A few days later, Hillary was back on the phone to me asking what she should do. "I think you should figure out some sort of task force you would head on a key issue, just like you did with education in Arkansas," I suggested. "That way you will have a clear body of work of your own, which you can use as the basis for your future."
"Like what?" she prompted.
Seeking to bolster Hillary"s credentials as a centrist, I suggested that she chair a commission on cutting costs in the government, akin to the Reinventing Government effort Vice President Al Gore eventually ran. "You can go around the country citing evidence of waste and mismanagement. It would be a modern variant of the old Hoover Commission that dug up examples of waste. You"d be like Eleanor Roosevelt, your husband"s eyes and ears, or like Harry Truman investigating wartime cost overruns," I said, hoping the precedents would convince her of how easily such a position could be accepted by the public. As the chair of such a commission, I felt, Hillary would get a chance to flex her managerial talents before the nation. She would be leading with her strength.
When President Clinton announced that the first lady would be heading just such a task force, I was as surprised as anyone else to learn that health care, not government waste, would be her mission. It was, to put it mildly, a mistake. Her success on the health care task force would be a direct function of Congress"s willingness to support her proposals. When Al Gore a.s.sumed direction of the Reinventing Government Task Force, he faced no such obstacles: Ultimately, he was able to claim broad success in his efforts to streamline the bureaucracy. Hillary, meanwhile, had chosen a highly visible, highly accountable post - and one in which she would inevitably tack to the left when she should have been reinforcing her credentials as a middle-of-the-road politician who could work with colleagues in both parties to get the job done.
The first two years of Clinton"s presidency were a disaster. With Hillary off on the sidelines running her health care initiative, the management of the White House was an administrative and political fiasco. Tripped up at the starting gate by a futile controversy over gays in the military, embarra.s.sed by amateur-hour tactics like firing the White House Travel Office staff, pursued by the media for stonewalling the Whitewater scandal, the Clinton administration shuffled along from bad to worse.
During 1993, as the administrative mess was paralyzing the executive branch, I urged Hillary to take a more direct role in the management of the White House. Pointing out that Clinton"s troubled first year as president echoed his troubled first year as Arkansas governor, I suggested that the Clintons resort to the same remedy: Hillary"s management skills.
Now, however, Hillary was adamantly against a.s.suming the burdens of de facto chief of staff. "I have to let Bill and his people work this out," she said. "I"m up to my neck in health care and I just don"t have time to run the White House. I"m only one person."
But a far greater debacle lay ahead, in the realm of policy initiatives. The administration"s first major legislative battle led to a resounding defeat, when Democratic majorities in both houses proved unable to pa.s.s a pork-laden economic stimulus package. Clinton was more successful in pa.s.sing his budget program - but the tax increases he signed into law would ultimately prove fatal to the Democratic majority in Congress that voted for them. Despite some successes, like ratification of NAFTA and the pa.s.sage of a good, strong anti-crime bill that led directly to the subsequent drop in violent crime, much of the Clinton program stalled in Congress. And the crowning failure, of course, was Hillary"s own: After two years of ballyhoo and bad judgment, her health care reform initiative never made it out of committee in the Senate, leaving a deadly black mark on Hillary"s resume and the opening act of the Clinton presidency.
The capstone to Hillary"s and Bill"s disastrous first two years in the White House was their loss of control of Congress in the midterm elections of 1994. The Democratic Party, which had held the majority in the House of Representatives for the previous forty years - twenty elections - lost not only the Senate, but the House as well.
Hillary catalogs several reasons for the 1994 defeat in Living History: Most Republican voters were intensely opposed to the upper-income tax increase for deficit reduction, the Brady bill and the a.s.sault weapons ban. ... I also knew that some core Democratic supporters felt disillusioned by our failure to reform health care or betrayed by the Administration"s successful push for NAFTA . . .
Deflated and disappointed, I wondered how much I was to blame for the debacle: . . . whether I had gambled on the country"s acceptance of my active role and lost. . .
Reality check: My polling at the time showed that the Democrats lost mainly because they imposed a five-cent increase in the tax on gasoline. Voters were largely willing to forgive the tax hike on upper income families, but not a gas tax that hit the blue-collar worker in his wallet. Bill and Hillary had forgotten the lesson of their 1980 defeat: Don"t mess with peoples" cars! The voting public is very, very sensitive to the idea that you are charging them more to travel to work every day. While revisionist history tends to credit future House Speaker Newt Gingrich"s Contract with America for the GOP"s ascendancy, and to blame health care reform for the Democrats" defeat, at the time it was clear to us that health care reform was a secondary issue. Once again, it was a car tax that had brought Bill Clinton down.
Oddly, the gas tax didn"t produce much money. But Clinton pa.s.sed it because Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board made him do it. He had to prove that he was serious about deficit reduction. "Why don"t you just increase the top bracket in the income tax a little more?" I asked Clinton over the phone in 1993 as his tax package took shape. "That"s where all the revenue is."
"I"d love to," the president answered, "but I have to show the Fed and the bond market that I am willing to take a political hit to cut the deficit."
I reminded Clinton how dangerous automobile taxes were, but he plowed ahead to self-inflicted disaster.
How odd that Hillary doesn"t even cite the gas tax as the reason for the 1994 defeat. Liberal Democrats always have a hard time realizing how unpopular that word is: T-A-X-E-S.
The tax increase remains the third rail of American politics. Those who touch it in their first term generally don"t survive to see a second. If Hillary truly doesn"t grasp that her husband"s tax increases were the real cause of the Democrats" 1994 rout, it bodes poorly for a HILLARY presidency. If she takes office after years of Bush tax cuts, and then follows her instincts and raises taxes, she will fall and take her party down with her.
Whatever her blind spots, though, Hillary"s instincts for political reality have usually proven sound. Before the 1994 midterms, she foresaw the Democrats" looming defeat and called to ask my advice.
In October 1994, I conducted a poll to help determine how the Clintons could best defend themselves. I found that very few Americans believed Clinton when he said he had cut the budget deficit or created lots of new jobs. But they did give him credit for some small advances: AmeriCorps, his volunteer plan; the Family and Medical Leave Act; pro-choice judicial appointments; the Brady gun control bill; and the a.s.sault rifle ban. If they could be reminded effectively of these accomplishments, my poll suggested that enough voters might come back to the Democrats to avert defeat.
But President Clinton would have none of it. "I cut the deficit by one third. I"ve created millions of new jobs. I"ve done the big things," he railed over the phone in a conference call with Hillary and me. It was a throwback to the arrogance of 1980 and his refusal to admit his license-tax mistake in Arkansas.
"Bill," Hillary concurred, "of course you"ve done these things. But n.o.body believes that you have. Go with the messages they will believe." It was a familiar scene: Hillary trying to beat sense into Bill, despite his head-in-the-clouds, prideful refusal to embrace reality.
I accused Clinton of not just wanting to win, but wanting to do so only if he could prevail "for the right reasons." But he wouldn"t budge. He ran on the big themes - and lost.
The larger lesson of the 1994 defeat was not lost on Hillary. She and the president had to move to the center. They simply could not win re-election running as the liberal Democratic standard bearers.
As I worked with Clinton to move to the middle, Hillary was helping me behind the scenes. In her memoir, she writes that "I encouraged Bill to include d.i.c.k Morris in his consultations" after the defeat. She did.
She also absorbed the lessons of my theory of triangulation, which she defines accurately in her book: "when opposing camps are in two polar positions and neither believes it can afford to be seen as moving toward the other, they can decide to move toward a third position - like the apex of the triangle - what came to be called "triangulation." "
By 1995, Hillary was reinventing herself as a moderate, triangulating "New" Democrat. She provided crucial help in urging the president to back a balanced budget and to sign the welfare reform bill, the two acts that came to define his move to the center. Like Bill, she showed great dexterity in shifting in such a centrist direction, a move that appealed to the great ma.s.s of American voters. Her leftward tilt in the health care reform days was a thing of the past. She seemed to have learned her lesson.
But a deeper personal adjustment lay behind her political moves. The loss of Congress had shaken Hillary to the core. She felt the defeat very, very personally, and took much of the blame on her own shoulders. And most observers in both parties agreed with her. Bewildered and a.s.sailed by atypical self-doubts, Hillary confessed to me in mid-November 1994: "d.i.c.k, I feel so lost, so confused. I don"t know what"s right anymore. Everything I do seems not to work. I"ve never felt this way before. I don"t even trust my own judgment. I don"t know what I should be doing."
For all her self-confidence, Hillary can lose her bearings when things don"t go right. Her strong and resolute leadership has a brittle quality to it; when her basic a.s.sumptions are proven wrong, they undermine her resolve and even her self-esteem. Bill copes with adversity by showing up for work each morning and hoping things will improve. Hillary has less flexibility, less give. She is more inclined to try to ram her way through obstacles. When it works, she does very well. But when it doesn"t - as in 1994 - it can paralyze her.
To help get to the bottom of the Clintons" loss, I conducted a series of surveys in November and December 1994, and reported the results to the president in early January. There seemed to be two different strains of negatives that characterized the voters" att.i.tudes toward him. "One third of the people feel you are immoral and one third think you are weak," I told the depressed president.
There was nothing we could do about his perceived moral failings - his draft avoidance, the Gennifer Flowers scandal, Travelgate, Whitewater, or the innumerable sc.r.a.pes to which the first family seemed forever p.r.o.ne. But as I examined the reasons that people gave explaining why they thought that the president was weak, one concern kept coming up over and over again: Hillary. "She"s the power," the respondents complained. "She wears the pants." "She thinks she"s president." "I voted for him, but she"s in charge now." I read them to Clinton one after another, letting their c.u.mulative effect wash over him.
In these voters" eyes, the president"s perceived weakness was directly proportionate to Hillary"s perceived influence. To them, the first couple was in a zero sum game: The more power she had, the less power he wielded.
One of the great phobias in political history is the fear of hidden power. At the slightest indication that their rulers have come under the sway of hidden forces, the people can be expected to rebel. After rumors spread that Rasputin was dominating policy by influencing Czarina Alexandra, for example, czarist Russia was catapulted into revolution. Likewise, Hillary"s power had begun to sp.a.w.n fear and resentment. Voters had failed to grasp the reality of the Clintons" relationship: that they fed off one another. Power, in fact, was a nonzero game with the Clintons. The stronger each was, the more powerful they both were.
Then I turned to the bright side. It turned out that many of the very same people who complained of his wife"s role behind the scenes were thrilled by her outspokenness. For all of their anger about her backstage role, they welcomed and approved of her public statements. The thought of Hillary whispering in the president"s ear may have excited their anger, but making her speeches to an audience - particularly when she was battling for women and children - won widespread approval.
"Hillary needs to avoid White House meetings where word of her role will get out and focus her efforts on public advocacy," I told the president. "In fact, her outspokenness before audiences can be an antidote to the perception of hidden power. The voters know she"s not sitting there doing nothing. The more they read about her public role, the less they will speculate on her private doings."
A week later, Clinton asked me to start sending Hillary memos suggesting new directions for her public advocacy, always making sure to send him copies.
Hillary"s reaction was immediate. She withdrew from all White House strategy meetings. She just stopped coming. For a year she didn"t even send a representative. She totally cut herself off from overt involvement in White House strategizing. She was less involved in decision making than she had been at any point since the early two-career couple days of the late 1970s.
And slowly but surely her withdrawal began to have an effect. Gradually the articles that spoke of her extensive influence faded. She was mentioned less and less frequently as a key White House honcho. And, predictably, Bill"s strength ratings began to bounce back. It worked.
And so the HILLARY that appears in Living History says nothing about her behind-the-scenes influence. In its pages, she is only the chatty housewife in private, and an aggressive advocate for women and children in public. Why does she hide her skills as a strategist and campaign manager under a bushel? Why the focus on her campaigning with Chelsea "on her hip" in 1982 rather than on her critical role as her husband"s campaign czar? Why does she emphasize the domestic challenges of moving to Washington from Little Rock, rather than her involvement in choosing the cabinet and the policy agenda?
Because the HILLARY brand cannot be about hidden power.
The corollary of her reduced role in private was that HILLARY became more outspoken in public. The first lady leapt at the chance. After squandering her opportunity to cut an independent figure during the health care episode, now she had a second chance to make a solo impression. And this time, instead of having to fight for congressional approval, she was able to appeal directly to the public with speeches and symbolic gestures. No bills, no deals, no obstacles, no policy hang-ups, no budgetary constraints, no compet.i.tion for priority, just speechmaking and traveling. It was HILLARY Lite: at last, a chance for the moon to move out from behind the sun and shine on her own.
Hillary followed this strategy, shifting her energies to public advocacy while withdrawing from private power, from 1995 to 1997. It was only the Monica Lewinsky scandal that forced her out of this role and back into the strategy meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With her husband"s presidency on the line, she had to get back in control. Then, after the Lewinsky storm finally pa.s.sed, Hillary returned to public advocacy. As she prepared to run for the Senate, she was more and more a public figure and less a private Svengali.
Thus far, then, Hillary has remade herself successfully: After getting her political start as a manager, she changed horses midstream, developing the skills (and the look) of an advocate, then a candidate, and now a Senator. But Hillary"s early experiences as a manager were imprinted deeply upon her political consciousness, and they remain crucial to understanding what kind of a president she would make.
In fact, Hillary is a great manager. She keeps her focus on the main objective, and delegates authority and power well. Her formidable self-discipline allows her to focus on her job while allowing her subordinates to do theirs. In all of this, she surpa.s.ses Bill. While he really trusts no one but himself to make decisions, she selects good people and gives them great loyalty, expecting as good in return.
At the White House, Bill Clinton saw his staff primarily as amba.s.sadors to other wings of the Democratic Party. Nominated by his party only after the favorite, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, decided not to run, and elected with only 43 percent of the vote, he saw the need to build bridges to his own party and the Washington establishment. So he gathered around him a collection of emissaries: Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes was his amba.s.sador to labor and the left, White House advisor George Stephanopoulos to the Washington Post and the White House press corps, Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to the chairmen who controlled the House committees. Ron Brown and Henry Cisneros were his amba.s.sadors to the African American and Hispanic communities. I was his link to the Republicans who ran Congress.
But Hillary"s staff has always been predominantly, overwhelmingly, and totally loyal to Hillary. Longtime Hillary allies like her first chief of staff, Maggie Williams, her successor Melanne Verveer, press secretary Lisa Caputo, and speechwriter Lissa Muscatine are her people, first and always. With clear lines of authority and strong discipline, Hillary runs a tight ship, never weakened by leaks or infighting.
Such talent for management would be one of President Hillary"s major a.s.sets, a welcome change from the floating chaos of her husband"s administration.
To date, Hillary Clinton has distinguished herself as a superb manager, political tactician, and hardnosed executive. It"s ironic, and rather a shame, that the HILLARY brand overlooks these real skills altogether, presenting her as the traditional first lady and hausfrau she never wanted to be.
HIDING HILLARY: THE IDEOLOGUE.
One of the questions that always worried voters about Bill Clinton looms just as large with Hillary: Is she really a liberal or a moderate? A New Democrat or an old one? Is she the Hillary of health care reform - a dogmatic advocate of big government - or the moderate who urged her husband to sign the welfare reform law pa.s.sed by a Republican Congress in 1996?
Living History offers no clue. Indeed, just as Bill Clinton always insisted that he had not changed from the big spender and taxer of his first two years in office to the budget balancer of the next two, so Hillary recognizes no incongruity or even dissonance between the liberalism of her health care agenda and the relative moderation of her advocacy during her husband"s remaining years in office.
Yet if we examine her real history and Living History side by side, we can get a glimpse of the answer: She is an opportunist when she needs to be, and an ideologue whenever she can. An opportunist by necessity but an ideologue by choice.
Unlike Bill, Hillary is deeply committed to an ideological agenda. But she is like him in a different respect: She will do what she has to do in order to get elected. When the political tides are with him, Bill ultimately does what makes sense to him. When they are flowing Hillary"s way, she tacks as far left as pragmatism will allow.
Hillary has a core issue: the needs of women and children. While Bill has a wide-ranging set of political values, including a general belief in social betterment, an end to racism, and a reduction in income and cla.s.s disparities, there is no single const.i.tuency with which he identifies so purely as Hillary does with hers. And she deserves credit for this: While the tactics she uses to help her const.i.tuency have changed over the years - maturing from the Utopian panacea of health care reform to more modest measures - her devotion has never really waned. It"s not just a part of the HILLARY brand; it"s Hillary herself.
In fact, the only consistent beneficiary of Hillary"s loyalty other than women and children has been political opportunity itself. When the voters call for liberalism, Hillary moves left. When they want moderation, she tacks back to the center. This practical compa.s.s has proved a lifetime"s work for Hillary. As a student, she was a radical. As a first lady of Arkansas, she was a moralistic reformer. In the health care debacle, she was a Utopian visionary. Finally, in Bill"s second term and thus far in her own Senate career, she has evolved into a center/left Democrat, liberal on some issues and moderate on others, highly attuned to the political tenor - and polls - of the moment.
Inside all this, however, is an ideologue awaiting her moment.
In this respect, Hillary"s evolution is not altogether different from many who have lived in the White House. Ronald Reagan moved left to right as he matured. Bill Clinton outgrew his student radicalism. But Hillary deliberately, if ineffectually, conceals her past as a radical and spins her role on health care to avoid admitting that she has changed or even grown. There is a fragility to her pretense of consistency. If Hillary does run for president, and if she ultimately serves in the White House, the media will never allow her to skate by without a fuller reconciliation of her past and the present.
The HILLARY brand will be forced to reckon, at last, with Hillary"s past.
STUDENT RADICAL.
In Hillary"s college and law school years, she was anything but a moderate. A dedicated leftist at left-leaning Yale Law School, she spent the summer of 1971 clerking for the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein - which she describes in Living History merely as "a small law firm."
It was a bit more than that. Its lead partner at the time, Robert Treuhaft, and his wife, Jessica Mitford, were both former active members of the American Communist Party. For years, in fact, Treuhaft was the Party"s lawyer. And what loyal members Treuhaft and Mitford were, staying in the party well into the 1950s - through the show trials and purges of the 1930s, through the carving up of Poland after Stalin"s nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, even through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. It was only in 1956, long after the American left had abandoned the Party en ma.s.se, that Treuhaft and Mitford finally left it, spurred by Khrushchev"s revelations of Stalin"s brutality and genocide.
Hillary biographer Joyce Milton notes that Treuhaft was "long known as Oakland"s Red Lawyer." As she reports, "Treuhaft had defended Harry Bridges, the Australian head of the longsh.o.r.eman"s union, enabling him to avoid deportation even though, as is now thoroughly doc.u.mented, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA. Treuhaft and Mitford left the Party . . . only because their chapter had lost so many members that it was "ineffectual." Their views remained fixed."
Hillary was no Communist, nor should her work in the Treuhaft firm imply that she was. But the fact that she chose this job out of all the summer jobs that might have been available, traveling three thousand miles for it, tells something about her orientation at the time. Just as the fact that she does not describe the firm"s work or reputation says something about her today.
During her time at Yale Law School, Hillary was especially active in defense of the Black Panthers. She treats the topic gingerly in Living History, describing how her quiet academic universe was invaded by political action: "That world and its realities came crashing down on Yale in April 1970 when eight Black Panthers, including party leader Bobby Seale, were put on trial for murder in New Haven. Thousands of angry protesters, convinced the Panthers had been set up by the FBI and government prosecutors, swarmed into the city. Demonstrations broke out in and around campus."
Hillary then describes how "I learned, late on the night of April 27, that the International Law Library, which was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the law school, was on fire. Horrified, I rushed to join a bucket brigade of faculty, staff, and students to put out the fire and to rescue books damaged by the flames and water."
But Hillary did a lot more than put out a fire. She actively worked in support of the Panthers" defense team.
Eight members of the extremist group had been charged with the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, whom they suspected of being a government informer. Insight magazine describes how Rackley was "clubbed, burned with cigarettes, doused with boiling water and stabbed with an ice pick before being taken out and shot twice in the head by his comrades."
The late Barbara Olson probed Hillary"s role with the Panthers in her book h.e.l.l to Pay: "The evidence against the Black Panthers was overwhelming - including an audio tape of part of the "trial" to which Rackley was subjected. Two Panthers confessed to shooting Rackley as part of a plea bargain." But Panther leader Seale fought extradition from California, and became "a rallying point for student radicals who idolized the Panthers as leaders of a necessary black insurrection against the repressive white establishment."
Former radical leader and Panther ally David Horowitz, the co-editor of the sixties leftist magazine Ramparts, says "The fact is that the Panthers were torturers and murderers of black people, and Hillary Clinton . . . organized . . . demonstrations to get them off."
Horowitz, who has taken a far longer road from left to right than either of the Clintons to become one of America"s leading conservatives, elaborates: "It was a bunch of revolutionary law students who were trying to obstruct justice; that"s what it was about. A guy was tortured and murdered; the government was trying people for the crime. . . . The Panther leaders who were on trial all thought it was okay to torture and murder somebody. That"s what Hillary Clinton was defending, people who thought it was okay to torture and murder somebody."
As Olson reports, "Hillary attended Black Panther trials and put her considerable leadership and organizational skills to work in organizing shifts of fellow students to monitor the trial and report alleged civil rights abuses."
Where most law students try to work for their school"s mainstream law review, Hillary served as an editor of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, an alternative leftist publication whose first issue, in 1970, included this declaration: "For too long, legal issues have been defined and discussed in terms of academic doctrine rather than strategies for social change." Contributors included William Kunstler, Charles Gerry (the lawyer representing the Panthers), and Jerry Rubin, who wrote in the Review that parents should "get high with our seven-year-olds" and students ought to "kill our parents."
Olson reports that "The combined second and third law issues of the Review in the fall/winter of 1970 on which Hillary served as a.s.sociate editor, centered on Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers. It included many cartoons depicting the police as hominid pigs, their snouts wet while they mutter, "n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs.""
If Hillary was a leftist at Yale - sympathetic to the Black Panthers, defensive of campus revolutionaries, and antagonistic toward the police - she had a lot of company. Millions of students of the era shared her views. Few would argue that the Hillary Clinton of today and the student radical of the sixties are one and the same. Times have changed; so have we, and so has she.
What is notable are the lengths to which she goes in Living History to avoid discussing that part of her life. Rather than frankly acknowledging the far-left positions of her twenties - or her evolution to more moderate views in her thirties and forties - she tries to conceal her radical background. Her sole mention of the Panthers in Living History is the harmless, even charming anecdote about the "bucket brigade" she led to put out a campus fire during the Panther riots. A past life as a campus radical doesn"t fit in with the HILLARY brand.
In a presidential campaign, of course, all is fair game. During the 1992 race, photos of Bill Clinton as a long-haired teenager, taken at peace rallies during the late sixties, were broadcast around the world. His adolescent drug use became an issue ("I did not inhale"). Thus far, Hillary"s involvement with the Panthers has yet to surface as a political liability - in part, perhaps, because she chose to begin her career in relatively liberal New York. But it"s sure to haunt her when she runs for the top office.
EDUCATION REFORM.
Hillary"s first major foray into public policy came after Bill"s restoration as Arkansas governor in 1982. Working day and night to re-elect her husband, she had put her own career on hold. Now she faced a decision: whether to return to her own life at the Rose Law Firm or move further down the road of politics. She chose politics.
And almost immediately Bill needed her again. Just after he returned to office, the Arkansas State Supreme Court handed him a live grenade, ruling the state"s entire existing education-financing system unconst.i.tutional. The system"s dependence on property taxes to pay for schools was illegal, the court found, because it left poor communities with worse schools than wealthy ones. Clinton was presented with a sobering choice: either cut aid to wealthy neighborhoods (a political impossibility) or increase funds in poorer areas - which would necessitate a tax increase.
Clinton had just been voted out of office for raising taxes. Now he would be forced to increase them again. There seemed no way out. "I"ll be a one-term governor twice," he complained.
Bill, Hillary, Betsey Wright, and I huddled for strategy sessions long into the night, trying to find a way around the problem. Clinton had calculated that he had to raise the state sales tax by one half of one cent to fund the mandates in the court decision. My polls showed that voters would resent a half-cent hike that did nothing to improve the schools, but would accept a full one-cent increase if it really helped education. The Clintons embraced the idea of the higher tax - it"s never hard getting them to raise taxes - but realized that if they were going to collect more money from the voters, they had better deliver.
It was Hillary who came up with the idea of a commission that would travel around the state holding hearings and bringing attention to the low quality of Arkansas schools. The commission, which she would lead, would then recommend fundamental reforms in education standards and big raises in teacher pay. Antic.i.p.ating the Bush administration"s "No Child Left Behind" program by twenty years, Hillary realized that voters - and the state legislature - would be less grudging about raising teacher salaries if they felt educational standards were rising.
And yet, strangely, Living History completely misrepresents the origins of Hillary"s education-reform initiative. Nowhere in the book does she reveal that her decision to focus on education was impelled by a court order. The court"s decision goes completely unmentioned. Rather, Hillary claims that she and Bill decided to focus on the issue because they "agreed that Arkansas would never prosper without an overhaul of its education system."
Talk about revisionist history! When Clinton first came back to power in 1982, he planned to focus on lowering utility rates, not on education. Exploiting Frank White"s dependence on donations from large utility companies, Clinton had campaigned for direct popular election of the state utility regulatory board, which was then appointed by the governor.
But the court decision on school finance soon eclipsed the utility rate issue. Clinton had to come up with an education program, and mobilize all his resources to get it pa.s.sed.
So why does Hillary fail to mention the court decision? What would be wrong with admitting that her education campaign was born of a judicial ruling? The reason is simple: The HILLARY brand moves in response to inner conviction, not outside necessity. Hillary, the political tactician? She saw how a good public policy initiative would help her husband survive another tax increase. HILLARY, the brand? She acted only because she cared about children.
In contrast to her later failures on health care, Hillary did a fantastic job working to reform the state"s backward education system . . . and backward is putting it kindly. When Arkansans of the time said "thank G.o.d for Mississippi," as they often did, everyone got the reference: Only the even more abysmal schools there spared Arkansas the indignity of being 50th in the nation in education.
It was Hillary who first introduced to Arkansas the idea of giving schools "report cards" based on their students" performance on standardized tests, a measure since adopted as the core of Bush"s school reforms. If a school"s students failed standardized tests in disproportionate numbers, it would get special help and extra funds. But if the school"s poor performance persisted, the school itself would be decertified, closed, and the children transferred to other inst.i.tutions.
The gutsiest part of Hillary"s program was a decision to test teachers to see if they were sufficiently skilled, informed, and educated to teach effectively. A state with a poor education system is frequently in danger of falling into a vicious cycle: Bad schools turn out bad teachers, who are then employed by the bad schools. (One teacher famously taught her cla.s.s that the conflict that engulfed the globe in the 1940s was "World War Eleven" - that"s how she read World War II!) So Hillary demanded that every teacher, tenured or not, be tested. Those who failed the examination would get remedial help. If they still failed, they would be fired. She also proposed big pay raises for the teachers who pa.s.sed the test - and got them. No longer would the poorly educated products of the state"s segregated school system of forty years ago teach in modern schools, perpetuating the cycle of ignorance that dogged them.
Her decision, and Bill"s determination to back her up, took enormous political courage. The teachers" union was the core of the progressive wing of the state"s Democratic Party. Alienated beyond imagination by the testing plan, the union"s membership turned on the Clintons in a flash when they got wind of Hillary"s proposal. Pickets appeared. Teachers attacked the governor, and singled out the first lady for special scorn. For years thereafter, the union refused to endorse Bill Clinton - despite its almost Siamese twin-like connection to the state Democratic Party.
Testing teachers was a bold and innovative move. Hillary describes accurately in Living History how the tests "enraged the teachers union, civil rights groups, and others who were vital to the Democratic Party in Arkansas."
But Living History does not tell the full story.
When the teacher test scores came in, Bill and Hillary were shocked. Arkansas teachers had failed miserably. Clinton complained: "I"d have to fire half the teachers if we held to the standard pa.s.sing grade." Minority teachers flunked the test in especially large numbers. Clinton knew he would be in hot water if he decimated the minority teachers as a result of the test. It would have been a political disaster.
So the Clintons commissioned me to take a poll to find out what percent of the teachers the voters felt ought to fail the test. 1 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent - what would the market bear?
The poll revealed that they expected one teacher in ten to flunk. Only about one voter in twenty would find it acceptable to fail half the teachers. So what did Bill and Hillary do? They adjusted the pa.s.sing grade so that only 10 percent failed the test.