The meeting was held in Jack Crumbly’s barbeque place in Forrest City, about ninety miles east of Little Rock. Jim Guy had come and gone by the time I got there, leaving a good impression. It was late and I was tired, but I made the best case I could, emphasizing the black appointments I’d made and my efforts to help long-ignored rural black communities get money for water and sewer systems. After I finished, a young black lawyer from Lakeview, Jimmy Wilson, got up to speak. He was Tucker’s main supporter in the Delta. Jimmy said I was a good man and had been a good governor, but that no Arkansas governor who had lost for reelection had ever been elected again. He said Frank White was terrible for blacks and had to be defeated. He reminded them that Jim Guy had a good civil rights record in Congress and had hired several young black people to work for him. He said Jim Guy would be as good for blacks as I would, and he could win. “I like Governor Clinton,” he said, “but he’s a loser. And we can’t afford to lose.” It was a persuasive argument, all the more so because he had the guts to do it with me sitting there. I could feel the crowd slipping away.
After a few seconds of silence, a man stood up in the back and said he’d like to be heard. John Lee Wilson was the mayor of Haynes, a small town of about 150 people. He was a heavy man of medium height, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, which bulged with the bulk of his huge arms, neck, and gut. I didn’t know him very well and had no idea what he would say, but I’ll never forget his words.
“Lawyer Wilson made a good speech,” he began, “and he may be right. The governor may be a loser. All I know is, when Bill Clinton became governor, the crap was running open in the streets of my town, and my babies was sick because we didn’t have no sewer system. Nobody paid any attention to us. When he left office, we had a sewer system and my babies wasn’t sick anymore. He did that for a lot of us. Let me ask you something. If we don’t stick with folks who stick with us, who will ever respect us again? He may be a loser, but if he loses, I’m going down with him. And so should you.” As the old saying goes, it was all over but the shouting, one of those rare moments when one man’s words actually changed minds, and hearts.
Unfortunately, John Lee Wilson died before I was elected President. Near the end of my second term, I made a nostalgic trip back to east Arkansas to speak at Earle High School. The school principal was Jack Crumbly, the host of that fateful meeting almost two decades earlier. In my remarks, I told the story of John Lee Wilson’s speech for the first time in public. It was televised across east Arkansas. One person who watched it, sitting in her little house in Haynes, was John Lee Wilson’s widow. She wrote me a very moving letter saying how proud John would have been to have the President praising him. Of course I praised him. If it hadn’t been for John Lee, I might be writing wills and divorce settlements instead of this book.
As we got close to election day, my support went up and down among voters who couldn’t decide whether to give me another chance. I was worried about it until I met a man in a café one afternoon in Newark, in northeast Arkansas. When I asked for his vote, he said, “I voted against you last time, but I’m going to vote for you this time.” Although I knew the answer, I still asked him why he voted against me. “Because you raised my car tags.” When I asked him why he was voting for me, he said, “Because you raised my car tags.” I told him I needed every vote I could get, and I didn’t want to make him mad, but it didn’t make any sense for him to vote for me for the same reason he’d voted against me before. He smiled and said, “Oh, it makes all the sense in the world. You may be a lot of things, Bill, but you ain’t dumb. You’re the very least likely one to ever raise those car tags again, so I’m for you.” I added his impeccable logic to my stump speech for the rest of the campaign.
On May 25, I won the primary election with 42 percent of the vote. Under the counterassault of my ads and the strength of our organization, Jim Guy Tucker fell to 23 percent. Joe Purcell had parlayed his issue-and controversy-free campaign into 29 percent of the vote and a spot in the runoff, two weeks away. It was a dangerous situation. Tucker and I had driven each other’s negative ratings up with the attack ads, and Purcell appealed to the Democrats who hadn’t gotten over the car-tag increase. There was a good chance he could win just by being the un-Clinton. I tried for ten days to smoke him out, but he was shrewd enough to stay in his van and shake a few hands. On the Thursday night before the election, I did a poll that said the race was dead even. That meant I’d probably lose, since the undecided vote usually broke against the incumbent, which I effectively was. I had just put up an ad highlighting our differences on whether the Public Service Commission, which sets electric rates, should be elected rather than appointed, a change I favored and Joe opposed. I hoped it would make a difference, but I wasn’t sure.
The very next day, I was handed the election in the guise of a crippling body blow. Frank White badly wanted Purcell to win the runoff. The governor’s negative ratings were even higher than mine, and I had the issues and an organized campaign on my side. By contrast, White felt certain that Joe Purcell’s poor health would become a decisive factor in the general election campaign, guaranteeing White a second term. On Friday night, when it was too late for me to counter on television, Frank White began running a TV ad attacking me for raising the car-tag fee and telling people not to forget it. He got the time to run it heavily all weekend by persuading his business supporters to pull their commercials so that he could put the attack ad up. I saw the ad and knew it would turn a close race. I couldn’t get a response to it on television until Monday, and by then it would be too late. This was an unfair advantage that was later disallowed by a federal regulation requiring stations to place ads that respond to last-minute attacks over the weekend, but that was no help to me.
Betsey and I called David Watkins and asked him to open his studio so that I could cut a radio ad. We worked on the script and met David about an hour before midnight. By that time Betsey had lined up some young volunteers to drive the ad to radio stations all over the state in time for them to be run early Saturday morning. In my radio response, I asked people if they’d seen White’s ad attacking me and asked them to think about why he was interfering with a Democratic primary. There was only one answer: he wanted to run against Joe Purcell, not me, because I would beat him and Joe couldn’t. I knew most Democratic primary voters intensely opposed the governor and would hate the thought of being manipulated by him. David Watkins worked all night long making enough copies of our ad to saturate the state. The kids started driving them to the radio stations at about four in the morning, along with checks from the campaign to purchase a heavy buy. The radio spot was so effective that by Saturday night, White’s own television ad was working for me. On Monday we put our response up on television too, but we had already won the battle by then. The next day, June 8, I won the runoff 54 to 46 percent. It was a near-run thing. I had won most of the big counties and those with a substantial number of black voters, but was still struggling in the rural Democratic counties where the car-tag issue wouldn’t die. It would take another two years to repair the damage completely.