Two case studies in narrative shaping from Bill Clinton’s career

It’s 1990. Bill Clinton is planning his presidential run. But he has a problem. He has to get reelected as governor of Arkansas.

In 1990, Clinton has a very difficult primary. He’s clearly wanting to look toward running for the Presidency. He’s now been in office—I think it’s ten years. I can’t remember the exact number of years, but he was in the fifth term. Anyway, the justification for another term was hard to figure. He had a difficult primary and he was running against a former Democrat in the general. It was a real question as to whether he could, indeed, lose. Obviously, if he lost the Governor’s race, his presidential ambitions were done. 

This is pollster Stanley Greenberg, remembering in the first of his two oral histories for UVA’s Miller Center. What can possibly be the case for a fifth term? Greenberg and Dick Morris run polling and focus groups:

I figured out a rationale that centered around not going back. It’s not important to your overall narrative, but it was focused on things he had done, including sex education, which surprised everybody, that sex education was popular in Arkansas. The Republican running was against all this and many of the education reforms.

Turn the clock back became the symbol, and it was all around the idea of, rather than him having a new agenda for his eleventh year in office—whatever it was—it was focused on not allowing the clock to be turned back on a modern Arkansas. It was effective and he won the election.

Cut to 1992, the New Hampshire primary. The Gennifer Flowers story breaks. Greenberg describes the situation:

It was James’ decision that everybody get to New Hampshire, and that we have to throw every resource—

Anyway, James at this point says, Everybody in New Hampshire.

Riley

Is that because you want to have resources to deploy there, or because there is an efficiency in having all the heads in one place to figure out how to deal with this?

Greenberg

There’s a sense that this entire candidacy could crash in a second. If we don’t do everything conceivable to save it, it’s gone. And so, enough of these conference calls all over America. Everybody get to New Hampshire.

Here’s James Carville describing the situation:

George Stephanopoulos called me. It was early in the morning and he said, “Why don’t you meet us? Why don’t you come to the airport? The governor wants you to come . . . thinks that something’s going to break today about some woman.” And I said, “Aw, shit, every day something’s going to break about some woman.” You know what I mean? I was not at all fired up about getting on a plane in January. And he said, “I think you’d better come.”

So I went. As the incoming started coming, they were out campaigning. I was in between. They were trying to tell Mrs. Clinton, who was in Georgia at the time, that the story was going to break. . . . From then until the primary, the dominant memory I have is fatigue–just being so tired and not sleeping. And the story broke, and of course they had the sort of press conference, the Gennifer Flowers press conference and the stuttering John thing. . . .

Right after that, we went on a tour down south. . . . My dominant memory in all of that is being tired. We had an event in Boston, Massachusetts. . . . I know what it feels like if you’re at a soccer game and you lose control. The media throng there was so intense that I got pinned. Maybe it was three seconds; I don’t want to exaggerate it. But I didn’t have any control. I thought I was going to be crushed. I was just sort of lifted off my feet. There was this radio guy with a little tape recorder and a mike, and he was screaming and he was crawling over the top of the crowd. And I was sitting there, and my arms were pinned, and I couldn’t move my legs. Like I said, for two or three seconds, I panicked that it was out of control–that I wasn’t just going to lose the election, but I was going to lose my life–as they say, I was going to be “taking a dirt nap” pretty soon.

The day that Mandy Grunwald went on Nightline, you had a strategy session. What was the strategy?

I think the “cash for trash,” was the sort of main thing. . . .

Who came up with the phrase “cash for trash?”

I wish I could say it was me, but I honestly don’t know.

In your book, you said it actually was Bill Clinton.

Okay, then it was. . . . The book supercedes my memory.

What was the strategy, and who came up with it?

The strategy was to say that there was a lot of money that was passing hands here. It was all odd that this was coming up around 10 days before the election. The strategy was pretty obvious, and I think the strategy worked pretty good.

When Mandy went on Nightline that night and you all were watching, what was the reaction in the campaign?

“Attagirl! Way to go!” It was good. We had pretty good points to make, and people really resent it. At one event in New Hampshire, someone there asked the question, and it was actually a journalist who sort of posed–they didn’t identify themselves — and there was a time when I thought the crowd could have turned physical.

Against the reporter?

Yes, against the reporter. If you did focus groups, if you did events, if you did anything, there was a real backlash to the whole thing

When Governor and Mrs. Clinton went on 60 Minutes, you had prepared an extensive memo for that interview. What were you trying to accomplish?

In that environment, if you let the story take its own course, it was going to be bad for you. You had to get in the middle of the story. Governor Clinton, myself, and most of the people in the campaign all shared this one thing — we were not just going to let people do what they wanted to do. If they were going to give us a chance to get on there, by God, we were going to get on there. We were going to get in the middle of it. There’s a lot of times when people have a strategy to say, “We’re just not going to participate in that sort of witch hunt here,” or something like that. That doesn’t work for very long in presidential races in the United States.

You have to fight back.

You’ve got to fight back. Yes, sir. And our strategy from day one was to contest it at every point, and to have them out there… The best person to explain what happened … was then-Governor Clinton and Mrs. Clinton. And that’s why we did the 60 Minutes thing, because it was the biggest deal out there. You had to show that you were out there, taking it on.