A political consultant and speechwriter, he (with partner James Carville) devised the strategy behind Clinton's 1992 campaign. He went on to serve as Clinton's political advisor at the White House. Interview conducted June, 2000 by Chris Bury How did you happen to hook up with the campaign? Well, Governor Zell Miller had been a client of Carville's and mine. He was the governor of Georgia. Bill Clinton was looking to run for president, and he came to visit Zell. They stayed up all night at the governor's mansion in Atlanta, talking about running. At the end of the conversation, Zell said, "If you run, I'll support you. And you probably ought to hire these boys that ran my campaign, James Carville and Paul Begala." And Clinton says, "Who are they?"... And then you meet with Clinton. What's your impression? I had been in the business for a number of years by then, and it was still political love at first sight. I thought he was the ablest guy I had ever met in politics. I was completely blown away, as was Carville... When you sat down with Clinton, he was this amazing talent, and at the time the only thing I thought was, "A little too much message." I mean, rather than some empty vessel into which we would have to pour in content as consultants, we had this overflowing cup that we were just going to have to try to cap it off and try to focus him down. When you say overflowing cup is that because he was just filled with policy ideas? What do you mean? Yeah, he was filled with policy ideas. Most politicians, when they meet with a guy like me, or a guy like Carville, tell you about how they can win. They would say, "Look, my wife is from Illinois, which will help me in the Midwest, even though I'm a southerner and I have close alliances with these moderates." They would give you the strategy. Clinton gave us the policy. He sat us down and he talked about [how] his daughter was going to inherit this country in a very few years, and what kind of world was she going to have? And I was bowled over. And then he went through the policy specifics, and he focused on these two things. He said, "Economically we're sliding down, and socially we're coming apart." I used to tease him that he had three solutions for every problem, but he went on like this for hours. We were completely bowled over. What about his retail ability? As the campaign started up, especially after the first of the year, when you saw him working with the crowds and so on, what was his skill level? I was always worried about New Hampshire. I'm a southerner, he's a southerner, and I thought this was just too far from home for him to do well. He had this endless self-confidence, which he's always had. He felt like New Hampshire was just like Arkansas, just a nice small state, full of good people that cared deeply, but it was transplanted up [north]. And so he attacked it like he was running really for sheriff more than president. He would plunge into shopping malls and introduce himself to strangers. He would have these endless town hall meetings, the hand shake, and he never met somebody he didn't like. He didn't ever meet somebody he couldn't persuade or feel like he could, but he also listened. And so by the time the New Hampshire campaign really heated up, he was talking like someone who knew a lot about the area, like he had grown up there instead of in Arkansas. There was a moment I remember in New Hampshire, where there's a woman who gets up at a meeting and talks about not being able to find enough money for medication. And for most of the national press corps, this is the first time they see Clinton being empathetic. That moment is captured by all the networks, and it's shown again. What's the import of that at that point in the campaign? ... It showed this humanity. He's the smartest guy I ever met, but his most compelling attribute is that interpersonal empathy. When he is connecting with someone, the whole world melts away. And for that woman, at a very vulnerable time in her life, there were no cameras, there were no staff, there were no fellow townspeople in that room any more. There was just a young, compassionate man who was going to try to help her, and it was amazing. In January the Gennifer Flowers scandal breaks. You have a meeting that day with George [Stephanopolous] and I'm not sure who else. When you're trying to hash out strategy, what do you decide is your tactic? Well, we decided quickly that he'd have to answer this. I mean, we didn't know. And that he was our best asset. A lot of times in a campaign you get in trouble, and the inclination of handlers is to hide the candidate, to so-called "protect" him. Well, in this case, there was no one else who could answer anyway, and he was our ablest spokesman. So we set about looking for a venue where he could go and answer these things... You talked, just before we started, about the pit in your stomach when these stories break. When Flowers broke did you have one of those moments? Oh, absolutely, yeah. You don't ever want to see someone dragged through something like that. It's a sickening experience. ... But it taught me something important. It taught me that Clinton's instinct to make this about your life as a citizen, rather than his as a human being, was the right answer to these things. He came out and basically said, "Look, I have not lived a perfect life", and people understood what that meant. ... And that changed all the rules. It used to be that a scandal like that took you out of the race. And in 1992, Clinton said, "Look, I've caused pain in my marriage, but I have good ideas for the country." People weighed those things in the balance, and I think they made the right decision.... When Clinton comes in second in the New Hampshire primary, you guys dream up some way to frame it. Tell us that story. ... We were authentically euphoric, because our polls showed that he was collapsing. Our polls were wrong. He actually finished a very respectable second, and given all that he'd been through, he was going to be the story. And so then we sent him down there and had him declare himself "the comeback kid."... And this would become a trademark for the next eight years, that he would go to the brink of disaster and pull back. Unfortunately, yeah. What is it about him that leads to that? I mean we saw it happen here first, but then we saw it again and again and again, where he would face disaster and somehow -- His whole life has been a high-wire act. I mean, his whole life. He was born without a daddy. He was raised in a fairly poor town in a fairly poor family. He came out of nowhere. He came out of a public school system that at the time was in a poor state that was not doing very well, and wound up being one of the brightest people of his generation. I think that's the whole story of the guy's life and in his presidency as well. I mean, look, his economic plan passes by one vote. All the way through you find him right at the brink, but maybe that's what happens when you have someone with that kind of talent and that kind of promise.... Was there a sense of panic when you found out that there was this letter where Governor Clinton says, "Dear Colonel Holmes, blah-blah-blah. Thank you for saving me from the draft." Yes. We were handed that letter as we landed in New Hampshire. We had been in Arkansas. The governor had gotten badly sick, a high, high fever. And this story of the draft had broken in the Wall Street Journal, and he had to go home. He was bad sick. So he was home trying to recuperate. We were getting poll numbers that showed us collapsing, absolutely collapsing in away we never did with the earlier scandals. And so we stayed up all night writing a speech that basically said, "I'm going to fight like hell. You know, we're not going to give up. Try this one more time." And we flew up there, and we're landed, and we're all revved up, and he's ready to go. And as we got off the plane, Mark Halperin of ABC hands Georgie and I this letter, and I'm looking over George's shoulder as he reads it, and I see that line, "Thank you for saving me from the draft." And my knees kind of buckled. George said, "That's it. We're through. We're out. It's over." But then when you read the whole letter, and particularly when you get the perspective of Carville and Hillary, who had lived through that era as adults, it turned out the letter was his best friend. He wound up coming on Nightline. Ted [Koppel] read the whole letter to the country, and you could see even among the press corps, which really did think he was a slick Willie, you could see for the first time they thought, "Well, okay. This is a highly-nuanced letter from a tortured young man who's really thinking through these issues just like every other young man of that generation did." So your initial reaction was wrong? I mean, you initially thought that maybe this was-- Before I had read it. The first thing I saw was that line. But even me, who did not have much of a feel for that time, I thought, "Yeah, this letter" -- I mean, the line we used was "This letter is going to be your best friend." ... What was Mrs. Clinton's role during the campaign? How would you characterize that in '92? She was enormously helpful. She was out campaigning a fair amount. She would help to bolster. She was a good spouse that way. She was someone that her husband turned to, obviously, as his probably singular advisor, and I think she was enormously helpful.... In '92 when do you know that you're going to win? When are you pretty sure? In Parrot, Georgia. We took a bus trip through Georgia, as I worked for Zell Miller and his campaign in 1990, so I knew the state fairly well. And we were on a bus with Zell, and with some other Georgia politicians. We went through this little town called Parrot, Georgia, and we drew more people in Parrot, Georgia than the total population of the town of Parrot, Georgia. It was raining, and I looked out there, and I thought, "You know, we're going to win this race." And that night in some little motel in I don't know where, I called Stephanopoulos, and I was just giggling. I was giddy. And I sat there on some crummy bed in some crummy motel, and I said, "George, I will guarantee you this: we win this election." I can't remember what month it was, but it was in the fall campaign. That was the moment. ...The day before the election we were at the Mayfair Diner in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And this is maybe professionally, aside from the birth of my child during that campaign, the sweetest moment. I was the guy that told Bill Clinton he was going to win. I had gotten the final polling numbers. He had a comfortable lead. He was not going to lose. And as he climbed into the car at the Mayfair Diner, I told him. I said, "Governor, it's over. You're going to be the president of the United States." And he said, "How do you know that? What do you think?" And I gave him the latest numbers, and he said, "That may not hold." So I told him what the latest numbers were for Reagan in '80, and then what the final election was. And I think that historical comparison -- he didn't say anything then. He just kind of quieted down, and his eyes got big and he sat back. That was very sweet. ... He's a very exuberant guy. It was very interesting. He settled back in the car, and his eyes got big and his mouth got shut, which is a pretty rare occurrence for him.... In a Polish restaurant in Chicago Mrs. Clinton makes her now famous comment about tea and cookies. This causes a real stir. What's the discussion on the campaign? Well, I was there when she said it, and I understood the context of it. She was being attacked by Jerry Brown for having been a practicing lawyer while her husband was the governor. Even though in her law firm she had a "Chinese wall" [as] the lawyers call it, separating her from any revenue that came into the firm from the firm doing business with the state. ... I thought it was an unfair attack and so did Hillary. Meaning "I could have just done the ceremonial functions of a first lady," she said, "I could have just stayed home and baked cookies and held teas, but I had to earn some income to help support my family." As soon as I heard that I thought, "People are going to take that out of context. They're going to suggest she doesn't care about stay-at-home moms." So I went up to her and I told her that. I pulled her aside, and I said, "You know, Hillary, you've got to go restate this. People are going to think that's an attack on stay-at-home moms." And she had the most wounded and naive look on her face. To think of all she's gone through since then, it's hard to imagine. She had no idea that that might be taken out of context. She said, "No one could think that." She said, "I would have given anything to be a stay-at-home mom. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. I just didn't have a choice because Bill was making $35,000 a year and we needed to support the family." I said, "I know that." And she said, "Oh, you worry too much." I mean, it was unimaginable to her that that would be a firestorm. I was certain it would be. I had been doing this for a while.... She didn't think it was something that she had to go out and apologize for or set straight? No. I can't remember what she did that day. I think she did not apologize, but go out and say, "Well, this is what I meant." It did seem to her unimaginable. When you know yourself and your own values, but other people don't, it's hard to imagine "People could think that about me." ... [No one knew] her passion for children and child-rearing, family issues. She was an utterly unknown person by then, except for the fact that her husband was running for president and had been through these scandals. Your cohort, James, speaks of a real blind spot that the president has about Hillary. Tell us about that. He loves her. And I don't like talking about other people's marriages, and this one has been analyzed ad nauseam, but I suspect if he were sitting here, he would tell you she's the finest person he's ever known, and he loves her and admires her, and that comes through...