Like ‘Old Lazarus,’ Clinton Keeps Rising Back to Life

Midnight was well past, and the day had been long. Another cycle of trudging through the New Hampshire slush, shaking hands, appearing on television, answering awkward questions--trying desperately to revive a presidential bid by sheer force of will.

And here, at the end of it all, Bill Clinton sat in a faded easy chair in the hallway of his Manchester, N.H., hotel, wearing a Dartmouth College sweat shirt, faded jeans and old sneakers. And smiling.

“God doesn’t give you many days like this,” he told two of his former college roommates and a couple of reporters standing near him. Even if he lost New Hampshire now, he said, he knew he had pulled away from disaster and would live to fight another day.

Looking for a metaphor, Clinton reached back to Scripture and the story of a man raised from the dead. “It’s just me and old Lazarus,” he said.

Risen from the dead--the story of Bill Clinton’s life.

Repeatedly in his career so far, Clinton has fallen in battle. More often than not, he has fallen victim to self-inflicted wounds. Each time, he has shown the ability to bring himself back.

“More than any other politician I know,” one top aide says, “he is capable of killing himself, then bringing himself back to life.”

How many times have pundits proclaimed the political obituary of the man who tonight expects to be proclaimed the presidential nominee of the nation’s oldest political party?

Having angered many Arkansas voters in his first term, Clinton was defeated for reelection as governor in 1980. But he immediately set about planning a comeback, bought time for a television advertisement in which he apologized for trying to govern without listening, and rebounded to win four straight reelection bids.

So successfully did he recover that seven years later, with the 1988 campaign looming, he came to the verge of running for President. He summoned close friends and allies to Little Rock, Ark., for an announcement, only to draw back at the last moment, saying, “I need some family time.” Before that election season ended, he would drink deeply from the cup of failure again, his political ambitions sinking beneath the ridicule that followed a speech to the Democratic convention so disastrous that it drove his aides to tears.

But Clinton recovered yet again. Appearing on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” he told jokes at his own expense, won praise for humor and humility, then set about laying the base for a White House bid in 1992.

And then in February, after a soaring start that seemed about to hand him the party’s nomination without even a struggle, his latest plan too began to collapse. A former nightclub singer’s allegations of an affair--specifically denied--focused the glare of publicity on Clinton’s past marital infidelity. Amid the storm that followed, many political professionals expected that he would drop from the presidential race.

For a man who craves approbation, those days of public scorn and humiliation were a time of near-despair. Close friends tell of anguished late-night telephone calls as the candidate desperately sought advice on how to respond, what to say, what to do.

What he did not do is ask whether to quit. “Withdrawal was simply not an option” in Clinton’s mind, longtime aide Betsey Wright says.

When Clinton first entered the presidential race nine months ago, one of the questions political professionals asked most about him involved toughness. For years, he had garnered a reputation as a compromiser. Political insiders wondered whether as a candidate--or as a President--Clinton was tough enough to fight.

The events of the last five months have answered that question at least. “I’ve learned I can take a punch,” Clinton said in an interview earlier this year.

The tenacity Clinton demonstrated over the last several months surfaced early in his life.

His high school guidance counselor, Edith Irons, for example, recalls the young Clinton arriving at her door one day early in his sophomore year to ask her what school would be best to attend if he wanted to become a diplomat, a question that took her, and later Clinton’s mother, by surprise. Irons mentioned Georgetown’s foreign service school, and from that point, she recalls, Clinton’s mind was set.

Irons and his mother suggested that he apply to other places to hedge his bets, but “we couldn’t, either one of us, make him apply anyplace else,” she recalls. “That’s an inner thing that he has inside him.” Once set on a goal, she said, Clinton would keep going until he had achieved it.

This time around, friends say, Clinton’s basic tenacity and ambition have been fortified by a deep anger at what he sees as an unfair portrayal of his life. “Bill was radically misrepresented. It was deeply, deeply upsetting,” said Melanne Verveer, a longtime Clinton friend and vice president of People for the American Way, the liberal lobbying group.

“To have an image created of you to the public at large which is so far away from who you really are is a tough experience,” Verveer said. “He knew it wasn’t him, and he knew he could not let himself be defined that way.”

To persevere in the face of the kind of punishing criticism he faced earlier this year did force Clinton to make a major change in his approach to running for office.

Early in his campaign, Clinton hoped that he could largely avoid talking about himself and his upbringing. Despite promptings from his staff, he seldom talked about his family or childhood. He insisted that voters would choose him on the basis of his policy proposals.

“In Arkansas, we’re small enough to know the stock people come from,” Wright said, and voters will lend a politician the benefit of the doubt.

Initially, Clinton seemed to believe that what had worked for him in Arkansas would work on the national stage as well. Aides, hampered by their candidate’s reticence, said they would leave it to the press to fill in the blanks.

Eventually, they learned better.

“People need to know what you stand for, but that’s not enough,” Clinton adviser Paul Begala said. “They need to know who you are.”

Who Bill Clinton is remains perhaps the most important question in the presidential campaign.

Answering questions about that “is very difficult for Bill to do. He’s basically embarrassed to talk about himself personally and is still incredulous that it is necessary,” Wright contended. But over time, “he’s come full face with the fact that he’s going to be measured by what’s in his soul, not simply what’s in his record.”

Clinton’s willingness to act on that realization remains spotty. Monday, for example, he stood among a crowd of several hundred at a settlement house on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In response to a question about why voters should believe his promises, Clinton thrilled his staff by talking of his family, telling the crowd--and the watching television cameras--about growing up poor.

“I know what its like to not have enough money to get along,” Clinton said. “When I tell you I’m for these things, its because they grow out of my life experience,” he said.

But when another questioner asked him about combatting domestic violence, Clinton reverted to form, making no reference to his own experience with an alcoholic and abusive stepfather who beat his mother. Instead, he delivered a short lecture on federal funding formulas and the interaction between state, local and national programs.

Even when Clinton does address his past, however, his statements alone may not suffice to resolve the basic doubts many voters have.

Is he, as his aides and friends like to portray him, the widow’s son from a small, poor town who worked his way through college, achieved the highest levels of accomplishment, then turned his back on easy success to return to Arkansas and devote 12 long years to improving the lot of the people of his home state?

Or is he, instead, the desperately ambitious, manipulative politician his enemies portray--a man who will bend any principle, betray any ally, tell any lie to achieve power for himself?

In truth, both portrayals hold an element of truth.

Clinton did, in fact, return to Arkansas after Yale Law School to pursue a career in an impoverished state when he could, easily, have had his pick of the many jobs open to Ivy League law graduates in places like Washington, New York or Los Angeles.

And he has, as his friends say, worked long hours in the hopes of improving his native state.

But he has also, as his enemies assert, made many compromises.

In his efforts to defuse conflict and bring contending groups together, he used his skill at words to make both sides of many fights believe he truly was with them, earning the “Slick Willie” moniker that has stuck to him ever since.

And in a year dominated by anti-politics, he has had to bear the burden of having made a choice early in his life to adopt politics as a career.

Classmates from college, law school and Oxford, where he spent two years as a Rhodes scholar, attest to how, early on, Clinton made his choice of careers. In high school, then again in college, Clinton ran for office, practicing his craft the way an aspiring professional football player would try out for the varsity, says Thomas Campbell, Clinton’s roommate for four years at Georgetown.

But what Campbell and other Clinton friends see as an admirable dedication to, and talent for, public service has struck others as unbearably phony. Today, voters seem to render a similar split decision, which explains why Clinton strategists are so keen to tell the portions of his life story that, they hope, will persuade at least a plurality of voters to see Clinton on his own terms.

Ultimately, however, the questions about Clinton’s character may simply not be susceptible to a final answer. At age 45, he remains a work in progress. To cite one of Clinton’s own favorite metaphors, life is a journey, and as a political leader, Clinton’s journey is still far from done.