My Life, page 47
I won the primary with more than 60 percent of the vote, but Faubus pulled a third of it. Even at seventysix, he still had some juice in rural areas. Frank White took up where Faubus left off. Although he had called teachers “greedy” when they pushed for higher pay during his tenure, he got the endorsement of the Arkansas Education Association in the Republican primary when he changed his position from support of the teacher test to opposition. Then he started in on Hillary and me. White began by saying the new education standards were too burdensome and needed to be changed. I hit that one out of the park, saying if he were elected, he would “delay them to death.” Then he went after Hillary, alleging she had a conflict of interest because the Rose firm was representing the state in its fight against the Grand Gulf nuclear plants. We had a good response to that charge, too. First, the Rose firm was working to save Arkansans money by lifting the burden of the Grand Gulf plants, while White, as a board member of one of the Middle South Utilities companies, had voted three times to go forward with construction of the plants. Second, the Public Service Commission hired the Rose firm because all the other big firms were representing utilities or other parties in the case. Both the legislature and the attorney general approved the hiring. Third, the money the state paid to the Rose firm was subtracted from the firm’s income before Hillary’s partnership profits were calculated, so she made no money from it. White seemed more interested in defending the utility’s effort to soak Arkansas ratepayers than protecting them from a conflict of interest. I asked him if his attacks on Hillary meant he wanted to run for first lady instead of governor. Our campaign even made bumper stickers and buttons that said, “Frank for First Lady.”
White’s final charges did him in. He had been working for Stephens, Inc., then the largest bond house outside Wall Street. Jack Stephens had supported me when I first ran for governor, but then he drifted to the right, heading Democrats for Reagan in 1984, and by 1986 he had become a Republican. His older brother, Witt, was still a Democrat and supporting me, but Jack ran the bond house. And Frank White was his guy. For many years, Stephens had controlled the state’s bond business. When I dramatically expanded the volume of bond issues, I insisted that we open all of them to competitive bidding by national firms, and that we let more Arkansas firms have the opportunity to sell the bonds. The Stephens firm still got its fair share, but it didn’t control all the issues as it had in the past and would again if White won the election. One of the Arkansas firms that got some business was headed by Dan Lasater, who built a successful bond firm in Little Rock before he lost it all to a cocaine habit. Lasater had been a supporter of mine and a friend of my brother’s, with whom he had partied hard when they were both chained to cocaine, as too many young people were in the 1980s.
When Betsey Wright and I were preparing for our television debate with White, we learned that he was going to challenge me to take a drug test with him. The ostensible reason was to set a good example, but I knew White was hoping I wouldn’t do it. The blizzard of rumors spawned by Lasater’s downfall included one that I had been part of Dan’s party circle. It wasn’t true. Betsey and I decided to take a drug test before the debate. When White hit me on television with his challenge, I smiled and said Betsey and I had already taken a test and he and his campaign manager, Darrell Glascock, should follow suit. Glascock had been subjected to his share of rumors too. Their clever trick had backfired. White turned up the heat with the nastiest TV ad I’d ever seen. He showed Lasater’s office, followed by a tray of cocaine, with an announcer saying I’d taken campaign contributions from a cocaine-using felon, then given him state bond business. The clear implication was that I’d given Lasater preferred treatment and at the least I had known about his cocaine habit when I did. I invited the Arkansas Gazette to review the records of the Development Finance Authority, and the paper ran a front-page story showing how many more bond houses had done business with the state since I’d taken over from Governor White. The number had gone from four to fifteen, and Stephens still had handled over $700 million of bond business, more than twice as much as any other Arkansas firm. I also hit back with a TV ad that began by asking people if they’d seen White’s ad and actually showing a few seconds of it. Then my ad cut to a picture of Stephens, Inc., with the announcer saying White worked there and the reason he was attacking me was that neither Stephens nor anyone else controlled the state’s business any longer, but they would if White became governor again. It was one of the most effective commercials I ever ran, because it was a strong response to a low blow, and because the facts spoke for themselves. I was also glad that Roger and Mother hadn’t let themselves get too hurt by White’s bringing up Roger’s drug problem. After he got out of prison, Roger served six months in a halfway house in Texas, and then moved to north Arkansas, where he worked for a friend of ours in a quick-stop service station. He was about to move to Nashville, Tennessee, and was healthy enough not to let the old story drag him down. Mother was happy with Dick Kelley, and by now knew that politics was a rough game in which the only answer to a low blow is winning.
In November, I won with 64 percent, including a staggering 75 percent in Little Rock. I was gratified that the victory gave me the opportunity to smash the suggestion that I had abused the governor’s office and the implication that drugs had something to do with it. Despite the tough campaign, I wasn’t very good at holding a grudge. Over the years, I came to like Frank White and his wife, Gay, and to enjoy being on programs with him. He had a great sense of humor, he loved Arkansas, and I was sad when he died in 2003. Thankfully, I also reconciled with Jack Stephens.
As far as I was concerned, the campaign against Faubus and White was a battle against Arkansas’ past and against the emerging politics of personal destruction. I wanted to focus the people on the issues and on the future, by defending our education reforms and promoting our economic initiatives. The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that “Clinton’s stump speeches in the area sound as much like seminars on the economy as pleas for votes and most political analysts agree that the strategy is working.”
I often told the story of my visit to the Arkansas Eastman chemical plant in rural Independence County. During the tour, my host kept saying that all the anti-pollution equipment was run by computers and he wanted me to meet the guy who was running them. He built him up so much that by the time I got to the computer control room, I expected to meet someone who was a cross between Albert Einstein and the Wizard of Oz. Instead, the man running the computers was wearing cowboy boots, jeans with a belt adorned with a big silver rodeo buckle, and a baseball cap. He was listening to country music and chewing tobacco. The first thing he said to me was “My wife and I are going to vote for you, because we need more jobs like this.” This guy raised cattle and horses—he was pure Arkansas—but he knew his prosperity depended more on what he knew than on how much he could do with his hands and back. He had seen the future and he wanted to go there.
In August, when the National Governors Association met in Hilton Head, South Carolina, I became the chairman and celebrated my fortieth birthday. I had already agreed to serve as chairman of the Education Commission of the States, a group dedicated to gathering the best education ideas and practices and spreading them across the nation. Lamar Alexander had also appointed me to be the Democratic co-chairman of the governors’ task force on welfare reform, to work with the White House and Congress to develop a bipartisan proposal to improve the welfare system so that it would promote work, strengthen families, and meet children’s basic needs. Though I had secured an increase in Arkansas’ meager monthly welfare benefits in 1985, I wanted welfare to be a way station on the road to independence. I was excited with these new responsibilities. I was both a political animal and a policy wonk, always eager to meet new people and explore new ideas. I thought the work would enable me to be a better governor, strengthen my network of national contacts, and gain a better understanding of the emerging global economy and how America should deal with its challenges.
As 1986 drew to a close, I took a quick trip to Taiwan to address the Tenth Annual Conference of Taiwanese and American Leaders about our future relations. The Taiwanese were good customers for Arkansas soybeans and a wide variety of our manufactured products, from electric motors to parking meters. But America’s trade deficit was large and growing, and four in ten American workers had suffered declining incomes in the previous five years. Speaking for all the governors, I acknowledged America’s responsibility to cut our deficit to bring down interest rates and increase domestic demand, to restructure and reduce the debt of our Latin American neighbors, to relax export controls on hightechnology products, and to improve the education and productivity of our workforce. Then I challenged the Taiwanese to reduce trade barriers and invest more of their huge cash reserves in America. It was my first speech on global economics to a foreign audience. Making it forced me to sort out exactly what I thought should be done and who should do it.
By the end of 1986, I had formed some basic convictions about the nature of the modern world, which later developed into the so-called New Democrat philosophy that was the backbone of my 1992 campaign for President. I outlined them in a speech to the year-end management meeting of Gannett, the newspaper chain that had just bought the Arkansas Gazette.
… these are the new rules that I believe should provide the framework within which we make policy today:
(1) Change may be the only constant in today’s American economy. I was at an old country church celebration in Arkansas about three months ago to celebrate its 150th anniversary. There were about seventy-five people there, all packed in this small wooden church. After the service, we went out under the pine trees to have a potluck lunch, and I found myself talking to an old man who was obviously quite bright. Finally, I asked him, “Mister, how old are you?” He said, “I’m eighty-two.” “When did you join this church?” “Nineteen sixteen,” he said. “If you had to say in one sentence, what is the difference between our state now and in 1916?” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Governor, that’s pretty easy. In 1916 when I got up in the morning I knew what was going to happen, but when I get up in the morning now, I don’t have any idea.” That is about as good a one-sentence explanation about what has happened to America as Lester Thurow could give….
(2) Human capital is probably more important than physical capital now…. (3) A more constructive partnership between business and government is far more important than the dominance of either.
(4) As we try to solve problems which arise out of the internationalization of American life and the changes in our own population, cooperation in every area is far more important than conflict…. We have to share responsibilities and opportunities—we’re going up or down together. (5) Waste is going to be punished… it appears to me that we are spending billions of dollars of investment capital increasing the debt of corporations without increasing their productivity. More debt should mean increased productivity, growth, and profitability. Now it means, too often, less employment, less investment for research and development, and forced restructuring to service nonproductive debt….
(6) A strong America requires a resurgent sense of community, a strong sense of mutual obligations, and a conviction that we cannot pursue our individual interests independent of the needs of our fellow citizens….
If we want to keep the American dream alive for our own people and preserve America’s role in the world, we must accept the new rules of successful economic, political, and social life. And we must act on them.
Over the next five years, I would refine my analysis of globalization and interdependence and propose more initiatives to respond to them, juggling as best I could my desire to be a good governor and to have a positive impact on national policy.
In 1987, my agenda for the legislative session, “Good Beginnings, Good Schools, Good Jobs,” was consistent with the work I was doing with the National Governors Association under the theme “Making America Work.” In addition to recommendations that built on our previous efforts in education and economic development, I asked the legislature to help me get the growing number of poor children off to a good start in life by increasing health-care coverage for poor mothers and children, starting with prenatal care in order to lower the infant-mortality rate and reduce avoidable damage to newborns; to increase parenting education for mothers of at-risk children; to provide more special education in early childhood to kids with learning problems; to increase the availability of affordable child care; and to strengthen child-support enforcement.
From Hillary, I had learned most of what I knew about early-childhood development and its importance to later life. She had been interested in it as long as I’d known her, and had taken a fourth year at Yale Law School to work on children’s issues at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale–New Haven Hospital. She had worked hard to import to Arkansas an innovative preschool program from Israel called HIPPY, which stands for Home Instruction Programs for Preschool Youngsters, a program that helps to develop both parenting skills and children’s ability to learn. Hillary set up HIPPY programs all across the state. We both loved going to the graduation exercises, watching the children show their stuff and seeing the parents’ pride in their kids and themselves. Thanks to Hillary, Arkansas had the largest program in the country, serving 2,400 mothers, and their children showed remarkable progress. The main focus of my economic development efforts was to increase investment and opportunity for poor people and distressed areas, most of them in rural Arkansas. The most important proposal was to provide more capital to people who had the potential to operate profitable small businesses but couldn’t borrow the money to get started. The South Shore Development Bank in Chicago had been instrumental in helping unemployed carpenters and electricians set themselves up in business on the city’s South Side to renovate abandoned buildings that otherwise would have been condemned. As a result, the whole area recovered.
I knew about the bank because one of its employees, Jan Piercy, had been one of Hillary’s best friends at Wellesley. Jan told us South Shore got the idea to fund artisans who were skilled but not creditworthy by conventional standards from the work of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, founded by Muhammad Yunus, who had studied economics at Vanderbilt University before going home to help his people. I arranged to meet him for breakfast in Washington one morning, and he explained how his “microcredit” program worked. Village women who had skills and a reputation for honesty but no assets were organized in teams. When the first borrower repaid her small loan, the next one in line got hers, and so on. When I first met Yunus, the Grameen Bank already had made hundreds of thousands of loans, with a repayment rate higher than that for commercial lenders in Bangladesh. By 2002, Grameen had made them to more than 2.4 million people, 95 percent of them poor women.
If the idea worked in Chicago, I thought it would work in economically distressed areas in rural Arkansas. As Yunus said in an interview, “Anywhere anybody is rejected by the banking system, you have room for a Grameen-type program.” We set up the Southern Development Bank Corporation in Arkadelphia. The Development Finance Authority put up some of the initial money, but most of it came from corporations that Hillary and I asked to invest in it.
When I became President, I secured congressional approval for a national loan program modeled on the Grameen Bank, and featured some of our success stories at a White House event. The U.S. Agency for International Development also funded two million micro-credit loans a year in poor villages in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. In 1999, when I went to South Asia, I visited Muhammad Yunus and some of the people he’d set up in business, including women who’d used the loans to buy cell phones, which they charged villagers to use to call their relatives and friends in America and Europe. Muhammad Yunus should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics years ago. My other major interest was welfare reform. I asked the legislature to require recipients with children three years old or over to sign a contract committing themselves to a course of independence, through literacy, job training, and work. In February, I went to Washington with several other governors to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on welfare prevention and reforms. We asked Congress to give us the tools to “promote work, not welfare; independence, not dependence.” We argued that more should be done to keep people off welfare in the first place, by reducing adult illiteracy, teen pregnancy, the school dropout rate, and alcohol and drug abuse. On welfare reform, we advocated a binding contract between the recipient and the government, setting out the rights and responsibilities of both parties. Recipients would commit to strive for independence in return for the benefits, and the government would commit to help them, with education and training, medical care, child care, and job placement. We also asked that all welfare recipients with children age three or older be required to participate in a work program designed by the states, that each welfare recipient have a caseworker committed to a successful transition to self-sufficiency, that efforts to collect child-support payments be intensified, and that a new formula for cash assistance be established consistent with each state’s cost of living. Federal law allowed states to set monthly benefits wherever they chose as long as they weren’t lower than they had been in the early seventies, and they were all over the place. I had spent enough time talking to welfare recipients and caseworkers in Arkansas to know that the vast majority of them wanted to work and support their families. But they faced formidable barriers, beyond the obvious ones of low skills, lack of work experience, and inability to pay for child care. Many of the people I met had no cars or access to public transportation. If they took a low-wage job, they would lose food stamps and medical coverage under Medicaid. Finally, many of them just didn’t believe they could make it in the world of work and had no idea where to begin.
