All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President - Couverture rigide

Carville, James; Matalin, Mary; Knobler, Peter

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0679431039 ISBN 13 : 9780679431039

Editeur : Random House Inc, 1994

Synopsis

Book by James Carville Mary Matalin Peter Knobler

A propos du livre

Extrait :

CHAPTER 1

James

It was another lost day, another disaster. We had a message to get out, to tell the good people of the state of New Hampshire who Governor Bill Clinton was, what he stood for, and why they should vote for him in this leadoff primary. But were we doing it? No. We'd spent almost a month dogged by Gennifer Flowers and the press hounds on the trail of the smoking bimbo. The Republican party had played no small part in that parade of trash and now, when we had almost put it to rest, all of a sudden ABC News shows up with this twenty-two-year-old letter from Bill Clinton to the head of the University of Arkansas ROTC program. Now how the hell did they get that?

Mark Halperin of ABC said, "We have this letter that Clinton wrote to Colonel Eugene Holmes in 1969. We want to show the letter to the governor, do an interview, and get his comments."

It was the Thank-you-for-saving-me-from-the-draff letter. When George Stephanopoulos read it he said, "That's it, we're out of the race, we'll never survive." But that's George, he has a strong streak of pessimism that he's got to run through before he kicks into gear.

I read it and said, "Partner, this is a hell of a letter. This letter is our friend, this letter will save us. This is a torn man. People will understand this.

"We have to want questions on this letter," I said. "We're going to publish this letter. We are going to be very aggressive about it --"

"Oh, man..."

"Look, I'm telling you, if you let them take excerpts out of this thing it'll kill us. If you read this letter in its totality you say, 'Geez, I want a president who could write a letter like that when he was twenty-one years old.'"

ABC didn't go with the story on Monday, which was fine with us. We had spent the night in western New Hampshire, away from our headquarters in Manchester. Tuesday morning on our way back I was driving on a highway with George and my partner, Paul Begala, and we got beeped.

Our van was cruising in a major-league hurry for a telephone. We passed the Hillbrook Motel in Bedford, New Hampshire, but it didn't have a pay phone. We needed privacy. "Look, just give us a phone. How much is a room? Ninety bucks? Here's the money, here's the credit card, just give us the room, I don't care what it costs." This was a phone call worth the price of a motel room. Ted Koppel had gotten the letter from another source and was talking about going with it on Nightline.

The governor called Koppel the next morning and they had a discussion about the letter. Nothing got resolved. We weren't sure what Koppel was going to do.

But each of us knew what the results would be. Very soon that letter would get out and all hell was going to break loose. Was the media going to tell the voters about Bill Clinton's position on health care or what he could do to strengthen the economy? Of course not. All the networks and local stations would lead with another take on "Slick Willie." That was all you'd be reading about in the papers or hearing on talk radio. It would be another day, couple of days, or a week off message. If things kept on the way they were going we'd never get our message out; we'd never talk about anything important or anything that could help Bill Clinton get elected president.

Governor Clinton asked, of course, but Koppel wouldn't say where he'd gotten the letter. He wasn't going to reveal his sources. But Koppel did tell the governor that he was under the impression the letter had come from somebody at the Pentagon.

All right. Now we had some evidence that they were monkeying with the election here. Now I had an enemy. Something out of his files? They'd taken something out of Bill Clinton's files? Those are confidential. I called Koppel and said, "We've got to blow this damn thing up about the Republicans using the Pentagon."

Nightline didn't go with the letter on Tuesday, which was a big break for us. We wanted to be there with the news first.

So Wednesday at noon we held a press event in an airport hangar in Manchester and released the letter ourselves. After it was over there was a spin session and the media just went crazy. So did I.

"What is the Pentagon doing leaking something -- Lemme finish! The larger question here is, What in the world business does the Pentagon have in the middle of a political campaign?"

"Why did the Pentagon release the letter?" a reporter asked.

"Let's try a case of rocket science," I told him. "Here's an article in The Wall Street Journal on Friday and here's a story that looks like it might be going away. And somebody says, 'Aha! Look, we have something that can kick this story an extra day. Because if Clinton is talking about the draft, he's not talking about the fact that we've had the lowest GNP growth under this administration than we've had under any administration in the history of this country; he is not talking about the fact that George Bush has had four different positions on the civil rights bill in two months; he is not talking about the fact that taxes have gone up for the middle class while services have gone down....So, what we will do is we will leak this to the press and we will get the microphone in Bill Clinton's face talking about something that is not particularly advantageous to him...and we will block him out from talking about the things that made him the leading candidate.' You understand? That's what's going on here. And if nobody can see that, I can't explain it to you."

Of course, as it turned out, I was wrong; the letter came from somewhere else. But, hell, I was angry. And it made the evening news. In fact, as disruptive as that letter was, it kind of turned a corner for us in New Hampshire. It lit a fire, raised the bloodlust, gave us something to fight.

Mary

In various corners and offices of campaign headquarters, campaign chairman Bob Teeter, chief strategist Charlie Black, director of research David Tell, field director David Carney, and press secretary Torie Clarke had all been watching CNN. The TVs were on pretty much all day. Not mine. I was on the phone, preoccupied with endless catastrophes. The campaign hierarchy stampeded through my office door like wild elephants.

"Mary, Mary, hang up, get off the phone. Look, you have to see this!"

"What? What's going on?"

"Your boyfriend has lost his mind! He's having a nuclear meltdown! Turn on CNN!" They flicked on the television that was perched on top of the little icebox I moved from campaign to campaign.

Of course by the time they got in there we'd missed it, so we had to wait for the replay, which, on CNN, wasn't very long in coming. All the while they were trying to describe this bizarre scene to me. Finally it reappeared.

They were screaming, "There it is! There it is!"

That was James, all right, in the middle of a ferocious media feeding frenzy. Unshaven. Hair, such as it was, askew. Standing in this ripped-up ratty old Burberry with the torn collar and Frankenstein stitching. Wearing some goofy T-shirt. There were huge dark circles under his eyes and he had the hollow-eyed look he gets when he's in full rant. His long arms flailing, he was screaming demonically into their faces.

The reporters were all yelling questions at the same time and his head was snapping from side to side like he was getting smacked. David Gergen was leading the inquisition. NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked him a question and he screamed at her. Syndicated columnist Ben Wattenberg and all these big-time network and political reporters were after him.

"If you let the Pentagon dictate the course of a presidential election," he told them, "you are missing something big."

And from all sides of me my GOP sisters and brothers were laughing. "See him? Oh, my God." "This man has lost his mind. He's in meltdown." "Mary, we love you but your boyfriend's imploding!"

Now, Teeter and Carney and Torie and Charlie and Tell had never met James. It was early February 1992; he was just some political consultant I was consorting with that they'd heard about. My assistants, who had come with me to the campaign from the Republican National Committee and who had just run into my office to see what all the shouting was about, knew him better. He was the guy who was in and out of the RNC every day bringing me tuna sandwiches, doting on me, keeping my office stocked with a fresh supply of flowers.

Everybody was standing there huddled around my little TV and I just had to laugh. It had never occurred to me that he could be perceived as a crazy person.

"Look at that face," said the new guys. "He's a madman. He's demonic. He's a serpenthead!"

Okay, as media guru Roger Ailes put it, sometimes Carville does look like a fish who's swum too close to a nuclear reactor. But he was my man.

I had seen it all before. I had seen James fake a heart attack to get a good table at a chichi restaurant. He can be a little theatrical.

The three women who worked with me at the RNC kept waiting for what it was these guys were seeing as unusual behavior.

"Yeah," they said. "So?"

"That's how he always is," I said. "But forget how he's acting, listen to what he's saying."

We weren't paying much attention to the Democrats at this point; we had enough trouble dealing with Pat Buchanan and figured we'd just let Clinton and Kerrey and Harkin and Tsongas and Brown beat each other up for a while. We'd get involved when the time came.

But I could see where Carville was going with this outburst. This was a preemptive strike. He was going to charge the Republicans and the entire government with dirty tricks. Ever since Nixon it's been a charge that's worked against Republicans. We had taken a lot of heat for our paid media in the 1988 presidential campaign, and now here was my boyfriend trying to create another smokescreen and cut into our ability to hit Bill Clinton hard. It was a winner's tactic. For all of his seeming lunacy, you had to admire his technique.

But the campaign was so freaked out over his appearance, they missed the content. They thought he was a total nut case and dismissed the possibility that he could do anything sane or productive. Inside the campaign, it became a joke. People would make fun of me because James was so crazy. They kept creating names for him and trashing him when he showed up on TV.

"Serpenthead" stuck.
ard

Torie Clarke, who was my good friend, would always talk to her mother about characters on the campaign. Her mom called up one day and said, "I'm very concerned about your little friend Mary. Every time I see that man on TV he just...sweetheart, he looks like he eats small children."

From then on, in Republican campaign lore James was the Man Who Eats Small Children.

James

I wasn't so sure I wanted to do a presidential race. I had lost consistently, didn't win my first statewide campaign until I was forty-two years old. Now I had a pretty fair winning streak going in the states: Bob Casey had won governor of Pennsylvania; Wallace Wilkinson, governor of Kentucky; Frank Lautenberg, senator from New Jersey; Zell Miller, governor of Georgia; and now Harris Wofford had beat Richard Thornburgh to become senator from Pennsylvania. I knew how to do it. I liked the hands-on way you could run a state, the fact that you could talk to everyone who needed to be talked to, that if something really needed to be dealt with you could jump on a plane and get anywhere you wanted in a couple of hours. I like to control a campaign, and you lose touch when it gets too big. Too many Washington insiders get their fingers in the pie until there's nothing left of substance or political nutrition.

Paul Begala and I weren't saying, "Gee, if we win this we can get in the presidential race and go up the ladder and some day get on Good Morning America." I wasn't looking for flight attendants to know who I was, or for strangers to get up from their meals to come shake my hand. Just professionally, I wanted people in the political consultant business to know that I was good.

I always felt that because I was from Louisiana and didn't go to a prestigious school, and was older, and my candidates were not glamorous or high-visibility national figures, somehow or other I was being professionally slighted.

I'm a runner. I run hard for a half hour every day, rain or shine, on the campaign trail or in the mountains. And any runner will tell you: When you run you dream.

I'm giving a talk to a bunch of political professionals and they're milling around out in the hallways, and they say, "Carville is speaking, let's go in and see what he's got to say." I'd dream about that. That was a big dream for me.

There's a great old Fats Domino, New Orleans rhythm-and-blues song that goes,

I'm gonna be a wheel someday

I'm gonna be somebody

I'm gonna be a real gone cat

Then I won't need you.

When you're toiling out there, particularly when you're not winning, you dream of being a wheel someday, dream of being somebody.

When Harris Wofford came from 47 points back to beat George Bush's cabinet member Dick Thornburgh, candidates came calling. Paul and I talked with Bob Kerrey, Tom Harkin, and Bill Clinton. It was there if we wanted it.

I knew Mary didn't want me to run a presidential; it takes all of your time. She should know, she'd worked for Reagan in 1984 and been pretty high up in Bush's 1988 campaign, which she never let me forget.

By November 1991 we'd been going out for about a year, but with one campaign after another, I hadn't been home much and we'd never really got settled in. She would come visit me at campaign headquarters in Pennsylvania; I'd disrupt her day at the Republican National Committee. We didn't see each other a lot but we thought about each other all the time. We were neither of us youngsters; this wasn't puppy love.

It was like I told Mary: I wasn't that interested in running the race. I liked what I was doing; Paul's wife, Diane, was going to have a baby, and Paul didn't want to be an absentee husband or a telephone daddy; I had a girlfriend who seemed like the real deal.

But Paul and I had a hard time saying no. Neither of us felt any sense of destiny about hooking up with Bill Clinton. He just seemed like a good guy, someone we could work for. In the end I went to work for a presidential candidate for the same reason that I went to law school: I never really wanted to but it was sort of expected of me. It was the next stage. I was a political professional, and that's what political professionals are supposed to do, run their guys for president.

Mary

When Harris Wofford beat Dick Thornburgh in November 1991 lots of people in the Republican party started wringing their hands. When our polls showed that only 41 percent of Americans thought George Bush deserved to be reelected, it got worse.

"We've got to start the reelection campaign now. We can't wait another minute."

President Bush didn't really want to start. He liked to govern and he wasn't interested in disrupting the important work of his administration until it was absolutely necessary.

This was my dream job, to be political director of the campaign, to help put a man I totally respected and really did love back in the most important position in the world.

But meanwhile here was James Carville -- to Republicans he was pretty much the devil and I was big -- time smitten with him.

We hadn't seen half enough of each other almost since we'd begun going out. First he'd been in Georgia running a governor's race; then he...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Never before has a more revealing X ray been taken of the modern American presidential campaign than this compelling memoir of the nation's foremost political operatives, Democrat James Carville and Republican Mary Matalin.
Not since Theodore White's legendary Making of the President series has a book on presidential campaigns so intimately recounted the power plays and clandestine maneuvers that are at the heart of American political dueling. James Cherville and Mary Matalin, themselves the key players at the center of the political battles and election headlines that gripped America, tell in candid, stunning detail of the day-by-day pressures, near disasters, and triumphs of campaign life; they take the reader deeper than ever before into the art of getting a president elected.
For anyone interested in politics and the way our nation chooses its leaders, All's Fair is a vital resource, and the most telling guide available to the inner workings of today's partisan conflict.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679431039
• ISBN 13: 9780679431039
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1