My life

With two weeks to go until the election, the polls showed me with a twenty-point lead, and 55 percent of the vote. I wish the survey hadn’t been released; it took some of the life out of our campaign when our supporters thought the election was over. I kept working hard, concentrating on our pickup targets, Arizona and Florida, and the states we’d won before, including three of those I was most worried about, Nevada, Colorado, and Georgia. On October 25, we had a great rally in Atlanta, where my longtime friend Max Cleland was in a tight race for the U.S. Senate. Sam Nunn gave a particularly effective argument for my reelection, and I left the state thinking we might have a chance. On November 1, I headed into the homestretch of the campaign with a morning rally at Santa Barbara City College. On a warm, sunny day, a large crowd gathered on the campus hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Santa Barbara was a good place to end the California campaign, a once solidly Republican area that had been trending our way.

From Santa Barbara, I flew on to Las Cruces, New Mexico, then to El Paso and the biggest crowd of the campaign, as more than forty thousand people came out to the airport to show their support, and finally to San Antonio and the traditional rally at the Alamo. I knew we couldn’t win Texas, but I wanted to honor the loyalty of the state’s Democrats, especially the Hispanics who had stuck with me. As we headed into the last three days of the campaign, I had a choice to make. Senate candidates from several relatively small states were asking me to campaign for them. Mark Penn said that if I spent the last days of the campaign doing that, instead of going to the larger states, I might not get a majority of the vote, for several reasons. First, our campaign’s momentum had been slowed in the last two weeks by allegations that the DNC had received several hundred thousand dollars in illegal campaign contributions from Asians, including people I had known when I was governor. When I heard about it, I was angry; my finance chair, Terry McAuliffe, had made sure the contributions to our campaign were reviewed scrupulously, and the DNC was also supposed to have a vetting operation to reject questionable contributions. There were clearly problems with the DNC clearance procedures. All I could say was that any unlawful contributions should be returned immediately. Regardless, the controversy seemed certain to hurt us on election day. Second, Ralph Nader was running on the Green Party ticket and would take some votes away from me on the left. Third, Ross Perot, who had entered the campaign in October, too late to get into the debates, wasn’t doing nearly as well as he had in 1992, but he was ending this campaign as he had the previous one, with vicious attacks on me. He said that I would be

“totally occupied for the next two years in staying out of jail,” and called me a “draft dodger” who was tainted by “ethical lapses, corrupt campaign financing, and a lax attitude toward drug use.” Finally, voter turnout was likely to be well below that of 1992, because the voters had been told for several weeks that the campaign was over.

Mark Penn advised me that if I wanted to win a majority of the votes, I needed to fly into the large media markets in the big states and ask people to go to the polls. Otherwise, he said, with the outcome not in doubt, lower-income Democrats were far less likely than more affluent or ideologically driven Republicans to vote. I was already scheduled to be in Florida and New Jersey, and on Mark’s advice we added a stop in Cleveland. Beyond that, I scheduled appearances in the Senate race states: Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Iowa, and South Dakota. In the presidential race, only Kentucky was in doubt; I was well ahead in all the others except South Dakota, where I expected the Republicans to come home to Dole at the end. I decided to go to these states because I thought it was worth two or three points off my vote total to elect more Democrats to the Senate, and the candidates in six of the seven states had helped me in ’92 or in the Congress.

On Sunday, November 3, after attending services at St. Paul’s AME Church in Tampa, I flew to New Hampshire to support our Senate candidate, Dick Swett; to Cleveland, where Mayor Mike White and Senator John Glenn gave me a last-minute boost; and to Lexington, Kentucky, for a rally at the state university with Senator Wendell Ford, Governor Paul Patton, and our Senate candidate, Steve Beshear. I knew it was going to be tough to hold Kentucky because of the tobacco issue, and I was heartened by the presence on the stage of the University of Kentucky basketball coach, Rick Pitino. In a state where everyone loved the basketball team and nearly half of them disliked me, Pitino’s presence was helpful and a gutsy move on his part.