Bill Clinton: The Long Road

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Clinton was to go on Nightline that evening to defend the letter. But he insisted on going through with a rally at Elks Club Lodge No. 184 in Dover, New Hampshire, only three hours before his scheduled appearance. Many another politician would have canceled the appearance or mumbled through a standard stump speech. Clinton, his voice hoarse, told an audience of about 300 supporters that if they would stick with him through that trial, "I'll remember you until the last dog dies." It was a deeply emotional appeal that those present recall with awe, and an example of the sheer persistence and indomitable will that enabled him to survive that crucial first primary.

What Clinton did not accomplish, however, was to put the draft issue to rest. His statements in New Hampshire were the first of a long series of incomplete and sometimes conflicting remarks that were to continue piecemeal throughout the campaign. In April aides urged him to call a press conference at which he would answer questions until reporters had nothing left to ask; he refused, in what now appears to have been a major blunder. Clinton did eventually develop a fairly effective answer of sorts: right through the fall debates with Bush and Perot, he has argued that voters should be far more concerned with how a candidate proposes to heal the ailing economy than with "character" issues. Many indeed are, and the Gennifer Flowers episode has apparently settled into a larger perspective. But the draft issue still continues to fuel a widespread distrust of Clinton.

Even in New Hampshire, Clinton only survived. Though he described himself on primary night as "the Comeback Kid," he ran second with 25% of the vote. The winner, Tsongas, went on to victories in Massachusetts and Maryland, and for a while was thought likely to come close in Georgia and possibly even win Florida. Strategist Carville says that shortly after New Hampshire "I was just as scared as I have ever been in politics." Tsongas, however, was already running out of money and energy; reporters who traveled on his campaign plane still remember how utterly exhausted he looked.

Clinton had always been favored to win the cluster of Southern and Border State primaries in early March, since that was his home region. In Florida he showed a harsh streak in his character, assailing Tsongas most unfairly -- but effectively -- for supposedly planning to cut Social Security benefits.

Clinton also had learned from Al Gore's failure in 1988. Gore had scored well in the Dixie primaries, Clinton told his aides, but then faltered because he had not developed any plan to follow up on that success. In contrast, Clinton from the very first had poured money and organizational effort into Illinois. Later, against the advice of some aides, he found time on six critical days to stump in Michigan. If he could follow up a Southern sweep with big March victories in those important industrial states, he figured, he could sew up the nomination.