My Life, page 50
Unfortunately, while things were looking up for me, they weren’t going so well for Mike Dukakis. George Bush had given a marvelous acceptance speech at his convention, offering a “kinder, gentler” Reaganism and telling us to “read my lips: no new taxes.” Moreover, the vice president’s kinder, gentler approach didn’t extend to Mike Dukakis. Lee Atwater and company went after him like a pack of rabid dogs, saying Mike didn’t believe in pledging allegiance to the flag or being tough on criminals. An “independent” group with no overt ties to the Bush campaign ran an ad featuring a convicted killer named Willie Horton, who had been released on a Massachusetts prison-furlough program. Not coincidentally, Horton was black. His opponents were performing reverse plastic surgery on Dukakis, who didn’t help himself by not responding quickly and vigorously to the attacks and by allowing himself to be photographed in a tank wearing a helmet that made him look more like MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman than a potential Commander in Chief of the armed forces.
In the fall, I flew up to Boston to see what I could do to help. By then Dukakis had fallen well behind in the polls. I pleaded with the people in the campaign to hit back; to at least tell the voters that the federal government, of which Bush was a part, furloughed prisoners too. But they never did it enough to suit me. I met Susan Estrich, the campaign manager, whom I liked and who I thought was shouldering too much of the blame for Mike’s problems, and Madeleine Albright, a professor at Georgetown who had worked in the Carter White House. She was the foreign policy advisor. I was very impressed with her intellectual clarity and toughness, and resolved to keep in touch with her. Dukakis found his voice in the last three weeks of the campaign, but he never recovered the New Democrat image that the negative ads and his insufficiently aggressive debate performances had destroyed. In November, Vice President Bush defeated him 54 to 46 percent. We didn’t carry Arkansas either, though I tried. Dukakis was a good man and a fine governor. He and Lloyd Bentsen would have served our country well in the White House. But the Republicans had defined him right out of the race. I couldn’t blame them for sticking with a strategy that worked, but I didn’t think it was good for America. In October, while the campaign for President was in the homestretch, I was involved in two exciting policy developments. I began a new initiative with the governors of our neighbor states, Ray Mabus of Mississippi and Buddy Roemer of Louisiana, to revive our economies. Both were young, articulate, Harvard-educated progressives. To highlight our commitment, we signed a compact on a barge in the middle of the Mississippi River at Rosedale. Not long afterward, we took a trade mission to Japan together. And we supported the successful effort of Senator Bumpers and Congressman Mike Espy of Mississippi to establish a Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission to study and make recommendations to improve the economies of poor counties on both sides of the river, from southern Illinois to New Orleans, where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The all-white counties in the northern part of the Delta region were in about as bad shape as the heavily black counties in the south. All three governors served on the Delta commission. For a year, we had hearings up and down the river in small towns time had passed by, and we came up with a report that led to the establishment of a full-time office and an ongoing effort to improve the economy and quality of life in the poorest part of America outside the Native American tribal lands.
On October 13, I was invited to the White House for President Reagan’s signing of the long-awaited welfare-reform bill. It was a true bipartisan accomplishment, the work of Democratic and Republican governors; Democratic congressman Harold Ford of Tennessee and Republican congressman Carroll Campbell of South Carolina; House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski and Senate Finance Committee chairman Pat Moynihan, who knew more about the history of welfare than anyone else; and the White House staff. I was impressed by, and appreciative of, the way the Congress and the White House had worked with the governors. Harold Ford even invited Republican governor Mike Castle of Delaware and me to participate in his subcommittee’s meeting to “mark up” the bill into the final version to be presented for a vote. I hoped and believed the legislation would help move more people from welfare to work, while providing more support to their children. I was also glad to see President Reagan go out of office on a positive note. He had been badly battered by the illegal Iran-Contra affair, which the White House had approved, and which might have led to his impeachment had the Democrats been half as ruthless as Newt Gingrich. Despite my many disagreements with Reagan, I liked him personally, and I enjoyed listening to his stories when I sat at his table at the White House dinner for the governors and when a few of the governors had lunch with him after his last address to us in 1988. Reagan was something of a mystery to me, at once friendly and distant. I was never sure how much he knew about the human consequences of his harshest policies, or whether he was using the hard-core right or was being used by them; the books about him don’t give a definitive answer, and because he developed Alzheimer’s disease, we’ll probably never know. Regardless, his own life is both more interesting and more mysterious than the movies he made. I spent the last three months of 1988 getting ready for the next legislative session. In late October, I released a seventy-page booklet, Moving Arkansas Forward into the 21st Century, outlining the program I would present to the legislature in January. It reflected the work and recommendations of more than 350 citizens and public officials who had served on boards and commissions dealing with our most critical challenges. The booklet was filled with specific innovative ideas, including school health clinics to fight teen pregnancy; health coverage through schools for uninsured children; parents’ and students’ right to choose to attend a public school other than the one in their geographical area; expansion of the HIPPY preschool program to all seventy-five counties; a report card on every school, every year, comparing students’ performance with the previous year and with other schools in the state; a provision for state takeover of failing school districts; and a big expansion of the adult literacy program, designed to make Arkansas the first state to “obliterate adult illiteracy among working-age citizens.”
I was particularly excited about the literacy initiative, and the prospect of turning illiteracy from a stigma into a challenge. The previous fall, when Hillary and I went to a PTA meeting at Chelsea’s school, a man had come up to me and said he’d seen me on television talking about literacy. He told me he had a good job but had never learned to read. Then he asked if I could get him into a literacy program without his employer knowing about it. I happened to know the employer and was sure he’d be proud of the man, but he was afraid, so my office got him into a reading program without his employer’s knowledge. After that incident, I began to say illiteracy was nothing to be ashamed of, but doing nothing about it would be.
For all its sweep and new specifics, the program’s central theme was the same one I had been hammering away on for the last six years: “Either we invest more in human capital and develop our people’s capacity to cooperate or we are headed for long-term decline.” Our old strategy of selling Arkansas as a beautiful state with hardworking people, low wages, and low taxes had lost its relevance a decade earlier, due to the new realities of the global economy. We had to keep working to change it. After stumping the state for the rest of the year, I presented the program to the legislature on January 9, 1989. During the speech, I introduced Arkansans who supported it and the increased taxes necessary to pay for it: a school board president who had never voted for me but had been converted to the cause of education reform; a welfare mother who had enrolled in our work program and finished high school, started college, and gotten a job; a World War II veteran who had just learned to read; and the manager of the new $500 million Nekoosa Paper mill in Ashdown, who told the legislators he had to have a better-educated workforce because “our productivity plan requires our workers to know statistics, and a lot of them don’t understand that.”
I argued that we could afford to raise taxes. Our unemployment rate was still above the national average, down to 6.8 percent from 10.6 percent six years earlier. We ranked forty-sixth in per capita income, but were still forty-third in per capita state and local taxes.
At the end of my address, I noted that, a few days earlier, Representative John Paul Capps, a friend and strong supporter of my program, was quoted in the press as saying that the people “were getting sick and tired of Bill Clinton giving the same old speech.” I told the legislature that I was sure many people were tired of hearing me say the same things, but that “the essence of political responsibility is being able to concentrate on what is really important for a long period of time until the problem is solved.” I said I would talk about something else “when the unemployment rate is below the national average and income above the national average in our state… when no company passes us by because they think we can’t carry the load in the new world economy… when no young person in this state ever has to leave home to find a good job.” Until then, “we’ve got to do our duty.”
I got some inspiration for giving the same old speech when Tina Turner came to Little Rock for a concert. After working through her new repertoire, Tina closed the show with her first top-ten hit, “Proud Mary.” As soon as the band started playing it, the crowd went wild. Tina walked up to the mike, smiled, and said, “You know, I’ve been singing this song for twenty-five years. But it gets better every time I do it!”
I was hoping my old song was still effective, too, but there was evidence to support John Paul Capps’s assertion that Arkansans, including the legislators, were growing tired of my constant urgings. The legislature passed most of my specific reform proposals, but wouldn’t raise the taxes necessary to fund the more expensive initiatives in health care and education, including another large increase in teacher salaries and the expansion of early-childhood education to three-and four-year-olds. An early January poll showed that a majority of voters supported greater spending on education and that I was ahead of other prospective candidates for governor in 1990, but the poll also indicated that half the respondents wanted a new governor.
Meanwhile, some of my own first-rate people were getting tired too, and wanted to go on to other challenges, including the exuberant state chairman of the Democratic Party, Lib Carlisle, a businessman I’d talked into taking the position when it would only take, I told him, a half day a week. He later joked that I must have been referring to the time he’d have left for his own business. Fortunately, talented new people were still willing to come serve. One of the best, and most controversial, appointments I made was Dr. Joycelyn Elders to be director of the Department of Health. I told Dr. Elders I wanted to do something about teen pregnancy, which was a huge problem in Arkansas. When she advocated the establishment of school-based health clinics that, if the local school boards approved, would provide sex education and promote both abstinence and safe sex, I supported her. There were already a couple of clinics in operation, and they seemed to be popular and successful in reducing out-of-wedlock births.
Our efforts generated a firestorm of opposition from fundamentalists, who favored a “just say no” policy. It was bad enough in their eyes that Dr. Elders was pro-choice. Now they claimed that our efforts to set up school-based clinics would lead to sexual encounters by hordes of young people who would never even have considered doing such a thing if Joycelyn hadn’t promoted the clinics. I doubted that Dr. Elders and her ideas even occurred to overheated teenagers in the backseats of their cars. It was a fight worth making.
When I became President, I appointed Joycelyn Elders surgeon general, and she was very popular with the public-health community for her continued willingness to stick her neck out for sound, if controversial, health policies. In December 1994, after we had suffered staggering losses in the midterm congressional elections to the Republican right, Dr. Elders made headlines again for suggesting that teaching children to masturbate might be a good way to reduce the likelihood of teen pregnancy. At the time, I had all I could handle to maintain the support of skittish congressional Democrats, and I was determined to fight the Republicans on their radical proposals to cut education, health care, and environmental protection. Now I faced the prospect that Gingrich and company could divert the attention of the press and the public away from their budget cuts by pillorying us. At any other time, we probably could have faced the heat, but I had already loaded the Democrats down with my controversial budget, NAFTA, the failed health-care effort, and the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, which the National Rifle Association had used to beat about a dozen of our House members. I decided I had to ask for her resignation. I hated to, because she was honest, able, and brave, but we had already shown enough political tone-deafness to last through several presidential terms. I hope someday she’ll forgive me. She did a lot of good with the two appointments I gave her.
The biggest staff loss I sustained in 1989 was Betsey Wright. In early August she announced that she was taking a leave of absence for several weeks. I asked Jim Pledger to do double duty at Finance and Administration and as her temporary replacement. Betsey’s announcement caused a lot of gossip and speculation, because everyone knew she ran a tight ship in the governor’s office and kept a close eye on everything that was going on in state government. John Brummett, the acerbic columnist for the Arkansas Gazette, wrote a column wondering whether our trial separation might end in divorce. He thought not, because we were too important to each other. That we were, but Betsey needed to get away. She had been working herself to death since my defeat in 1980, and it was taking its toll. We were both workaholics who got more irritable when we were exhausted. In 1989, we were trying to do a lot in a difficult climate, and we too often took our frustrations out on each other. At the end of the year, Betsey formally resigned as chief of staff after a decade of selfless service. In early 1990, I named Henry Oliver, a retired FBI agent and former chief of police in Fort Smith, as Betsey’s successor. Henry didn’t really want to do it, but he was my friend and believed in what we were trying to do, so he gave me a good year.
Betsey came back in the ’92 campaign to help defend me against attacks on my record and my personal life. Then, after a stint in Washington with Anne Wexler’s lobbying firm early in my presidency, she went home to Arkansas to live in the Ozarks. Most Arkansans will never know the large role she played in giving them better schools, more jobs, and an honest, effective state government, but they should. I couldn’t have accomplished much of what I did as governor without her. And without her, I never would have survived the Arkansas political wars to become President.
At the beginning of August, President Bush announced that he was inviting the nation’s governors to an education summit the following month. We met September 27 and 28 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Many of the Democrats were skeptical of the meeting, because the President and his secretary of education, Lauro Cavazos, made it clear the meeting was not a prelude to a large increase in federal support for education. I shared their concern, but was I excited by the prospect that the summit could produce a road map for the next steps in education reform, just as the Nation at Risk report had done in 1983. I believed the President’s interest in education reform was genuine, and agreed with him that there were important things we could do without new federal money. For example, the administration supported giving parents and students the right to choose a public school other than the one to which they were assigned. Arkansas had just become the second state after Minnesota to adopt the proposal, and I wanted the other forty-eight states to follow suit. I also believed that, if the summit produced the right kind of report, governors could use it to build public support for more investment in education. If people knew what they would get for their money, their aversion to new taxes might lessen. As the co-chairman of the Governors’ Task Force on Education, along with Governor Carroll Campbell of South Carolina, I wanted to build a consensus among the Democrats, then to work with the Republicans on a statement reflecting the outcome of the summit.
President Bush opened the meeting with a brief but eloquent speech. Afterward, we all took a stroll around the central lawn to give the photographers something for the evening news and morning papers, then went to work. The President and Mrs. Bush hosted a dinner that night. Hillary sat at the President’s table and got into a debate with him about how bad America’s infant-mortality rate was. The President couldn’t believe it when she said eighteen countries did a better job than we did in keeping babies alive until the age of two. When she offered to get him the evidence, he said he would find it himself. He did, and the next day he gave me a note for Hillary saying she was right. It was a gracious gesture that reminded me of the day in Kennebunkport six years earlier when he had personally escorted three-yearold Chelsea to the bathroom. When Carroll Campbell was called home to deal with an emergency, I was left to work out the details of a summit statement with the NGA chairman, Republican governor Terry Branstad of Iowa; the association’s education staffer, Mike Cohen; and my aide, Representative Gloria Cabe. Laboring until well after midnight, several of us hammered out a statement committing the governors and the White House to development of a set of specific education goals to be achieved by the year 2000. Unlike the standards movement of the last decade, these goals would be focused on outputs, not inputs, obligating all of us to achieve certain results. I argued that we would look foolish unless we came out of Charlottesville with a bold commitment that would put new energy into education reform. From the start, most of the governors were behind the cause and supported the idea of making the summit the start of something big. Some of the President’s people weren’t so sure. They were afraid of committing him to a big idea that could get him into trouble by raising expectations of new federal funding. Because of the deficit and the President’s “no new taxes” pledge, that wasn’t in the cards. In the end, the White House came around, thanks to John Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff. Sununu convinced his White House colleagues that the governors couldn’t go home emptyhanded, and I promised to minimize public pressure from the governors for more federal money. The final summit declaration said, “The time has come, for the first time in U.S. history, to establish clear national performance goals, goals that will make us internationally competitive.”
