Of all the Arkansans who came to help, no one made a bigger difference than my closest childhood friend, David Leopoulos. After the Flowers story broke, David heard TV commentators say I was finished. He was so upset, he got in his car and drove three days to New Hampshire. He couldn’t afford a plane ticket. When he reached our headquarters, Simon Rosenberg, my young press aide, scheduled him for an interview on a Boston radio station with a large New Hampshire audience. He hit it out of the park, just by talking about our forty-year friendship and making me seem more human. Then he spoke to a gathering of our discouraged volunteers from across the state. When he finished, he had them in tears and full of resolve for the final push. David worked the state for a whole week, doing radio interviews and passing out homemade flyers with pictures of our childhood friends as proof that I was a real person. At the end of his journey, I saw him at a rally in Nashua, where he hooked up with fifty other Arkansans, including Carolyn Staley, my old jazz partner Randy Goodrum, and my grade-school friend Mauria Aspell. The “Friends of Bill” probably saved the campaign in New Hampshire. A few days before the election, I went down to New York for a long-planned fund-raiser. I wondered if anyone would come, even if only to see a dead man walking. As I made my way through the Sheraton Hotel kitchen to the ballroom, I shook hands with the waiters and kitchen workers, as I always did. One of the waiters, Dimitrios Theofanis, engaged me in a brief conversation that made him a friend for life.
“My nine-year-old boy studies the election in school and he says I should vote for you. If I do, I want you to make my boy free. In Greece, we were poor but we were free. Here, my boy can’t play in the park across the street alone or walk down the street to school by himself because it is too dangerous. He’s not free. So if I vote for you, will you make my boy free?” I almost cried. Here was a man who actually cared about what I could do for his son’s safety. I told him that community police officers, who would walk the blocks and know the residents, could help a lot, and that I was committed to funding 100,000 of them.
I was already feeling better, but when I walked into the ballroom, my spirits soared: seven hundred people were there, including my Georgetown friend Denise Hyland Dangremond and her husband, Bob, who had come from Rhode Island to show moral support. I went back to New Hampshire thinking I might survive.
In the last few days of the campaign, Tsongas and I had a heated disagreement over economic policy. I had proposed a four-point plan to create jobs, help businesses get started, and reduce poverty and income inequality: cut the deficit in half in four years, with spending reductions and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans; increase investment in education, training, and new technologies; expand trade; and cut taxes modestly for the middle class and a lot more for the working poor. We had done our best to cost out each proposal, using figures from the Congressional Budget Office. In contrast to my plan, Tsongas said that we should just focus on cutting the deficit, and that the country couldn’t afford the middle-class tax cut, though he was for a cut in the capital gains tax, which would benefit wealthy Americans most. He called me a “pander bear” for proposing the tax cuts. He said he’d be the best friend Wall Street ever had. I shot back that we needed a New Democrat economic plan that helped both Wall Street and Main Street, business and working families. A lot of people agreed with Tsongas’s contention that the deficit was too big for my tax cuts, but I thought we had to do something about the two-decade growth in income inequality and the shift of the tax burden to the middle class in the 1980s. While I was glad to debate the relative merits of our competing economic plans, I was under no illusion that the questions about my character had gone away. As the campaign drew to a close, I told an enthusiastic crowd in Dover what I really believed about the “character issue”: It has been absolutely fascinating to me to go through the last few weeks and see these so-called character issues raised, conveniently, after I zoomed to the top by talking about your problems and your future and your lives.
Well, character is an important issue in a presidential election, and the American people have been making character judgments about their politicians for more than two hundred years now. And most of the time they’ve been right, or none of us would be here today. I’ll tell you what I think the character issue is: Who really cares about you? Who’s really trying to say what he would do specifically if he were elected President? Who has a demonstrated record of doing what they’re talking about? And who is determined to change your life rather than to just get or keep power?… I’ll tell you what I think the character issue in this election is: How can you have the power of the presidency and never use it to help people improve their lives ’til your life needs saving in an election?
That’s a character issue….
I’ll tell you something. I’m going to give you this election back, and if you’ll give it to me, I won’t be like George Bush. I’ll never forget who gave me a second chance, and I’ll be there for you ’til the last dog dies.
“’Til the last dog dies” became the rallying cry for our troops in the last days of the New Hampshire campaign. Hundreds of volunteers worked furiously. Hillary and I shook every hand we could find. The polls were still discouraging, but the pulse felt better.
On election morning, February 18, it was cold and icy. Young Michael Morrison, Jan Paschal’s wheelchair-bound student, woke in anticipation of working a polling place for me. Unfortunately, his mother’s car wouldn’t start. Michael was disappointed but not deterred. He rode his motorized wheelchair out into the cold morning and onto the shoulder of the slick road, then wheeled himself into the winter wind for two miles to reach his duty station. Some people thought the election was about the draft and Gennifer Flowers. I thought it was about Michael Morrison; and Ronnie Machos, the little boy with a hole in his heart and no health insurance; and the young girl whose unemployed father hung his head in shame over the dinner table; and Edward and Annie Davis, who didn’t have enough money to buy food and the medicine they needed; and the son of an immigrant waiter in New York who couldn’t play in the park across the street from where he lived. We were about to find out who was right. That night, Paul Tsongas won with 35 percent, but I finished a strong second with 26 percent, well ahead of Kerrey with 12 percent, Harkin with 10 percent, and Brown with 9 percent. The rest of the votes went to write-ins. At the urging of Joe Grandmaison, a New Hampshire supporter I’d known since the Duffey campaign, I spoke to the media early, and at Paul Begala’s suggestion said New Hampshire had made me “the Comeback Kid.” Tsongas had annihilated me in the precincts closest to the Massachusetts state line. From ten miles north into New Hampshire, I had actually won. I was elated and profoundly grateful. The voters had decided that my campaign should go on.
I had come to love New Hampshire, to appreciate its idiosyncrasies, and to respect the seriousness of its voters, even those who chose someone else. The state had put me through the paces and made me a better candidate. So many people had befriended Hillary and me and lifted us up. A surprising number of them worked in my administration, and I kept in touch with several more over the next eight years, including hosting a New Hampshire Day at the White House.
New Hampshire demonstrated just how deeply the American people wanted their country to change. On the Republican side, Pat Buchanan’s upstart campaign had won 37 percent of the vote, and the President’s national approval ratings had dropped below 50 percent for the first time since the Gulf War. Although he still led both Paul Tsongas and me in the polls, the Democratic nomination was clearly worth having.