Twenty years ago today, things officially got weird for me.
I sat in the office of then-Sen. Dale Bumpers’ press secretary in Washington and watched the coverage of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign announcement. Clinton was the last big dog to get into the ’92 race, and an unbelievable set of fortuitous/ridiculous circumstances meant I was going to cover the campaign for his home town paper.
Here’s what had to happen to make that event occur:
–The Washington job for the paper came unexpectedly open a year earlier when the Arkansas Democrat’s reporter there was hired away by the rival Arkansas Gazette. I had been his editor for a short time, but I had moved on to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. The Democrat made me a big enough offer to lure me back and move to Washington (although I actually took a substantial pay cut). Off I went in late 1990, thoroughly convinced Clinton would not run for president.
–The soon-to-be-christened Democrat-Gazette — it bought out its rival Little Rock paper two weeks after Clinton announced for president — had a statehouse bureau chief who knew Clinton well and would have been the logical choice to cover him. However, that reporter had just gotten engaged and wasn’t interested in a life on the road while trying to plan a marriage (see the comments section). I saw it as an unbelievable opportunity and a potential 15-month assignment that would set me up as a journalist for the rest of my life. That is exactly how things turned out.
–The Democrat-Gazette, even though it soon became a monopoly paper, had to be willing to pay a freelancer to replace me in D.C., and to put me on the road at an absurdly cash-gobbling rate. I am grateful to this day for the paper’s willingness and guts on these fronts. I did what I could to save the paper money — but make no mistake: Putting a reporter on the road for a presidential campaign was a giant cash suck that most of America’s mid-metro papers would have never considered.
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So there I was 20 years ago, sitting in an office in D.C., having already visited New Hampshire several times and getting ready to go up there again as Clinton spoke in Little Rock. Within weeks and months, I’d witness the Gennifer Flowers presser and the draft controversy and the 60 Minutes interview and I-didn’t-inhale and endless bus tours and saxophone-on-Arsenio and on and on and on. I covered it all and traveled with the campaign for a lot of it, finally getting tossed off the candidate’s plane one week before Election Day when I had an emergency appendectomy. But I recovered in time to work Election Night, and my byline is on most famous newspaper front page in Arkansas history.
I finally disconnected from day-to-day life with Bill Clinton in 1995, just in time to miss the whole impeachment fiasco, which I suspect would have burned me out and ended my journalism career. I jumped into the nascent online news business, a move that featured its own brand of weirdness, and that’s where I remain to this day.
Twenty years ago, I could not have predicted any of this — especially the fact that Clinton would actually beat a popular incumbent president to take office. But he did, and it really did all happen, and of course it will always be the great adventure of my professional life. Now I’m a veteran editor, and I’ve noticed that a bit of “get off my lawn!” attitude has started to creep into my outlook, but then I was young and ambitious and about to go on a fantastic journey. And for that, I will always feel profoundly lucky.
Randy, good post. Let me add a couple of things. I don’t know that I didn’t want to cover a presidential campaign. I was under the impression you covered Clinton from Chicago east and I got the trips west of there. By the way, I got married in June 1991, a few months before Clinton announced. But I started traveling with the “candidate” a month before that. I joined you in New Hampshire and at the Democratic National Convention. I waved good-bye when you joined Clinton on the post-convention bus trip while Cynthia joined me for a NYC vacation. Even you came to regret that bus trip. One of my favorite memories: You talking Ray Hobbs into obtaining cell phones for us. I remember you putting together a budget as part of your argument. I think we blew through it in the first month! I went on a few trips: the Lake Erie bus trip, Wyoming, Nevada, Washington state, etc. Heck, I spent my first wedding anniversary covering the California primary. My worst memory? You falling ill and me having to cover the final two weeks of the campaign. Before I boarded the airplane, I didn’t know how sick you were and thought I would be back in Little Rock by the weekend. It was only after the wheels were up that I learned how sick you were and Didi Meyers informed us we wouldn’t becoming back to LR until election day. I almost cried. We had a quick stop in Fayetteville to campaign for the Democratic congressional candidate. Cynthia packed another bag for me and sent it up with a photographer so I could have enough clothes to finish out the trip. And the very last segment: a non-stop cross-country trip covered in 24 hours: Philadelphia, Paduca, McAllen, Albuquerque, Denver and, finally, Little Rock. Crazy times.
Wow, that’s what memory and time does to you. You certainly covered a chunk of that campaign and I did not mean to disparage your work in any way. Now that I think about it, I really didn’t do too much west of the Mississippi — especially in the primary months — although I do remember a few long trips to California, Oregon and Washington state in the fall.
Yes, because buying cell phones was against the Democrat-Gazette’s religion, I talked Ray into letting me lease one. The bill the first month was over $1,000. Corporate credit cards were also a D-G no-no (which was a problem because the Clinton campaign took only credit cards for billing) and the worst part was that the D-G would not buy me a laptop PC, making me the only person on the plane/bus still using a Trash 80. This was a problem because we shared pool reports in those days by passing around floppy disks (the Web hadn’t even been invented yet). I eventually had to spring for a beat-up used one on my own.
Randy, at one point during the campaign Nancy Mathis of the Houston Chronicle swapped her laptop for a Model 200 – a Trash 80 with a bigger screen – because she had so much trouble keeping her laptop batteries charged because the campaign was always on overdrive and didn’t stay anywhere long enough – even overnight – to recharge the batteries. At least the Trash 80s and Model 200 needed only AAs. By the way what ever happened to Nancy? She loved to play golf. We hit a few buckets along the trail.
You could drive nails with Trash 80s, which was their great advantage. They were perfect word processors but did little else. I’ve lost track of Nancy but it looks like she went into media relations:
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Nancy-Mathis/32910087