Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - I was at once reluctant to abandon the life I... |
| I was at once reluctant to abandon the life I knew and eager for the challenge, a little afraid but sure I was doing the right thingI spoke for more than half an hour, thanking my family, friends, and supporters for giving me the strength to step beyond a life and job I love, to make a commitment to a larger cause: preserving the American dream, restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class, reclaiming the future for our childrenI closed with a pledge to give new life to the American dream by forming a new covenant with the people: more opportunity for all, more responsibility from everyone, and a greater sense of common purpose
When it was over, I felt elated and excited, but maybe relieved more than anything else, especially after Chelsea wisecracked, Nice speech, GovernorHillary and I spent the rest of the day receiving well-wishers, and Mother, Dick, and Roger all seemed happy about it, as did Hillarys familyMother acted as if she knew I would winAs well as I knew her, I couldnt be sure if it was truly how she felt or just another example of her game faceThat night we gathered around the piano with old friendsCarolyn Staley played, just as she had done since we were fifteenWe sang Amazing Grace and other hymns, and lots of songs from the sixties, including Abraham, Martin, and John, a tribute to the fallen heroes of our generationI went to bed believing we cartier watches for women could cut through the cynicism and despair and rekindle the fire those men had lit in my heart
Governor Mario Cuomo once said we campaign in poetry but we govern in proseThe statement is basically accurate, but a lot of campaigning is prose, too: putting together the nuts and bolts, going through the required rituals, and responding to the pressDay two of the campaign was more prose than poetry: a series of interviews designed to get me on television nationally and in major local markets, and to answer the threshold question of why I had gone back on my commitment to finish my term and whether that meant I was untrustworthyI answered the questions as best I could and moved on to the campaign messageIt was all prosaic, but it got us to day three
The rest of the year was full of the frantic activity of a late-starting campaign: getting organized, raising money, reaching out to specific constituencies, and working New Hampshire
Our first headquarters was in an old paint store on Seventh Street near the CapitolI had decided to base the campaign out of Little Rock instead of WashingtonIt made travel arrangements a little more complicated, but I wanted to stick close to my roots and to get home often enough to be with my family and handle official business that required my presenceBut staying in Arkansas also had another big benefit: it helped our young staff keep prada backpacks focused on the work at handThey werent distracted by the pervasive Washington rumor mill and they didnt get too carried away by the surprisingly favorable press coverage I received early in the campaign, or too depressed by the torrent of negative press soon to come
After a few weeks, we had outgrown the paint store and moved nearby to the old office of the Department of Higher Education, which we used until we outgrew it, too, just before the Democratic conventionThen we moved again, downtown to the Arkansas Gazette building, which had become vacant a few months earlier upon the purchase and subsequent dismantling of the Gazette by the owner of the Arkansas Democrat, Walter HussmanThe Gazette building would be our home for the rest of the campaign, which, from my point of view, was the only good result of the loss of the oldest independent newspaper in America west of the Mississippi
The Gazette had stood for civil rights in the fifties and sixties, and had staunchly supported Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, and me in our efforts to modernize education, social services, and the economyIn its glory days, it was one of the best papers in the country, bringing well-written and wide-ranging national and international stories to readers in the far corners of our stateIn the 1980s, the Gazette began to face competition from Hussmans Arkansas Democrat, which until then had been a black balenciaga bag much smaller afternoon paperThe newspaper war that followed had a foreordained outcome, because Hussman owned other profitable media properties, which allowed him to absorb tremendous operating losses at the Democrat in order to take advertising and subscribers away from the GazetteNot long before I announced for President, Hussman acquired the Gazette and consolidated its operations into his paper, renaming it the Arkansas Democrat-GazetteOver the years, the Democrat-Gazette would help to make Arkansas a more Republican stateThe overall tone of its editorial page was conservative and highly critical of me, often in very personal termsIn this the paper faithfully reflected the views of its publisherThough I was sad to see the Gazette fall, I was glad to have the buildingPerhaps I was hoping that the ghosts of its progressive past would keep us fighting for tomorrow
We started out with an all-Arkansas staff, with Bruce Lindsey as campaign director and Craig Smith, who had handled my appointments to boards and commissions, as finance directorRodney Slater and Carol Willis were already hard at work contacting black political, religious, and business leaders across the countryMy old friend Eli Segal agreed to help me build a national staff
I had already met with one person I was sure I wanted on the team, a talented young staffer for Congressman Dick Gephardt, the tiffany heart link necklace Democratic majority leaderGeorge Stephanopoulos, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, was a Rhodes scholar who had previously worked for my friend Father Tim Healy when he ran the New York Public LibraryI liked George immediately, and knew he could serve as a bridge to the national press and the congressional Democrats, as well as make a contribution to thinking through the intellectual challenges of the campaign
Eli met with him, confirmed my judgment, and George came to work as deputy campaign manager in charge of communicationsEli also saw David Wilhelm, the young Chicago political operative whom I wanted on the teamWe offered him the job of campaign manager, and he quickly acceptedDavid was, in political language, a two-fer: besides managing the overall campaign, he would be a special help in IllinoisI was convinced that, with David as campaign manager, along with Kevin OKeefe as a state organizer, we could now win a clear victory in Illinois to follow up on the anticipated sweep of the southern states on Super TuesdaySoon afterward, we also persuaded another young Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel, to join our campaignRahm had worked with Wilhelm in the successful campaigns of Mayor Richard Daley and Senator Paul SimonHe was a slight, intense man who had studied ballet and, though an American citizen, had served in the Israeli ArmyRahm was so aggressive he made me look omega usa laid-bac |
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