Making His Point With Friends Or In Front Of The Media, Bill Clinton Uses Anecdotes To Get His Message Across
All day Monday, Bill Clinton was riding a serious post-debate buzz.
Laughing and loose, he took the stage at a late-afternoon rally in Manchester, N.H., and announced, apropos of nothing, that it was possible that someone in America was happier than he - but not very likely.
A few hours later, bathed in the white lights here at Hadlock Field, the ballpark where the Portland Sea Dogs play, he babbled and burbled. It was cold out, even by Maine standards, and his aides were dead tired. They wanted to go home, and so did the press corps.
But Clinton kept talking, demonstrating an astonishing capacity to describe virtually any aspect of human endeavor - from battling Newt Gingrich to pioneering the Human Genome Project - as “building that bridge to the 21st century.”
Yet, for all Clinton’s abundant energy in New Hampshire and Maine, it was in the far more subdued setting earlier in the day, in Stamford, Conn., that it became clear to me just how psyched he was now that the first debate was behind him.
He was talking about welfare, and about the kinds of public-private efforts that would be needed if the law signed this year was really going to work.
Specifically, he was talking about Kansas City, where local officials have started a “full employment council,” and have started using welfare funds to give employers a wage subsidy to hire welfare recipients. And then he said this:
“Bill (William Esrey, CEO of Sprint) and I were in Kansas City the other day with a guy that had 25 employees. It’s a great small-business story. He stored data for the federal government. And he won all these competitive bid contracts, 25 employees. Five of them were former welfare recipients he had hired.
“And the way the Missouri program works is you have to promise to keep one person for a year unless they’re really bad; they have to do something terrible, and then you don’t have to keep somebody if they’re just unemployable. But you can keep one person in a job slot for up to four years and get the welfare check.
“However, you can keep the slot for 10 years. So if you can promote them up, or they go on to other jobs or whatever, you might do 10 people in one job slot. But it’s a manageable thing.”
And he said:
“There are other things that can be done. There are some people who are represented here who have made investments in areas specifically so they could hire a disproportionate number of poor people.
“I know Eric Scalara of Burrito Brothers is doing that in the Washington area. Sandy Wile has a great program at Travelers, called the Academy of Finance, which is designed in part to train people who might become welfare recipients to stay off it in the first place.
“But I’m telling you, this is a problem we can solve. This is not rocket science.”
Bill Clinton has many strengths and certain weaknesses as a communicator, but it’s impossible not to be amazed by the sheer volume of anecdotage that pours out of his head.
In all of presidential history, Clinton stands as the greatest master, and the most flagrant abuser, of the illustrative example. The tendency is in his bones.
In private White House suppers or major public addresses, with pals at Renaissance Weekend or advisers in the councils of power, Clinton mixes his theoretical musings with a strong dose of the empirical, the particular.
When Clinton is in his groove, feeling confident and comfortable, there’s always some “guy that had 25 employees” who captures perfectly the point, and provides evidence in favor of the argument he’s trying to make.
Clinton would have had no trouble finding work in the days when the oral tradition was still in effect.
You can imagine him as a troubadour, traveling from village to village with his lyre, sitting by the fire and spinning tales the locals might learn from.
And as I was thinking this, Don Baer, Clinton’s communications director, sidled over and sat down next to me, so I laid my theory on him. Baer smiled broadly and showed me a piece of paper on which he’d been taking notes during the speech.
At the top he’d scrawled the words, “Information Age Bully Pulpit.”
“It’s easy to make light of,” Baer explained, “but spreading the word about what works may be one of the most important things we have to do in the next four years.”
No doubt Baer is right - and his line is certainly in sync with the logic of a decentralized, networked world, in which microsolutions are increasingly tailored to solve the problems that arise in particular, sometimes peculiar circumstances.
But it also carries a terrifying implication. The era of big government may be over, but with Clinton’s re-election seeming all the more inevitable, it appears that the era of endless anecdotage has only just begun.
MEMO: John Heilemann writes “Impolitic” for The Netizen, part of HotWired, Wired magazine’s World Wide Web site at http://www.netizen.com on the Internet for election coverage.