began thinking about running for President as a teenager. Indications are that he started seriously pondering what would be required for a winning race early in 1987. As a successful Governor of Arkansas, he already figured in speculation, and when he summoned his closest advisers to Little Rock, he was widely expected to announce his candidacy. Instead, he announced he would not run. Gary Hart had just been driven from the race by the scandal over Donna Rice, and Clinton well knew that rumors of womanizing had been swirling around him too. By 1989 Clinton was considering the pros and cons of running for a fifth consecutive gubernatorial term in 1990: on the one hand, a sitting Governor could better raise money for a presidential bid; on the other hand, he seemed bored with state issues and worried about losing. "Every time I've run for Governor," Clinton told a reporter at the time, "it has been a referendum on the question of change versus no change. Sooner or later, the forces in this state opposed to change are bound to win."

Clinton did run and win again in 1990, and that same year he became chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist organization that gave him a platform for addressing the national press as to what kind of Democratic candidate might finally break the long Republican lock on the White House. The picture -- surprise! -- was a kind of idealized self-portrait: a nontraditionalist who could win back the alienated white middle class by repudiating tax-and-spend, something-for-nothing policies and stressing / economic growth to be achieved by heavy government investment in job-creating activities.

In late August 1991, Clinton and Hillary decided to appear together the next month at one of the weekly breakfasts hosted by Christian Science Monitor columnist Godfrey Sperling, at which influential Washington reporters question prominent politicians. One reason: they thought the rumors of infidelity might come up, and this would afford them a chance to start defusing such stories. It happened as they foresaw; they readily affirmed that their marriage had been through some shaky times, but insisted it was now rock solid. Implicit message from Clinton: Even if I did commit adultery, so what? It's in the past, and so long as Hillary is satisfied about that and will stick by me, it's no one else's business.