When it was over, I felt elated and excited, but maybe relieved more than anything else, especially after Chelsea wisecracked, “Nice speech, Governor.” Hillary and I spent the rest of the day receiving wellwishers, and Mother, Dick, and Roger all seemed happy about it, as did Hillary’s family. Mother acted as if she knew I would win. As well as I knew her, I couldn’t be sure if it was truly how she felt or just another example of her “game face.” That night we gathered around the piano with old friends. Carolyn Staley played, just as she had done since we were fifteen. We sang “Amazing Grace” and other hymns, and lots of songs from the sixties, including “Abraham, Martin, and John,” a tribute to the fallen heroes of our generation. I went to bed believing we could cut through the cynicism and despair and rekindle the fire those men had lit in my heart.
Governor Mario Cuomo once said we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose. The statement is basically accurate, but a lot of campaigning is prose, too: putting together the nuts and bolts, going through the required rituals, and responding to the press. Day two of the campaign was more prose than poetry: a series of interviews designed to get me on television nationally and in major local markets, and to answer the threshold question of why I had gone back on my commitment to finish my term and whether that meant I was untrustworthy. I answered the questions as best I could and moved on to the campaign message. It was all prosaic, but it got us to day three.
The rest of the year was full of the frantic activity of a late-starting campaign: getting organized, raising money, reaching out to specific constituencies, and working New Hampshire. Our first headquarters was in an old paint store on Seventh Street near the Capitol. I had decided to base the campaign out of Little Rock instead of Washington. It made travel arrangements a little more complicated, but I wanted to stick close to my roots and to get home often enough to be with my family and handle official business that required my presence. But staying in Arkansas also had another big benefit: it helped our young staff keep focused on the work at hand. They weren’t distracted by the pervasive Washington rumor mill and they didn’t get too carried away by the surprisingly favorable press coverage I received early in the campaign, or too depressed by the torrent of negative press soon to come.
After a few weeks, we had outgrown the paint store and moved nearby to the old office of the Department of Higher Education, which we used until we outgrew it, too, just before the Democratic convention. Then we moved again, downtown to the
