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14 of 15 DOCUMENTS

The Washington Post

October 2, 1992, Friday, Final Edition

Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun; At Clinton HQ, Washington Operatives Get a Taste of America

Joel Achenbach, Washington Post Staff Writer

SECTION: STYLE; PAGE C1

LENGTH: 3054 words

DATELINE: LITTLE ROCK, Ark.

This is the unWashington. People don't walk fast. They don't have car faxes. They don't have the classic Washington attitude of I'll give up my cellular phone when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Breathe the air: The absence of power and influence is detoxifying. The only sign of monumentalism is the requisite dome on the state Capitol. The last really important thing that happened here was in 1957, a civil rights riot down at the local high school (that is, until this Nov. 3, when, just maybe, there might be something new to talk about). Today the citizens are so friendly that total strangers act like they want to give you a big ol' bear hug. When Clinton aide Jacquelyn Davis's car was hit in the parking lot, she found a note saying, "I am so so so so terribly sorry I hit your car. Here is my name and number... ."

The closest thing to a power lunch spot is Your Mama's. "Your Mama's Good Food" says the sign on the window. A plate of meatloaf, turnip greens, purple hull peas and corn bread costs $ 3.99. The place, a humble storefront next to a Kinko's copy center on Louisiana Street, opens at 11 and closes three hours later, and in between there's always a confab of Clinton campaigners with elbows on the checkerboard tablecloths.

"The Republicans are at [Washington's] 21 Federal, we're at Your Mama's," bellows James Carville, Bill Clinton's senior strategist and official Large Personality. "No Red Sage here!" He is filling up the restaurant with his high-calorie Cajun accent. "Man, we havin' jambalaya Friday?" he shouts to the cook.

In June there had been a debate over where to establish the presidential campaign's national headquarters for the final five months. The obvious choice: Washington. In Washington the human and electronic infrastructure is in place to support a logo-centric and imagistic enterprise, and it seems natural and appropriate and perfectly seemly to spend your entire life in the desperate manipulation of the political process. When doing as the Romans do, go to Rome.

But Bill and Hillary Clinton wanted to stay in Little Rock, where they have their only home (the Governor's Mansion) and where their daughter, Chelsea, goes to school. At first, some of the senior campaign operatives didn't cotton to the idea -- they'd have to change planes in Atlanta! For someone from Washington or New York City or Los Angeles, Arkansas is about as nowhere as you can get. Distressingly near Mississippi. Dozens of newly hired campaign workers found themselves heading to a place that for all they knew had the lowest teeth-to-people ratio of any state in the union. The state song would be "Dueling Banjos"! Everyone would be named Bubba and Buford! Even the women!

And the food: Endless iron skillets overflowing with chicken-fried steak; bottomless bowls of black-eyed peas. Page 2 Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun;At Clinton HQ, Washington Operatives Get a Taste of America The Washington Post October 2, 1992, Friday, Final Edition

But the operatives were surprised. They were intrigued by the very absence of intrigue. "This is a very interesting place to be engineering the peaceful takeover of the Free World," says Bob Boorstin, policy adviser, formerly of New York City. "Because Little Rock is America."

America! The place they'd heard about for so long. The place they had all aspired to live, in those reflective moments back in the big city when the cappuccino was just taking effect. Matt Smith, from Chicago, says, "You can say hi to someone in the Woolworth's and they return it. It's not like, 'Hey, you talking to me?' "

Jeff Eller, the political communications director, recently of Washington: "You get out here and it's Sunday morning and people are going to church."

Innocence is rare in politics. Some of the campaign workers almost seem a little sad that they'll be leaving in just a few weeks. They have destinies elsewhere. This may be America, but they're still just tourists.

All Work

By 7 a.m. the War Room is packed. At midnight many will still be here in the Gazette Building, the old newspaper office serving as Clinton campaign headquarters. In these final weeks the campaign never really sleeps. There are people who look as if they've been living on a diet of candy bars and adrenaline. Thirty-six days, 35 days, 34 days, they count it down, they know the number. There is no time and no energy for casual conversation -- they have to maintain the focus on victory. If this is a confident bunch they don't want to let it show, they don't even want to feel that emotion -- this year has been too crazy, the campaign too up and down, no one wants to jinx anything. And Perot is back. Weird! "It accentuates the need for discipline," says Carville.

This is the great thing about Little Rock: There are no distractions, nothing to do but work. The drawbacks of Arkansas turned out to be attributes. Not many reporters. No running into think tank guys on the sidewalk and feeling obligated to chat. No future Clinton administration wannabes wandering around looking for a lunch partner. "People on the Hill don't constantly call us and tell us what they just saw on 'The McLaughlin Group,' " says Clinton aide Carter Wilkie. "Also in Washington you can't park for $ 2 a day," says Matt Smith.

Everyone at the Clinton campaign has a CNN tan. They start early and work late and if someone offers to buy them a beer for dinner they say no, a Diet Coke will be fine, there're some briefing papers we need to go over back at the office. There's an ethic of zeal.

"You guys are 9-to-5ers," says one worker to a colleague from another department.

"How late were you here last night?"

"11:30."

"2:10!"

This is not an Arkansan kind of conversation.

"It's a little bit of a Washington thing," says Carville -- speaking, it should be noted, at 6:30 in the morning as he scans the newspapers in the restaurant of the Capital Hotel, which he calls home. "You know how everyone in Washington runs around telling you how hard they work? I don't care about that, go bore someone else with all that crap."

But he adds, "I tell you what, when this thing is over, you're looking at someone who's not going to hit a lick for a while."

What'll he do? Page 3 Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun;At Clinton HQ, Washington Operatives Get a Taste of America The Washington Post October 2, 1992, Friday, Final Edition

"Stare a lot. You know, just stare into space."

Carville's routine never changes. Wake-up call at 6:15. War Room meeting at 7. Lunch at noon. A quick nap on his office couch. Another meeting after the evening news. A jog. Dinner, with a martini before and a glass of wine during. Usually he goes to Doe's Eat Place with other campaign workers.

At the beginning of a meal they vow not to talk about the campaign. They then break the vow. Nothing else matters! They can hum the CNN theme music. They can imitate that deep lionlike growl of James Earl Jones: "This ... is CNN."

At the Clinton headquarters you hear snippets of wistfulness:

"Sylvia, did you go on that Buffalo River trip?"

"No, we were preparing for a Monday policy event."

Put it this way: There's a little Washington in Little Rock.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the thrilling, frenzied pace of the Clinton campaign. Win or lose, the Clintonoids will go down in history as quick-draw artists. They never met a Republican they didn't spite. The rule of the campaign is, every assault must have a counter-assault. Bush hits, Clinton hits back. Did not, did so. The strategy seems to be working -- the only drawback being that it has given the campaign the feeling of a huge water gun fight. Godzilla vs. Mothra, armed with Super Soakers.

Behind a closed door in a corner of the third floor of the Gazette Building is the hyper-efficient spin control operation. George Stephanopoulos, the super-charming communications director, sits behind a CEO-size desk with three phones, one labeled "Batphone." Like the true Washington character he is, he can simultaneously converse with a live person and a telephonic person even while glancing constantly at the TV to catch the most recent pretty picture from the trail, the latest-breaking sound nibble.

An electric shaver, plugged in, rests on top of the fax machine. To run a political campaign in the '90s you have to be able to shave and fax at the same time.

"... I actually think we're going to get a good pop back on the networks," Stephanopoulos is saying into the phone. "Hello? ... It worked! ... It totally worked! It created a new story."

He's sipping from a mug of coffee. His grin softens for a moment and he says, "We're low on spin here." You can sense wheels turning inside his head; let's ratchet it up a notch.

At the next telephone is Gene Sperling, the guy in charge of explaining Clinton's economic policies. People at the campaign always talk about Gene Sperling -- about how he doesn't sleep. "Gene works 22 hours a day," Stephanopoulos says. Sperling looks a tad fatigued -- you might say, gently, that he looks like a man who must spend his day explaining Clinton's economic policies.

"All of those 10 or 11 things together get you the $ 150 billion," he's saying. "... The top 2 percent is just our shorthand ..."

A few minutes after he hangs up, Sperling says he doesn't remember who he had been talking to.

"You were doing blind spin!" marvels Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos says all he ever does here is work and go to Doe's. He wanted to be in D.C. originally. He's a Dukakis campaign veteran and former aide to Rep. Dick Gephardt. But now he feels right being here. "We're the insurgents. And it helps to be the insurgents from Little Rock." Page 4 Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun;At Clinton HQ, Washington Operatives Get a Taste of America The Washington Post October 2, 1992, Friday, Final Edition

Because it just sounds better. The Little Rock thing has a nice spin to it.

Real People

It is not, in fact, nowhere. Little Rock is full of musicians, actors and all sorts of other artsy characters who have filtered in from the sticks. There is a repertory theater, a gay nightclub, some fine hotels. What there isn't much of is people -- fewer than 200,000 in the city. The downtown on any weekend is thoroughly depopulated, except, of course, for the ever-present Clinton campaigners. Mary Madden, a Clinton aide who grew up here, says of the downtown area, "It looks like a city, there's just no people here."

Outside Little Rock there are miles and miles of lonely two-lane highways. They weave through empty pine forests, fertile farmland, rolling hills. A town on a map may just be a filling station (they still have Sinclair out here, the ones with the dinosaur emblem), and maybe a few houses and a couple of churches. The Clinton folks don't get out in the country much (why watch a sunset when you can monitor C-SPAN?).

Arkansans don't show any particular obsession with Clinton's election. There's a big Clinton billboard downtown, but there's also a huge sign saying ARKANSAS IS BUSH COUNTRY out by the airport. There are Clinton/Gore signs on the front doors of most of the houses across from the Governor's Mansion. Some people say they like the idea of one of their own making it to Washington -- can't hurt. "Maybe it'll perk the town up again," says Tom Johnson, who's mowing his lawn in the lovely Hillcrest neighborhood, a few doors down from the two-story, porch-lined frame house where Bill and Hillary Clinton lived for two years in the early 1980s. (There's a gazebo in the side yard, a trampoline in back, a cat sleeping on the porch next to a football -- who'd trade this for the Governor's Mansion, much less the White House?)

If you drive out of town on Kanis Road, you'll eventually reach a spot on the map called Ferndale, the anchor of which seems to be Tommy's Ferndale Gro. & Feed. Tommy Wakefield pauses when asked whom he'll vote for. He looks at his wife, Linda. It's as though they've never given it a thought. "We're probably undecided," he finally says. Sorry, that's not on the form. He thinks a second and says, "I'm favoring Clinton, I think." Linda says, "We need a change." Tommy says, "He's talking more about things for us, rather than things across the sea." Foreign policy -- who cares? All politics is local, and the Wakefields can't even sell beer. "We've got two churches within 400 yards or so," says Tommy. "This community out here would go crazy if we tried to sell beer. They'd rather go in town and get it."

That's innocence too, of a sort.

Back to the city: Clinton, when not on the road, usually sticks to the mansion and stays clear of campaign HQ. In the morning he jogs around his neighborhood, a racially and economically mixed area called Quapaw Quarter. He doesn't cause any stir among the locals, they've seen his shuffling gait and pasty legs plenty of times, but the photographers and camera crews zig and zag through the quiet streets trying to get the perfect angle, and of course there are the Secret Service cars and the two agents who flank the governor, just far enough behind to be out of view.

At the end of his run Sunday morning, Clinton walked a few blocks and paused to shake hands with a local black minister and his two sons. It's what the operatives say: Clinton's comfortable here. He's in his comfort zone. Where would he jog in Washington? When would he ever shake hands spontaneously with someone who happened to cross his path?

The next morning, USA Today suggested that the campaign was coasting, because Clinton spent a few hours off the trail.

"For being in Little Rock until 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning!" Carville says. "The church people will be kicking us for not going to church, you know."

Carville is no ideologue. He's just a fighter. His job is to win elections for his clients. Asked why he works for Clinton, Page 5 Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun;At Clinton HQ, Washington Operatives Get a Taste of America The Washington Post October 2, 1992, Friday, Final Edition he says simply, "I liked him." He doesn't mean he liked Clinton's policies or envisioned Clinton as a great president -- he's saying he just liked him at the let's-stay-up-late-and-play-cards level. Carville says the voters have to be careful whom they vote for, because the man they elect is going to be president for four years -- but he, Carville, has to be even more careful than that: "If you do what I do and you pick someone, you got to live in a foxhole with him for a year."

He talks about the "goofball convention" of the Republicans. "It was attacking the governor's wife! It was talking about some religious war going on in America. It was" -- he squints, his eyes nearly disappear, he makes a bad-taste expression with his mouth -- "dark (pronounced dawk). It was a dawk, sinister view of the world they were presenting."

Is he confident?

"I'm as nervous as I've ever been in my life," he says. "Catholic culture is an indoctrination against overconfidence. It's just been beaten into my head."

He had originally thought that Atlanta would be the best place for the headquarters. He has seen the light. This is where the guvnuh is most com-fuh-tuhble. And it doesn't matter to Carville where he is; strategy is strategy. "This campaign could be located across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It wouldn't matter. I'd never go there."

At 47 he's twice the age of some Clinton campaign workers. There are at least 300 people working in the Gazette Building, most of them in their twenties, most white, all rather clean-cut and mainstream-looking. There are no skinheads, no beads, no hairy legs, no ostentatious signs of sexual preference. No one wears a button. If they're liberals they wear their liberalism up their sleeve.

In fact, it seems to be a thoroughly non-ideological campaign. It's almost issueless: The only thing that matters is that Bush lose and Clinton win. Everyone just talks about "change." "This has to do with the rubber hitting the road. Making changes. This doesn't have to do with a highfalutin philosophy," says campaign worker Sylvia Mathews, whose Clintonesque background includes a childhood in tiny Hinton, W.Va., and a Rhodes scholarship.

The question remains as to what would happen if this operation moves north and east after Nov. 3. Ideology can be a nice mooring in a whirl of victory -- no one wants to end up like Peter Boyle and Robert Redford at the end of "The Candidate," staring at each other and wondering, What do we do now? You need the anchor of a belief system in Washington, a city that is essentially mechanistic, that operates like a wound-up gadget, with money and power seeking their own level in accordance with the laws of political physics. The did-not/did-so form of politics won't be anything new in Washington, it'll be the same old adversarial game.

And so however much the campaign would like to consider itself on the outside of the power corridor, however much it may relish the David-with-the-little-rock-vs.-Goliath imagery that goes along with the Arkansas political base, the fact remains that you could shrink-wrap the Gazette Building and ship it to Washington and hardly anyone would have culture shock. Besides: This is the modern era. All wires lead to Washington. "Between E-mail and phones and faxes, we could be in Hot Springs," says policy adviser Boorstin.

The Measures of Success?

You have to wonder, late at night as you're dozing off to sleep, what will happen to Arkansas if Bill Clinton wins the election. Maybe the same thing that happened in recent years to Maine, President Bush's home turf. The prices will go up. Tourists will line up down the block to taste Your Mama's "Famous Purple Hull Peas." It's a bad dream: Suddenly you can't get meatloaf, two vegetables and corn bread for $ 3.99. Doe's Eat Place will put in a new dining room, then go nationwide as a chain. Phillips Big and Tall Men's Store on Main Street will be replaced by a United Colors of Benetton. Krazy Ray's Fashions will give way to a Sharper Image. Downtown Wigs & Fashions will become a Ben & Jerry's. Page 6 Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun;At Clinton HQ, Washington Operatives Get a Taste of America The Washington Post October 2, 1992, Friday, Final Edition

The blue laws will be repealed. Tourists are thirsty even on the day reserved for the Lord.

The Gazette Building will be empty again. The outsiders will become insiders, with some exceptions. "I would not live in a country whose government would hire me," vows Carville.

But the call of power is not easily ignored. If Clinton wins, he will surely want some of those kids who worked until midnight every night to come to Washington with him. They'll learn to dress better, wear the appropriate tie and carry the right handbag, go to the beach every summer, hang out at the most awesome happy hours. The senior staffers will eat lunch at 21 Federal and Red Sage.

Maybe they'll remember what it was like in Arkansas, out there in the real America. Or maybe there will be too many distractions.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

SERIES: Occasional

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, SENIOR STRATEGIST JAMES CARVILLE AT A CLINTON CAMPAIGN AIDES' HANGOUT IN LITTLE ROCK, ARK; BELOW CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS. "WE'RE THE INSURGENTS," SAY COMMUNICATIONS CHIEF GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS. "AND IT HELPS TO BE THE INSURGENTS FROM LITTLE ROCK.", JEFF MITCHELL FOR TWP 538976288

TYPE: NATIONAL NEWS

Copyright 1992 The Washington Post