Free All Too Human: A Political Education by George Stephanopoulos Page B

welfare, they nodded in empathy. When he left rhetorical questions hanging over the foyer, they responded with murmurs and muffled shouts. When he condensed his life's ambition into a single closing sentence — “I desperately want to be your president, but you have to be Americans again” — the applause wrapped around him like a communal hug.
    Joe Klein and I took it all in from the back of the room with tears in our eyes — moved by the emotional moment, expectation, and apprehension. Reporters are paid to be dispassionate, but Joe was either smitten with Clinton or doing a smooth job of spinning me. We talked openly and often now, either on the phone or when he hooked up with us on the road. As the paying guests sat down to dinner, we retreated to the basement. The campaign was going so well that we slipped into what Joe called a “dark-off,” whispering fears of future misfortune like a couple of black-robed crones spitting in the wind to ward off the evil eye.
We're peaking too early. It can't stay this good. Too tempting a target. What goes up must come down
.
    “I come from Russian Jews,” Joe said. “Whenever things are good, we start to hear hoofbeats — the Cossacks.”
    “Yeah, I know just what you mean.”
    “Don't try to out-dark me on this one, George. It's in my genes.”
    “Mine too,” I replied. “The Turks.”
    The hoofbeats we heard that night weren't Cossacks heading for a Russian
shtetl
or Ottoman Turks bearing down on a Peloponnesian
chorio
. They were the ghosts of Clinton's past, summoned to life by his campaign's success. From Hot Springs and Little Rock, Fayetteville and Oxford, they were gathering together and galloping north — to New Hampshire.
    New Hampshire's not only the first presidential primary; it's also the most intimate. You meet people where they live and work and play, and talk to them over cake donuts and Greek pizza, over Friday night boilermakers in the dimly lit Manchester men's clubs, and in bowling alleys on Saturday afternoons where families roll games of duckpins. Only in New Hampshire do presidential hopefuls still go door-to-door. Salt stains crept up my loafers as I followed Clinton through the snow.
    A master at what James Madison called the “little arts of popularity,” Clinton was made for this kind of hand-to-hand campaign. No one could match him at a house party. He'd greet each guest individually while I checked in with headquarters from the kitchen phone. Then I'd settle on the second-floor landing with a Styrofoam cup of strong coffee and watch him do his stuff in the living room below.
    Clinton would lay out his economic plan, and they'd fire back questions. Flinty and frugal, New Hampshirites wanted to know exactly how he was going to pay for his programs. But that year they also needed help. New Hampshire was mired in recession. Clinton's new ideas on health care, jobs, and student loans sounded sensible, and he answered every question — in detail. No one could stump him, and people walked away impressed. Here was a politician who cared enough to really know the pressures families faced, and with definite ideas on what could be done to ease them.
    I summed up that sensibility in a quote I gave Joe Klein for his January profile of Clinton in
New York
magazine. “Specificity is a character issue this year,” I said. Like all good spin, it was a hope dressed up as an observation. We wanted Clinton to be seen as the thoughtful candidate — the man with a plan who knew what to do — and we needed that to be the character test of 1992. A good spinner is like a good lawyer: You highlight the facts that help your client's case and downplay the ones that don't. When the facts are unfavorable, you argue relevance. That's what I was trying to do: blunt the questions about Clinton's private behavior by pointing to his public virtues and saying that was what voters cared about most. It was, but “specificity” obviously wasn't the only character