Clinton Seeks Brass Ring, Finds It Is Still Out of Reach : Politics: Primary winner’s message was lost amid personal attacks. Now he must re-establish credibility.

For most Democrats it was a time for despair. The Persian Gulf War had just ended in victory, leaving Republican commander in chief George Bush riding record levels of popularity. Democratic chances of regaining the White House in 1992 seemed so remote that some party leaders talked of running a caretaker candidate who would lose the presidency without losing his dignity--and without taking too many other Democrats down with him.

But for the handful of advisers Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton summoned to Little Rock in the early spring of 1991, this season of Democratic discontent seemed bright with the promise of opportunity.

The group was convinced that after losing five of the last six presidential elections, the party was ready to embrace a new credo aimed at the middle-class voters who had deserted it. And Clinton seemed like the candidate who could deliver that new message, use it to reshape the party in his own centrist image and--by presenting himself as an agent of change--possibly turn Bush into a one-term President.

The methodical deliberations, planning and work that went forward from that session--building on more than a decade Clinton had spent searching for solutions to public policy problems and winning friends across the Democratic ideological spectrum--left him far better prepared than any of his rivals for the nomination.

And it helped bring Clinton to where he stands today: prepared to receive his party’s nomination for President of the United States.

Yet if foresight and effective pursuit of their vision have brought Clinton and his strategists to the brink of victory, their success has brought them little joy. For despite an astonishing decline in Bush’s fortunes, Clinton faces the daunting task of trying to re-establish his credibility and recapture the attention of voters disillusioned with him and with the political process. It is a challenge made all the more difficult by the astonishing surge of interest in the prospective independent candidacy of Ross Perot.

For Clinton, as for some of his predecessors as Democratic standard-bearers, the process of winning the party’s nomination may have made vastly more difficult the ultimate goal of winning the White House.

The governor himself has ruefully declared, “I think winning a party’s primary is a disadvantage in this day and age, because when people read and see the coverage, all they see is politics. And voters hate politics.”

Wave of Allegations

What accounts for Clinton having so little cause to celebrate his steady string of primary and caucus conquests?

The main reason for Clinton’s frustration is easy to pinpoint: Neither the candidate nor his strategists were prepared for the wave of disclosures and allegations about his past behavior, which came to dominate his campaign.

Clinton struck back hard at his accusers and rivals, transforming the campaign into a test of his will and nerve. But the charges and his counterattacks raised such a din that it drowned out much of the middle-class message that he and his aides believed would be the core strength of his candidacy.

As for his success, the conventional wisdom holds that in a year in which the party’s supposed heavyweights stayed home, the prospective nominee won in part because of the weakness of the candidates arrayed against him.

That explanation harbors more than a grain of truth, for many prominent Democrats came to support Clinton largely by default. At a Washington party this past New Year’s Eve, for example, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland asked influential lawyer-lobbyist Harry McPherson, a vigorous Clinton booster: “Why has the Washington Establishment anointed Clinton for the nomination?”

“Who else is there?” McPherson retorted.

“We weren’t talking about a field of Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey,” McPherson said later, referring to the list of those who lost the party’s nomination to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Still, of the factors contributing to Clinton’s triumph, none was more important than the planning, forethought and talent he brought to bear on his campaign at the very beginning. So diligently and well had he and his aides prepared the ground that, when questions about his character threw his campaign into chaos in the weeks before the Feb. 18 New Hampshire primary, Clinton already had established such an advantage in fund raising, organization and support that he survived the crisis.

In the face of adversity, Clinton proved notably supple and resourceful. Although he framed his candidacy as a challenge to his party’s liberal orthodoxies, for example, he wound up attacking former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas from the left, turning the pro-business economic arguments that were supposed to be Tsongas’ strength into a fatal liability.

And as Clinton dealt with the attacks on his personal life, his natural elan and combativeness kept his campaign going even on days when his closest aides had despaired of victory.

At the same time, many of the wounds Clinton suffered were self-inflicted. As questions about his character arose, he often made his problems worse by offering explanations that many voters found evasive. This helped erode the credibility of the message that lay at the heart of everything that commenced at the spring meeting in Little Rock.

Decision to Run

The threshold decision facing the gathering was whether Clinton should make the run. On the positive side of that question, Clinton’s advisers argued that with their party in the midst of a generational change in leadership, 1992 was the year for him to establish himself on the national stage.

As the small group sat on the comfortable couches of the Arkansas governor’s mansion, they heard from Clinton’s pollster, Stanley B. Greenberg, that the prospects of taking on Bush were better than many believed. The negative impact of continued economic difficulties would make Bush vulnerable, despite his temporary Gulf War ascendancy, Greenberg said.

Despite those arguments, Clinton hesitated. Only months earlier, as he ran for reelection as governor, he had pledged to serve out a full four-year term and he worried about breaking that promise.

It was not hard to understand why.

“Will you guarantee all of us that if reelected, there is absolutely, positively no way that you’ll run for any other political office and that you’ll serve out your term in full,” a reporter had asked him during a televised debate.

“You bet,” Clinton replied. “I’m going to serve four years. I made that decision when I decided to run. I’m being considered as a candidate for governor. That’s the job I want. That’s the job I’ll do for the next four years.”

Clinton also had doubts about whether the party was ready for what he had to say. But as it turned out, of all his problems, this would be among the least troublesome.

“Everyone at the end of 1988 recognized the desperate need for a new Democratic message that would take some of the traditional legacy of the Democratic Party and cast it in language that would resonate in the 1990s,” said Michael McCurry, former communications director of the Democratic National Committee and an adviser to one of the presidential foes Clinton vanquished, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey.

Clinton, having thought more and deeper about how to make that transformation, had a clear advantage over his rivals. The advantage became clear over the next several months as he used a series of public speeches to see whether his message would, in fact, sell.

Testing the Waters

The first significant test came soon after the Little Rock strategy session, in May of 1991, at the Democratic Leadership Council’s annual meeting in Cleveland. Much of the national political press watched as Clinton competed in speeches with two veterans of the 1988 campaign and potential 1992 rivals, House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee.

Clinton’s speech drew considerable praise. “Too many of the people who used to vote for us, the very burdened middle class we’re talking about, have not trusted us in national elections to defend our national interests abroad, to put their values in our social policy at home or to take their tax money and spend it with discipline,” he warned Democrats.

To solve that problem, he said, the party needed to embrace the idea of economic opportunity rather than dependence on government and had to be willing to call for greater responsibility from citizens--from welfare mothers, for example, who would be obliged to seek work. Government, he said, must “reinvent” itself.

His reception in Cleveland and at subsequent appearances dispelled Clinton’s doubts about whether his message could sell in a Democratic primary. But he continued to worry about his pledge to serve out his term, and his advisers increasingly began to think he would decide against running, just as he had four years earlier.

Another strategy session was held in Little Rock on July 23. Afterward, Mark Gearan, director of the Democratic Governors’ Assn., remembered being struck by Clinton’s misgivings.

“I left the meeting and got into the car and told Stan Greenberg flatly: ‘He’s not running,’ ” Gearan said.

But by summer’s end, Clinton’s advisers sensed he had put to rest his concerns about his gubernatorial term pledge. By mid-September, when he called yet another planning session (this one in Washington), many of those present realized he had already decided to run.

The Competition

Clinton and his aides believed his chief competition would come from New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Against Cuomo, Clinton aides hoped, their candidate could position himself as the voice of the new generation. And his main competition for that mantle, they believed, would be Nebraska’s Kerrey.

Clinton’s strength against Kerrey would be his grasp of issues, and an emphasis on policy statements became the linchpin of his early strategy, beginning with a series of addresses at his alma mater, Washington’s Georgetown University. The speeches covered the gamut of domestic and foreign policy issues and drew heavily on the themes of opportunity and responsibility he had outlined in his Cleveland appearance in May.

He combined his various messages in a speech to state party chairs in Chicago, where his enthusiastic reception was amplified by rave reviews in the press. When Cuomo finally ended his Hamlet-like deliberations in December and ruled out a presidential candidacy, Clinton had established himself as the next name most Democratic activists thought of.

His success now fed on itself in a propitious cycle. His speeches and pledges of support from key Democrats added to his credibility in the press, which boosted his fund raising, which led to more favorable coverage, which generated more support and more funds.

“The tide is rising around the country for him, and New Hampshire is part of it,” Kerrey’s campaign director, Jim Monahan, conceded at the time.

Clinton boosted his standing further in the Granite State with a television commercial that took account of the intense local distress with the economy by focusing on his economic recovery plan.

Within a week after the ads began, touting a telephone number voters could call to receive copies of the plan, Clinton had moved up 13 percentage points in Greenberg’s polls, establishing a clear lead over Tsongas. “I was stunned,” Greenberg recalls.

What happened next stunned Clinton and his entourage even more.

For years, rumors had spread in political circles that the boyish-looking governor with the folksy charm and easy grin had been involved in extramarital affairs. Clinton and his wife, Hillary, had known those rumors would circulate again with his candidacy, and had sought to quiet the gossip with a joint appearance at a September press breakfast in Washington.

“Like nearly everybody who has been together 20 years, our relationship has not been perfect or free of difficulties, but we feel good about where we are,” Clinton said when asked about the rumors, using words he had rehearsed with his advisers the night before. “We intend to be together 30 or 40 years from now whether I run for President or not, and I think that ought to be enough.”

It wasn’t.

Rather than settling the issue, Clinton’s statement seemed merely to act as bait, attracting dozens of reporters into an effort to determine the details of what, in fact, he had done. By the time Clinton achieved his front-runner status, nearly everyone covering the campaign had heard the rumors, many had looked into them and all were waiting for someone to be the first to detail them in print--a distinction that went to the Star, a supermarket tabloid.

First, the Star printed an article in January rehashing a lawsuit filed by a disgruntled former Arkansas state employee who charged that Clinton had carried on affairs with several women, whose names the Star printed. The New York Post and the New York Daily News ran the story on their front pages, and many other papers--including the Los Angeles Times--ran stories on their inside pages, but Clinton aides appeared to have successfully dismissed it before it caused damage.

They had much more difficulty with the story of Gennifer Flowers, which the Star published a week later. A sometime nightclub singer in Little Rock and Dallas, Flowers claimed to have conducted a 12-year affair with Clinton, and offered excerpts from their taped phone conversations as proof.

Clinton vehemently denied her story and denounced the Star. He contended that the meaning of the taped phone conversations had been distorted.

Credibility Question

In a nationally televised interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Clinton, with Hillary by his side, admitted “wrongdoing” in his marriage but accused the press of playing “gotcha” with his personal life and challenged reporters to turn their attention to more substantive concerns.

Aides insisted the appearance had rescued his candidacy, but subsequent events showed he remained vulnerable.

On Feb. 6, the Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton had gotten a deferment from the Vietnam War draft by signing up for a University of Arkansas ROTC program that he never actually joined. Although the issue had come up during some of Clinton’s early Arkansas campaigns, no one on his staff expected it to resurface--and the campaign had only sketchy responses for the questions that began pouring in.

The two issues--the draft and the allegations of extramarital affairs--compounded each other, raising questions about Clinton’s truthfulness. As New Hampshire voters pondered those doubts, “the initial impact was not great,” Greenberg recalled. But the day after the story broke, Clinton, suffering from a bad cold, left New Hampshire to return to Little Rock for the weekend, and the effect of Clinton’s absence was “devastating,” Greenberg said.

“Every time before, people had seen him defending his position. Now, he wasn’t there to defend himself.”

That Sunday, Clinton and his top aides met at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock to review what to do next. As the weekend polls came in, Greenberg called from his office in Washington.

“Meltdown,” he told strategist James Carville.

Carville asked for the numbers.

Greenberg said Clinton had dropped 17 points overnight.

“Thank you,” Carville said, and hung up.

Clinton returned to New Hampshire the next morning, primed with a statement accusing the Republicans of being behind his latest round of problems.

But as soon as he landed, matters got worse. Clinton and his party were met by an ABC reporter with a copy of a letter Clinton wrote in 1969 to the commander of the Arkansas ROTC in which Clinton conceded he had misled the program’s officials into enrolling him in it to avoid being drafted.

Clinton stalled for time--successfully holding off ABC from using the letter for two days while launching his own assault.

“I’m going to fight like hell,” he insisted.

The next several days testified to Clinton’s stamina. He campaigned nonstop, by bus and by plane, in walking tours and on television call-in shows, thrusting himself at voters as if he were determined to meet every individual Democrat in New Hampshire and convince each one personally of the rectitude of his actions.

The funds he carefully had accumulated in December now gave him the resources to buy the television time he needed for his call-in programs, to fly around the state on his plane, to get new commercials and still pay for a long-planned final stratagem, a massive canvassing effort to deliver campaign videotapes to tens of thousands of targeted voters.

By primary day, Clinton aides knew their campaign had survived. As they sat in a van outside a doughnut shop in Manchester that morning, consultant Paul Begala and media adviser Mandy Grunwald, drafting the speech Clinton would make later that evening, came up with the punch line that would help him convert his anticipated second-place finish to Tsongas into a national resurgence.

As the candidate, wearing his seemingly indelible grin, phrased it that night: “New Hampshire has made me the Comeback Kid.” But while Clinton made a strong second-place showing, he had lost the message of change and renewal that had been the chief justification for his candidacy. The battle for the nomination turned into a struggle in which voters mainly weighed the asserted flaws in Clinton’s character against the alleged defects of his opponents’ policies.

Clinton floundered briefly after New Hampshire, then zeroed in on Tsongas’ economic plan and soundly defeated him in a series of early March Southern primaries and then in Illinois and Michigan on March 17. Two days later, Tsongas suspended his candidacy.

Final Hurdle

That left former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. as Clinton’s sole remaining foe. But even as the tag “presumptive nominee” began to appear in front of his name, Clinton stumbled, unaccountably using one of his rare afternoons off the campaign trail to play golf at an all-white Little Rock country club. The resulting flap put him of the defensive again.

Brown’s upset win in the March 24 Connecticut primary threw Clinton’s campaign further off stride. And a few days later, he belatedly admitted he had once smoked marijuana but had not inhaled, a response that provoked a nationwide wave of derision and a memorable headline in the New York Daily News: “WEED ASKED HIM THAT!”

As New York’s April 7 primary beckoned, Brown loomed as a serious threat. But Clinton turned the tide by using the same tactic he had employed against Tsongas--turning his opponent’s own message against him. Clinton hammered away at Brown’s controversial flat-tax proposal, contending it would hit hardest at the low-income voters Brown claimed to champion.

Brown’s pledge to make the Rev. Jesse Jackson his running mate aided Clinton’s cause, alienating many Jewish voters who still recall Jackson’s characterization of New York as “Hymietown.” When the votes were counted, Brown ran third, behind not only Clinton but the shadow candidacy of Tsongas.

As the primary road eased for him, Clinton talked of his determination to shift voter attention away from himself to the nation’s larger problems. Yet the two subjects are intertwined for most voters, and thus far he has not found a way to disentangle them. It appears public support for the policy solutions he propounds will hinge to a large degree on his success in improving the public’s opinion of himself.

That point was implicitly acknowledged by Clinton in a moving address last month at a party meeting in New Orleans in which he implored Americans to unite in dealing with the racial tensions that exploded in violence in Los Angeles after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

Stressing the theme of individual responsibility that underlies his candidacy, Clinton presented his own character and upbringing as a paradigm of the beliefs that undergird his campaign.

“My life is a testament to the fact that the American dream works,” he declared. “Leadership, rules, responsibility and love . . . I got to live by the rules that work in America and I wound up here today running for President of the United States of America.”

What remains unclear--and what constitutes the heart of the task before him--is whether a majority of voters can be persuaded to accept Clinton on his own terms.

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Douglas Jehl and Robert Stewart contributed to this story.

Road to the Nomination

* OCT. 3, 1991: Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton formally announces his presidential bid.

* DEC. 20: New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo announces he will not run for President. His decision solidifies Clinton’s status as the front-runner for the nomination among Democratic insiders.

* JAN. 17, 1992: Rumors of marital infidelity swirling around Clinton culminate with a supermarket tabloid story in which Gennifer Flowers, a sometime nightclub singer, claims to have conducted a 12-year affair with him. Clinton vehemently denies the allegation.

* FEB. 12: Questions about Clinton’s draft status during the Vietnam War peak with release of a letter he wrote in 1969 in which he conceded he had misled Arkansas ROTC officials into enrolling him in their program to avoid being drafted.

* FEB. 18: After days of frantic campaigning, Clinton scores a strong second-place finish behind former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary. Clinton quickly declares himself “The Comeback Kid.”

* MARCH 10: Clinton re-establishes himself as the race’s clear favorite by sweeping the Southern states that dominate the primary slate on “Super Tuesday.”

* MARCH 17: Clinton scores convincing victories in Illinois and Michigan, demonstrating strength beyond his home region. Tsongas suspends his campaign two days later.

* MARCH 24: Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. upsets Clinton in the Connecticut primary.

* APRIL 7: Clinton thwarts the Brown threat and effectively lays claim to nomination by winning New York primary.