A Woman in Charge (29 page)

The Clintons' villains of choice in 1983 were the utility companies, which Bill had campaigned against in the election with considerable success. But too many legal technicalities and constraints could get in the way of successfully villainizing them from the governor's office, though there was no question that the companies were usurious and that their influence needed to be curtailed. So dealing with the utilities would have to be a secondary priority.

The Arkansas State Teachers Association would become the leading villain instead for the rest of Hillary and Bill's hold on the governor's mansion. This was in spite of the fact that there was no difference of opinion between the ASTA and the Clintons about the need for a massive infusion of funds from the legislature to give Arkansas kids an equal chance to compete with kids in other states, even next door in Mississippi. The ASTA was not exactly the antichrist, and in fact had done some pretty good things in a state where the legislature had typically accorded more attention to protecting the rights of poultry farmers to saturate half of Arkansas's topsoil with chicken feces than providing its children with a decent education. The little money that teachers earned (Arkansas teachers were the poorest paid in the nation), what little serious attention in the state was paid to the condition of schools and classrooms, was often at the behest of the teachers association.

But Arkansas's moribund education system represented an enormous opportunity for its governor. The system was about to get picked apart by the Arkansas Supreme Court for good reason: a lower court had ruled that the state's system of funding public education was unconstitutional because it discriminated against students in poor school districts. During Clinton's upcoming term, it was virtually certain that the Supreme Court would uphold the lower court, and toss the matter back at the governor and the legislature to solve. Better that Clinton get in front of the issue and use the case to his advantage.

While he was reading Reich and others on political economy, Bill was also engaged in a nonstop strategic dialogue with Hillary and Dick Morris about how to attain lofty goals through the messy process of ground-and-gut-level politics. The education problem had to be solved on a practical, political level, combined with the best ideas for helping the students and the state—a synthesis of means and ends. The education agenda occupied the three of them during the transition between Bill's election and inauguration, just as the health care agenda would occupy much of the transition period from election day 1992 to the start of the Clinton presidency.

The most facile solution would be to raise taxes—the riskiest thing a governor (or a president) could do, as he had learned with the relatively simple matter of car tags. Another solution—combining some school districts and eliminating others, taking from the rich school districts and giving to the poor ones—was an invitation to racial and class warfare, and to ugly reminders of Orval Faubus; it also wouldn't get to the basic problem, the state's failure to spend sufficient money on education.

The most perceptive of Clinton's biographers, David Maraniss, would write about a strategy, managed largely by Hillary and Morris, to do whatever it took to get elected and use the same philosophy to govern. He called it the Permanent Campaign. The concept was derived from Morris, who had observed that Clinton, after learning his hard lesson on the high road in 1974 and being defeated for Congress, had become compliant enough to do almost anything not to get beat in an election. But once in office, he had continued to ignore a dangerous consequence of governance. “When you lead in an idealistic direction, the most important thing to do is to be highly pragmatic about it. And when necessity forces upon you a problem of great pragmatism, you need to use the idealism to find your way out of the thicket,” wrote Maraniss. Maraniss defined this as a basic tenet of the Permanent Campaign—interweaving ends and means, pragmatism and idealism, lofty goals and getting there. The supporting elements were a determination to use paid media in the form of TV and radio commercials and mailings to reach voters, rather than expect print and broadcast journalists, “free media,” to deliver a political message, and constant polling to see what voters were responding to at a given moment, what they would accept and what they would reject. It was a system that played to Hillary's strengths as a strategist, disciplinarian, and motivational force, and offset Clinton's sometimes lackadaisical optimism.

So at Hillary's urging, and trusting his own instincts and Morris's polling as a litmus test, education was made the signature issue of his administration. Hillary would coordinate a great effort at reform, and, instead of focusing public attention on its financing by tax increases, she and Bill would promote it as an idealistic cause that Arkansans should be proud to support. They would also make sure that those who got in the way of the crusade were identified and stigmatized.

Ten years later, they would do almost the same thing with health care. In both instances, there were solid reasons for choosing the crusade they did. The results were not the same.

In May 1983, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the state's system of funding public education was inequitable and therefore unconstitutional. Hillary took another leave of absence from the Rose Law Firm and, as had been planned months earlier, became chairwoman of the governor's Education Standards Committee.

“We [Hillary and Bill] were sitting around talking about it,” Bill told a reporter, “and I said, ‘This could be the most important thing we'll ever do. Who should I name the chairman of the Standards Committee? The chairman is the key.' Either the first or second day we talked about this—we talk about a lot of things like this—she said, ‘I think I'd like to be it. Maybe I'll do it.'” When he reminded her that she'd just taken eight months off from her law practice to help him get reelected, she responded, “Yeah, but this may be the most important thing you ever do, and you have to do it right.” Hillary's memory was different: she wrote in
Living History
that it was his idea and that he was insistent about it when she protested.

That Hillary was a woman didn't hurt either. Most schoolteachers, most educators, were women; helping in this traditionally feminine area of endeavor was acceptable to the same Arkansans who had been upset about Hillary's keeping her maiden name.

In announcing to his staff and the state's citizens that he was naming Hillary to head his task force on education reform, Bill said, “This guarantees that I will have a person who is closer to me than anyone else overseeing a project that is more important to me than anything else”—words almost identical to those he would use in announcing that Hillary would become head of his health care task force in 1993.

That summer and fall in Arkansas, the Education Standards Committee took public testimony across the state, held seventy-five meetings, and formulated a program of reforms, which had been largely predetermined by Hillary and experts with whom she was working. The reforms were overdue and addressed debilitating shortcomings in a public education system that had been built on inequality: 200 high schools in poor areas that taught no foreign languages or music, no physics curriculum at 150, no math beyond algebra at 135. Because of such conditions, the percentage of Arkansas students who failed standardized achievement tests was the highest of any state in the nation. Arkansas ranked last in the percentage of high school students who went on to college.

Hillary's preparation for her assignment (as in Washington with health care) was exhaustive, her expertise made almost as sharp as that of professionals with years of experience. She researched the curriculum of every Arkansas school district and traveled the state to attend public hearings. Hillary said she kept hearing stories about grossly incompetent teachers who could hardly read or spell.

Ultimately Hillary would prevail in the political battle for education reform. It would be her greatest achievement in public life until she was elected to the U.S. Senate, though the substantive results fell short of the grand expectations of her plans. And the methodology she employed to win the battle, and the lessons she and Bill took away from the experience, would haunt the Clinton presidency and doom health care reform from the start.

In addition to teacher-testing, the plan that Hillary and her task force eventually formulated required that all local school districts adopt uniform, state-imposed standards for curriculum and classroom size—devised by educational experts who were consultants to her commission. Any basic philosophical disagreements about those standards had been resolved before she traveled the state holding public hearings to solicit ideas. In June 1983, Hillary spoke at the statehouse before a joint House-Senate legislative committee and outlined her recommendations, including compulsory testing of students before they could matriculate to the next grade, a 20-to-1 student-teacher ratio, adding more math and science courses, and mandatory all-day kindergarten. At the end of the ninety-minute presentation, Representative Lloyd George remarked, “Well, fellas, it looks like we might have elected the wrong Clinton!” (After her first trip to Capitol Hill to sell the Congress her ideas on health care, she received almost exactly the same encomium.)

The Arkansas Department of Education estimated that $200 million would be needed to execute the plan adopted by Hillary's task force; it would require 3,781 more teachers, administrators, nurses, counselors, and librarians, and two thousand new classrooms. The initiative would be financed by increasing the state sales tax for the first time in twenty-six years.

Morris did the polling: 50 percent of voters would support the tax increase as a means to fund education; but if teacher-testing were a requirement in the reform package, which Hillary was secretly considering, the number went up to 85 percent.

Early in their discussions of an education agenda, Hillary enthusiastically embraced the idea of competence tests for teachers, as did Bill. But she decided not to make her opinion public, even to members of her own task force. When Hillary announced the plan to the state legislature that fall, she called teacher-testing “the real heart” of the reform package.

It was clear that the state's teachers would therefore oppose it. The National Education Association, the most powerful lobby and union in the field of education, had long held that competence tests were an affront to the profession. The Arkansas Education Association was one of its affiliates.

“She made it very clear that there had to be a bad guy in this,” said Richard Herget, Bill's campaign chairman. “Anytime you're going to turn an institution upside down, there's going to be a good guy and a bad guy. The Clintons painted themselves as the good guys. The bad guys were the schoolteachers.” The day before Hillary's plan was announced publicly, Bill told the head of the Arkansas Education Association that teacher-testing would be part of the reform package. The official was, predictably, furious.

Exactly how Hillary decided that teacher-testing might be the smoothest road to education reform is unclear. Former governor White, among others, eventually took credit, and indeed Republicans had long advocated competence-testing for teacher certification; Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, were generally opposed to the idea. More than expediency was certainly involved. Hillary's basic statements about education sometimes sounded as if they could have been written by Dorothy or Hugh Rodham, and had taken firm hold long before her assignment. She was sure that testing teachers' competence and holding them to minimum standards would help the schools educate. Frequently Hillary and Bill would talk about one teacher who, reading from a textbook, reportedly referred to World War II as “World War Eleven.” But Hillary also knew her words would appeal to Republicans and conservative Democrats: “The first purpose of school is to educate, not to provide entertainment or opportunities to socialize. Discipline holds no mystery. When it is firm, clearly understood, fairly administered and perceived to be so, it works. When it isn't, it doesn't.”

Bill, in presenting his budget plan to a special session of the legislature, called mandatory teacher tests “a small price to pay for the biggest tax increase for education in the history of the state and to restore the teaching profession to the position of public esteem that I think it deserves.” The teachers called it an outrage, racist. They accused the Clintons of calling the entire teaching profession incompetent. Civil rights organizations condemned the testing provision.

It genuinely pained Hillary and Bill that they were accused of appealing to racist sensibilities, just as they would be attacked for “playing the race card” to achieve welfare reform a decade and a half later. But it was also true that if a specific group of individuals were to suffer disproportionately in the process of reform it would be black teachers (and later black welfare recipients).

The union pursued its case in court—Hillary's task force and the state were the defendants—for eight years. Most of the teachers' wrath was trained on Hillary. Diane Blair remembered “walking through a crowd with her at a school, and you could hear teachers hissing at her. She just shook her head and said, ‘I get this all over the state. It's heartbreaking. It's hard. But someday they'll understand.'” In fact, Hillary didn't seem to mind too much. At times she wore the teachers' enmity as a badge of honor, and for almost a decade used the example of their villainy as a basic component of the Permanent Campaign in Arkansas. When it came time for health care, there would be another villain—the medical establishment—but it was richer and better organized than the teachers, who did not prevail.

Her substantive legacy in Arkansas was real, though the teachers association tried through two elections to defeat Bill Clinton at the polls and to repeal the teacher tests. As Dick Morris had predicted, the more the teachers heaped scorn on the Clintons, the more popular they became.