While Clinton steeled himself and set to work, Bob Dole was beset by doubts. In early 1995, Woodward writes, Dole wasn’t sure he was going to run at all. As Dole prepared to file a ““statement of candidacy,’’ he drafted a second letter that would leave him a legal way out. He asked himself: was he running out of habit, on mere momentum? His wife, Elizabeth, and his campaign aides went ballistic: either he declared or didn’t; he couldn’t afford to indulge his legislative trick of playing for time. Dole eventually agreed. A year later it was Elizabeth who had the doubts. When Dole told her that he was going to quit the Senate, she responded with a long memo discussing the risks. When he insisted, she wrote him a private note that drew on her devout Christian faith. ““Bob, I believe God has prepared you for such a time as this!''
““The Choice’’ is Woodward’s first ““campaign’’ book. It is full of rich detail about the secret maneuvers of handlers, polltakers and media advisers. Dogged as always, Woodward unearths scooplets about their machinations that normally wouldn’t surface until after the election. And with his ability to penetrate to the core of Washington institutions, he underscores something about ““the choice’’ that the rest of the city often forgets. Voters will choose between two families, two ways of looking at life – and two men who’ve been taking each other’s measure since 1993.
In Woodward’s telling, Clinton long ago became obsessed with polls, ads and reelection. He depicts an embittered and sometimes lonely man, playing solitaire while he makes late-night calls. After the Democrats lost Congress in 1994, Hillary left the White House inner councils, seeking support and votes among liberals and women, and personal encouragement from Dr. Jean Houston. Her husband, meanwhile, merged his administration with his campaign and put the combined operation mostly in the care of three men: polltaker Dick Morris, adman Robert Squier and fund raiser Terry McAuliffe.
Morris’s behind-the-scenes influence is well known, but Woodward adds details. Bypassing White House staff, Morris in December 1994 secretly helped Clinton draft the first major proposal he made in response to the midterm elections: a series of tax-cut initiatives called a ““middle-class bill of rights.’’ Morris’s ““triangulation’’ strategy also is no secret. An adviser to many Republicans, he urged Clinton to move right on a host of issues, from the budget to welfare to crime, to get them ““off the table’’ for the fall campaign.
But Morris, Woodward reports, was playing both sides – and so was the president. On the one hand, Morris insisted that Clinton needed to make a budget deal with the GOP. On the other, he devised an ad strategy that helped make a deal less likely. In its budget, the GOP Congress had voted to slow the growth of Medicare spending by $270 billion over seven years. Morris told Clinton that his polls showed the idea was wildly unpopular. ““You can shove it up their a,’’ Morris told him. Which is precisely what he did. In a series of ads ““personally approved’’ by Clinton, the Democratic National Committee depicted Dole, Newt Gingrich and the GOP as a bloody horde out to ““cut’’ Medicare. Furious Republicans eventually refused to deal with Clinton.
Carefully targeted to reach ““persuadables’’ in key markets, the ad campaign was an unprecedented run of what Squier proudly called ““unopposed storytelling.’’ Woodward says Clinton ““personally controlled’’ the DNC’s $25 million ad budget, much of it raised by McAuliffe in a series of lucrative ““soft money’’ events. By law, the DNC’s ad campaign should have been independent of the White House. The president’s close control of it, Woodward suggests, was ““possibly illegal.’’ But it worked: the president’s poll numbers rose steadily, market by market.
Meanwhile, Dole groped for compelling and consistent things to say as he pursued the GOP nomination. As depicted by Woodward, Dole is a man of decent instincts and centrist views, willing to play the statesman on Bosnia and the budget. But Dole can be timorous, undisciplined and confused as a candi- date. Dole’s unpredictable decision-making, Woodward says in one of his few judgmental asides, raises questions about the kind of presidency he’d conduct.
The Clintons declined to be interviewed by Woodward, but Dole cooperated big time: 12 hours of interviews that produced 200 pages of transcript. Playing ball evidently helped, for in ““The Choice’’ Dole is shown as uncomfortable with conservative positions he took in the primaries – and that he’d now rather forget.
According to Woodward, Dole came close to throwing away the text of his most successful speech of 1995, his attack on the cultural excesses of Hollywood. His campaign manager, Scott Reed, had released an advance copy, then waited nervously for the balking Dole to finally give it. Dole bridled at signing a ““no tax pledge,’’ but did so. To remind reporters – and Dole – of the commitment, Reed put the pledge’s chief proponent on the campaign plane. Dole told Woodward that he opposed Reed’s decision to return a contribution from a gay Republican group, but kept quiet about it to avoid stories about second-guessing his staff.
From the beginning, Dole has been obsessed with winning over Colin Powell. Early on, Dole secretly visited the retired general for a fireside chat. He floated to Powell the idea of a ““one-term presidency’’ as a way to interest him in being his running mate. Dole didn’t declare his support for sending U.S. troops to Bosnia until he knew that Powell would go along. According to Woodward, Reed and longtime Dole adviser Bob Ellsworth in May compiled their first short-list of potential running mates. On a scale of 1 to 10, Dole told Woodward, ““I’m going to find a 10.’’ The list includes Govs. Pete Wilson of California and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania; Sens. Richard Lugar and Connie Mack, and GOP veterans Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and James A. Baker III. But the list is headed by… Powell.
As Woodward describes it, Clinton and Dole have been eying each other warily since Clinton came to town in 1993. In an early meeting Dole flatly told Clinton to forget any Republican support for a tax increase. It was a politically realistic assessment, but nevertheless astounded and annoyed Clinton. The president was infuriated, Woodward says, by Dole’s decision the following year to dwell on the Whitewater affair at a time when Clinton was mourning his mother’s death. But later, during budget talks, Clinton privately expressed admiration for Dole, saying he would have ““some confidence’’ in Dole as president. The other GOP contenders, he told an aide, were ““nitwits.''
Dole, for his part, expressed grudging admiration for Clinton’s political skill. At one point, Woodward says, Clinton took Dole aside at a meeting on Bosnia and invited him to work secretly on a welfare bill. Dole agreed, though the deal later fell through. Dole was amazed, but not impressed, by Clinton’s willingness to be berated on the phone by GOP House leaders. ““If I’d have been the president,’’ he said later, ““I’d have hung up on them.’’ In the end, Dole became weary and infuriated at Clinton’s on-again, off-again budget strategy. The man will say anything, Dole concluded.
Woodward’s inside-the-room, cinma vrit approach has its drawbacks. This is the campaign as seen from Washington. He ignores the wider view: of the electorate, ideology, history. He takes Clinton’s Oval Office ethics to task, but barely mentions the Dole camp’s use of nasty phone-bank calls to the grass roots. He seems a trifle awestruck by an old story: the power of TV in politics. And Clinton is hardly the first modern president to be obsessed with the mechanics of his re-election. The last one was Richard Nixon – which is where, nearly a quarter century ago, both modern politics and Bob Woodward’s career began.
Still, in his plodding Sgt. Friday style Woodward once again superbly chronicles the public and private actions of men in power, and in pursuit of power. Whitewater is treated very lightly in ““The Choice.’’ ““That’s another book,’’ says Woodward, sitting in his Georgetown home. He hastens to add that he hasn’t chosen – let alone started – another project. The Clintons can only hope that Whitewater isn’t it.
