My life

“sex question” against me. Larry Nichols had made more than 120 phone calls from his office to conservative supporters of the Nicaraguan Contras, a cause the national Republicans strongly supported. Nichols’s defense was that he was calling the Contra supporters to get them to lobby congressional Republicans to support legislation beneficial to his agency. His excuse didn’t fly, and he was fired when the calls were discovered. Nichols called a press conference on the steps of the Capitol and accused me of using the finance agency’s funds to carry on affairs with five women. I drove into my parking place in front of the Capitol not long after Nichols had made his charges and was hit cold with the story by Bill Simmons of the Associated Press, the senior member of the political press and a good reporter. When Simmons asked me about the charges, I just suggested he call the women. He did, they all denied it, and the story basically died. None of the television stations or newspapers ran it. Only one conservative radio announcer who supported Nelson talked about it, actually naming one of the women, Gennifer Flowers. She threatened to sue him if he didn’t stop. The Nelson campaign tried to stoke the rumors, but without corroboration or evidence.

At the end of the campaign, Nelson put on a television ad that was misleading but effective. The announcer raised a series of issues and asked what I would do about them. To each question, my own voice answered, “Raise and spend.” Nelson’s campaign had lifted those three words from a section in my State of the State address, in which I compared Arkansas’ budget with that of the federal government. While Washington could engage in deficit spending, if we didn’t have money, we had to

“raise and spend, or not spend at all.” I put out a response ad comparing Nelson’s claim to what I had really said and told the voters that if they couldn’t trust Nelson not to mislead them in the campaign, they couldn’t trust him to be governor. A couple of days later, I was reelected, 57 to 43 percent. The victory was sweet in many ways. The people had decided to let me serve fourteen years, longer than any other Arkansas governor in history. And for the first time, I had carried Sebastian County, which was then still the most hard-core Republican big county in the state. In a campaign appearance in Fort Smith, I had promised that if I did win there, Hillary and I would dance down Garrison Avenue, the town’s main street. A couple of nights after the election, along with a few hundred supporters, we kept our commitment. It was cold and raining, but we danced away and enjoyed every minute of it. We had waited sixteen years for a general-election win there.

The only really dark moment of the general election was purely personal. In August, Mother’s doctor discovered a lump in her right breast. Forty-eight hours later, while Dick, Roger, and I waited in the hospital, Mother had the lump removed. After the procedure, she was her usual chipper self and was back at work on the campaign in no time, though she faced months of chemotherapy. The cancer had aleady spread to twenty-seven nodes in her arm, but she didn’t tell anyone this—including me. In fact, she never told us how bad it was until 1993.

In December, I resumed my work for the Democratic Leadership Council, launching the Texas DLC

chapter in Austin. In my speech, I argued that, contrary to our liberal critics, we were good Democrats. We believed in keeping the American dream alive for all people. We believed in government, though not in the status quo. And we believed government was spending too much on yesterday and today—

interest on debt, defense, more money for the same health care—and too little on tomorrow: education, the environment, research and development, the infrastructure. I said the DLC stood for a modern, mainstream agenda: the expansion of opportunity, not bureaucracy; choice in public schools and child care; responsibility and empowerment for poor people; and reinventing government, away from the topdown bureaucracy of the industrial era, to a leaner, more flexible, more innovative model appropriate for the modern global economy.