I had never seen anything like the sustained enthusiasm the bus trips engendered. Of course, part of it was that people in small towns weren’t accustomed to seeing presidential candidates up close—places like Coatesville, Pennsylvania; Centralia, Illinois; Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin; Walnut Grove, California; Tyler, Texas; Valdosta, Georgia; and Elon, North Carolina. But mostly it was the connection our bus made between the people and the campaign. It represented both the common touch and forward progress. In 1992, Americans were worried but still hopeful. We spoke to their fears and validated their enduring optimism. Al and I developed a good routine. At each stop, he would list all of America’s problems and say, “Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down.”
Then he would introduce me and I’d tell people what we intended to do to fix it. I loved those bus tours. We motored through sixteen states and in November won thirteen of them. After the first bus tour, one national poll showed me with a two-to-one lead over President Bush, but I didn’t take it too seriously because he hadn’t really started to campaign. He began in the last week of July, with a series of attacks. He said that my plan to trim defense increases would cost a million jobs; that my health-care plan would be a government-run program “with the compassion of the KGB”; that I wanted “the largest tax increase in history”; and that he would set a better “moral tone” as President than I would. His aide Mary Matalin edged out Dan Quayle in the race for the campaign’s pit bull, calling me a “sniveling hypocrite.” Later in the campaign, with Bush sinking, a lot of his careerist appointees started leaking to the press that it was anybody’s fault but theirs. Some of them were even critical of the President. Not Mary. She stood by her man to the end. Ironically, Mary Matalin and James Carville were engaged and soon would be married. Although they were from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they were equally aggressive true believers whose love added spice to their lives, and whose politics enlivened both the Bush campaign and mine.
In the second week of August, President Bush persuaded James Baker to resign as secretary of state and return to the White House to oversee his campaign. I thought Baker had done a good job at State, except on Bosnia, where I felt the administration should have opposed the ethnic cleansing more vigorously. And I knew he was a good politician who would make the Bush campaign more effective. Our campaign needed to be more effective, too. We had won the nomination by organizing around the primary schedule. Now that the convention was behind us, we needed much better coordination among all the forces, with a single strategic center. James Carville took it on. He needed an assistant. Because Paul Begala’s wife, Diane, was expecting their first child, he couldn’t come to Little Rock full-time, so reluctantly, I gave up George Stephanopoulos from the campaign plane. George had demonstrated a keen understanding of how the twenty-four-hour news cycle worked, and now knew we could fight bad press as well as enjoy the good stories. He was the best choice.
James put all the elements of the campaign—politics, press, and research—into a big open space in the old newsroom of the
Change vs. More of the Same
The Economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care
Carville also captured his main battle tactic in a slogan he had printed on a T-shirt: “Speed Kills . . . Bush.” The War Room held meetings every day at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. to assess Stan Greenberg’s overnight polls, Frank Greer’s latest ads, the news, and the attacks from Bush, and to formulate responses to the attacks and unfolding events. Meanwhile, young volunteers worked around the clock, pulling in whatever information they could get from our satellite dish, tracking the news and the opposition on their computers. It’s all routine stuff now, but then it was new, and our use of technology was essential to the campaign’s ability to meet Carville’s goal of being focused and fast. Once we knew what we wanted to say, we got the message out, not only to the media but to our “rapid-response” teams in every state, whose job it was to transmit it to our supporters and local news outlets. We sent pins with “Rapid-Response Team” on them to those who agreed to do daily duty. By the end of the campaign, thousands of people were wearing them.
