Bill Clinton: Esquire Interview

Twenty years ago this month, on the early afternoon of February 18, 1992, in a lousy room with two double beds at the Days Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire — primary day — Bill Clinton's senior campaign staff frantically worked on two speeches, one of which the candidate would deliver that night after the day's results were known. Two weeks before, amid a firestorm of rumor and scandal, Clinton, who had the best organization and had been the front-runner, had seen his numbers collapse. Now he was mired down with the rest of the pack — Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey and Jerry Brown — while native-son Paul Tsongas, from neighboring Massachusetts, held a commanding lead. Not giving up, Clinton had scratched and clawed and campaigned around the clock, in bowling alleys and bait shops and dive bars, declaring to the people of New Hampshire that he would be with them until "the last dog dies." And so on the afternoon of primary day, the governor's staff holed up and wrote one set of remarks for a strong second-place finish, which would mean not only that Clinton had survived but that he'd effectively won. The second speech was to be delivered if Clinton faded to a distant second, or worse. This speech would likely have marked the end of Clinton's campaign that year, and maybe the end of his political career. The room was extraordinarily tense. Senior advisor Paul Begala manned the keyboard and did the writing. George Stephanopoulos hovered over him, looking at the screen. Mandy Grunwald sat on the double bed across the room. Bob Boorstin stood at the window. Every few minutes, James Carville, too restless to be contained by any room, would burst through the door, speak in tongues for exactly one minute, and slam the door on his way out.

Just then, the first exit-poll numbers began to come in, and it became clear that Clinton's desperate bid to survive had worked. Suddenly energized, Begala began to type furiously. "The guy's been shit on and shot at more than anybody in American presidential politics, and he's survived!" he said. "He's the Comeback Kid!"

This, of course, all happened before a single moment of the Clinton presidency transpired, one of the most rancorous and partisan periods in American history, culminating in a presidential impeachment that was seen as so political as to be illegitimate, and that has all but been forgotten.

And so twenty years after Bill Clinton walked onto the world stage, during this new period of astoundingly rancorous partisanship, it might amuse him that he himself has become one of the few things that Americans can agree on. Comeback Kid indeed.

ESQUIRE: Mr. President, as we're going into an election year that will likely scorch the earth, we want to talk with you about the notion of American consensus for the common good and why that is in so much trouble right now, and we want to find consensus on some things. As impossible as it might have seemed twenty years ago, there is now no figure of greater consensus in America than you. How did that happen? What is different between now and then? Why does the politics seem so much more caustic now than even then?

CLINTON: Well, it is more caustic now, but don't forget, when I was there, there were radio talk shows accusing me of murder, killing guys on train tracks in Arkansas, and of running drugs in western Arkansas, that kind of stuff.

First of all, I think the obvious answer is that I'm not running for anything anymore, and when you get out of the conflict, there is no particular advantage to somebody continuing to tear you down. And I think the second thing is the work I have done since I left office. It is seen as both conventionally progressive — the kind of stuff a Democrat would do in America and around the world — but it focuses on what works, and I've been able to generate support from liberals and conservatives across the board. One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well. It is extremely personal now, and you see in these primaries that the more people agree with each other on the issues, the more desperate they are to make the clear distinctions necessary to win, so the deeper the knife goes in.

by Charles P. Pierce and Mark Warren, Esquire |  Read more:
Photo: Peter Yang