On Labor Day, the traditional opening of the general election campaign, I went to Harry Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri, to rally working people to our cause. Truman’s outspoken daughter, Margaret, helped by saying at the rally that I, not George Bush, was the rightful heir to her father’s legacy.
On September 11, I went to South Bend, Indiana, to deliver an address to the students and faculty at Notre Dame, America’s most famous Catholic university. On the same day, President Bush was in Virginia to address the conservative Christian Coalition. I knew Catholics across the country would take notice of both events. The church hierarchy agreed with Bush’s opposition to abortion, but I was far closer to the Catholic positions on economic and social justice. The Notre Dame appearance bore a striking resemblance, with roles reversed, to John Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Southern Baptist ministers. Paul Begala, a devout Catholic, helped prepare my remarks, and Boston mayor Ray Flynn and Senator Harris Wofford came along to lend moral support. I was nearly halfway through the speech before I could tell how it was going. When I said, “All of us must respect the reflection of God’s image in every man and woman, and so we must value their freedom, not just their political freedom, but their freedom of conscience in matters of family and philosophy and faith,” there was a standing ovation. After Notre Dame, I went out west. In Salt Lake City, I made my case to the National Guard Convention, where I was well received, because my reputation for leading the Arkansas National Guard was good, and because I was introduced by Congressman Les Aspin, the respected chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. In Portland, Oregon, we had an amazing rally. Over ten thousand people filled the downtown streets, with many more leaning out of their office windows. During the speeches, supporters threw hundreds of roses onto the stage, a nice gesture in Oregon’s City of Roses. For more than an hour after the event, I went up and down the streets, shaking hands with what seemed like thousands of people.
On September 15, the western swing got its biggest boost when thirty high-tech leaders in traditionally Republican Silicon Valley endorsed me. I had been working on Silicon Valley since the previous December, with the help of Dave Barram, vice president of Apple Computer. Dave had been recruited to the campaign by Ira Magaziner, my friend from Oxford, who had worked with high-tech executives and knew that Barram was a Democrat. Many of Barram’s Republican cohorts shared his disillusionment with the economic policies of the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the explosive potential of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs. A few days before my first trip, according to the San Jose Mercury News, President Bush’s trade representative, Carla Hills, had endorsed the view that “it makes no difference whether the United States exports potato chips or silicon chips.” The high-tech executives disagreed, and so did I.
Among those who came out for me were prominent Republicans like John Young, president of HewlettPackard; John Sculley, chairman of Apple Computer; investment banker Sandy Robertson; and one of Silicon Valley’s few open Democrats at the time, Regis McKenna. At our meeting in the Technology Center of Silicon Valley at San Jose, I also issued a national technology policy, which Dave Barram had worked for months to help me prepare. In calling for greater investment in scientific and technological research and development, including specific projects important to Silicon Valley, I staked out a position at odds with the Bush administration’s aversion to government-industry partnerships. At the time, Japan and Germany were outperforming America economically, in part because government policy in those countries was targeted to support potential areas of growth. By contrast, American policy was to subsidize politically powerful, established interests like oil and agriculture, which were important but which had much less potential than technology to generate new jobs and new entrepreneurs. The hightech leaders’ announcement provided an enormous boost to the campaign, giving credibility to my claim to be pro-business as well as pro-labor, and linking me to the economic forces that most represented positive change and growth.
While I was garnering support for rebuilding the economy and reforming health care, the Republicans were working hard to tear me down. President Bush, in his convention speech, had accused me of raising taxes 128 times in Arkansas and enjoying it every time. In early September, the Bush campaign repeated the charge again and again, though the New York Times said it was “false,” the Washington Post called it highly “exaggerated” and “silly,” and even the Wall Street Journal said it was “misleading.” The Bush list included a requirement that used-car dealers post a $25,000 bond, modest fees for beauty pageants, and a one-dollar court cost imposed on convicted criminals. Conservative columnist George Will said that, by the President’s criteria, “Bush has raised taxes more often in four years than Clinton has in ten.”
The Bush campaign devoted most of the rest of September to attacking me on the draft. President Bush said over and over that I should “just tell the truth” about it. Even Dan Quayle felt free to go after me on it, despite the fact that his family connections had gotten him into the National Guard and away from Vietnam. The vice president’s main point seemed to be that the media weren’t giving my case the same critical scrutiny he had received four years earlier. Apparently he hadn’t followed the news out of New Hampshire and New York.
I got some good help in countering the draft attack. In early September, Senator Bob Kerrey, my Medal of Honor–winning primary opponent, said it shouldn’t be an issue. Then on the eighteenth, on the back lawn of the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, I received the endorsement of Admiral Bill Crowe, who had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan and briefly under Bush. I was very impressed by Crowe’s straightforward, down-home manner and deeply grateful that he would stick his neck out for someone he barely knew but had come to believe in.
The political impact of what Bush and I were doing was uncertain. Some of his convention edge had worn off, but throughout September the polls bounced back and forth between a lead of 9 and 20 percent for me. The basic dynamic of the campaign had been set: Bush claimed to represent family values and trustworthiness, while I was for economic and social change. He said I was untrustworthy and antifamily, while I said he was dividing America and holding us back. On any given day, a substantial number of voters were torn between which one of us was better.