POLITICS • Paul Begala
His spirited defense of the president proves that spinning isn’t everything–it’s the only thing.
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After graduating from UT, Begala joined Lloyd Doggett’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1983. Doggett, now a congressman, won the Democratic primary but was routed by Phil Gramm in the general election. Two good things happened to Begala as a result of the otherwise disastrous race. One was that he was able to extract half of a joke that is a staple of his speeches: “When Lloyd Doggett got forty-two percent of the vote in 1984, we were idiots. When Bill Clinton got forty-three percent of the vote in 1992, we were geniuses.” The second thing was that he struck up a friendship with James Carville, then a down-on-his-luck political consultant, later his partner in helping Clinton win the White House. Carville told of his first encounter with Begala in All’s Fair, a book he co-wrote with his wife, Mary Matalin, who had been George Bush’s political director: “During the early days of the Doggett campaign there were thousands of meetings . . . These meetings would go on for two, sometimes three hours. And I noticed there was this reddish-blond-haired kid who, while everyone else was pontificating, would just sit there at a word processor banging out statements . . . I said, ‘This guy’s a keeper. I’m gonna want to work with him again.’”
Begala enrolled in law school at UT but took so much time off to join Carville on campaigns that it would be almost six years before he graduated. Before he met Begala, Carville could never win a race; now he couldn’t lose one. The two men have different personalities—Carville is hot, Begala is cool—but the same attitudes about politics. “He is so profound,” Begala said. “He knows what the folks around the nail bin are going to be thinking about and how to reach them. Not with liberal guilt. He’ll say, ‘We don’t have a person to waste; it doesn’t make sense not to use everybody.’ He’s the least greedy person in the business. We never had a formal partnership agreement. Somebody told us we needed one, and we had one drafted. I never read it, never signed it, and never had an argument about money.”
Their breakthrough victory was a 1991 Senate race in Pennsylvania in which Harris Wofford came from 47 points behind to defeat former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh. “The polls said that jobs was the big issue,” Begala recalled, “but Harris said that the thing he kept hearing about was health care. Once you thought about it, it jumped out at you. Nobody was addressing it.” Wofford’s victory catapulted health care into a national issue and Begala and Carville into the top rank of consultants. They joined forces with Clinton in 1991, and when Clinton made up ground in the New Hampshire primary to finish second to Paul Tsongas, Begala christened him the Comeback Kid. The implication was that Clinton had “won” the primary by coming in second to someone from neighboring Massachusetts. It was great spin because the phrase did all the work.
After the election, Begala went to work at the Democratic National Committee but fell out of favor at the White House—first because he wasn’t a policy wonk, then because he was a source for The Agenda, Bob Woodward’s unflattering account of policymaking in the first two years of the Clinton administration. He returned to Austin in 1995 and joined Public Strategies, an issue-oriented political consulting firm, where he did work for Southwest Airlines and the San Antonio Spurs. Then, in the summer of 1997, he was asked to return to the White House as counselor to the president. He and his wife, Diane, whom he had met at UT, had just bought a house and were expecting their third child. “I didn’t take it seriously at first,” he remembered, “but they said I would be advising the president. The conventional wisdom was that Clinton was out of gas, so he wanted to aggressively push an agenda for the post—balanced budget world. My focal point would be the State of the Union.”
The speech was set for January 27. Then, on January 21, the Lewinsky tapes hit the front pages. “There was such a rush to judgment,” Begala said. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Network anchors were standing on the north lawn, saying the president was going to resign. CNN reported that the staff was contemplating resignation.”
In that surreal atmosphere Begala went on Meet the Press. Carville, Mr. Hot, would appear on TV later to talk about how Ken Starr was obsessed with sex, but what was needed now was Mr. Cool. The hands stayed clasped, the voice stayed calm, the eyes never wavered as Begala got his message out—that Starr makes a million dollars a year from tobacco interests, that witnesses have accused Starr’s office of trying to intimidate them into testifying falsely, that the investigation is “out of control.”
This was the key exchange:
Russert: The president has always said he wanted the most ethical administration in history.
Begala: Absolutely.
Russert: Why won’t he come forward and level with the American people?
Begala: He said these are false charges, and a fair investigation will prove that. Now, part of the reason this investigation is not fair is because of the leaks. And I need to ask you, Has NBC News been the recipient of illegal leaks from Ken Starr?
There was a brief but fatal pause before Russert answered: We don’t talk about whether leaks come from the White House, from Ken Starr, from the State Department, from the Pentagon. We do our job, and we do it well.
After spending the entire program accusing the White House of ducking the issue, Russert had done the same.
“ALL RIGHT, I SAID TO BEGALA.” I’ll ask the question. What was the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky?”
“In my view, the president has answered that,” he said. “He was asked if they had had sex and whether he had asked anyone to lie. He said no. Those are the only two questions that matter.”
“Why doesn’t the public seem to care about this?” I asked.
“Because it doesn’t affect their lives. If Rush Limbaugh’s dream came true and the president had to resign, it wouldn’t educate a single child, it wouldn’t create a single job. In fact, it would do the opposite. They don’t think of character as having to do with his private life. Only he and God can judge that. They see his character come through in the way that he keeps his focus on his job. They see that when he says, ‘I’ll fix the economy and reduce crime.’ He keeps his word.”
The success of the White House strategy—pioneered and implemented by Begala—has been to personalize and politicize what had previously been a legal matter. Recent events have given Starr the upper hand for the moment, but he remains, like his adversary, badly wounded, in many cases by his own hand. In challenging the president’s attorney-client privilege, in demanding the testimony of Secret Service agents, in subpoenaing the president, Starr has stretched the very fabric of constitutional government and its foundation of separation of powers. The issue now on the table is which man’s weaknesses are the greater threat to the nation.
“I used to think the investigation was all political,” Begala said. “Now I think it’s a case of too much power and too little accountability. Everything that has happened to Kenneth Starr has been his own doing, not mine.”
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