LITTWIN: Questions stay the same as Hillary takes a new path

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Skip Rutherford is not on the unofficial Clinton-tour brochure you get at the airport. But he ought to be.

He is pulling on a bottle of Dr Pepper - no diet, full strength - in the hotel dining room and talking to me about his old friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Let's just say he's so practiced at it he almost makes you believe he enjoys it.

And not long after we sit down, he has this to say about Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes: "I learned long ago to never underestimate the Clintons. Never."

The Clintons have been, of course, the main topic of conversation in Arkansas for about 30 years. No one underestimates that. And Rutherford is the go-to guy for a reporter coming to town.

He was the point man in building the Clinton Library, which is packed with tourists. He's the University of Arkansas' William J. Clinton professor at the Clinton School of Public Service, which is hard to fit on a business card. He met Bill and his girlfriend, Hillary, in 1974 during Bill's first campaign, his losing run for Congress. He was an adviser in Clinton's first presidential race. His daughter played softball with Chelsea. (Note: Chelsea caught and his daughter played third.) Rutherford knows where the bodies are buried, not that he'd tell you without a subpoena.

He does advise a visit to the library and to the library gift shop, where the "I Miss Bill" bumper stickers and T-shirts are best-sellers, which particularly annoys state Republicans. Later, one would slip me a copy of the unofficial counter-Clinton bumper sticker: "Monica Misses Bill Too" - just to remind us that Arkansas, where politics can be a blood sport, is still very much Arkansas. And that the Clinton divide is as wide as ever.

At the gift shop, a clerk whispers to me - whispering because he's not supposed to talk to the press - that when Bush's popularity is slipping, the gift shop thrives. Now, he says with a grin, business is booming.

And there's another reason for the boom - the little matter of a new Clinton running for president, the same one that Rush Limbaugh has been warning us about for years, the one Karl Rove calls "fatally flawed." And, not coincidentally, first lady action dolls - I didn't check to see if they were made in China - are another best-seller.

Rutherford tells of this latest twist in the Clintons' saga: "Bill Clinton gave a talk here the other night at the library. When he walks into a room, all eyes go in that direction. All eyes. But the other day, when I saw them together, it was the strangest thing.

"It was at a reception following his stepfather's funeral in Hot Springs. And all eyes didn't go to him. She had the bigger crowd. She had the bigger crowd. They were holding court in different parts of the room, and there were more people surrounding her than surrounding him."

He leans in, tapping the table for emphasis. "I don't know if that's ever happened in Arkansas."

The question of the Clintons here is as inescapable as the heat. It's maybe 103 outside. In the River Market across the way on President Clinton Avenue, the vegetables are in mid-wilt, and the fruit pies lining the counter are sticky sweet in the August melt. Across the street at the Flying Fish - where the customers are lined up for the fried catfish, and maybe for the pickled green tomatoes, too - the overhead fans barely move the air. If these fish really had wings, I promise they'd be flying for water.

•

"I've slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, and I didn't have to pay."

Rev. Vic Nixon, who married the Clintons

I've come here to test a theory or two, now that we're a year out from the Democratic convention in Denver. First, there is the question of whether America is ready to elect a woman as president. You may have noticed there hasn't been one yet. You've seen the polling, which is mixed. And there is the subtext, for which there is no polling, but no lack of debate: Does Hillary Clinton, after all this time, somehow transcend gender? And if so, what exactly would that make her?

And even more to the point, there's the question of Hillary Clinton's famously high negatives - polite language for anti-Hillary people. The negatives began with the Clinton wars, which came straight from the '60s culture wars, which are still being fought in D.C., where George Bush was last seen comparing an Iraq withdrawal to the choppers-on-the- rooftop ending in Saigon.

Barack Obama, meantime, is campaigning on the notion that the way to end this long-running uncivil war is to not nominate Hillary Clinton. He's not blaming her, necessarily, saying many of the attacks were unfair. Even so, he told The Washington Post, "But that history exists, and so, yes, I believe I can bring the country together in a way she cannot do. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be running." And John Edwards now works into his stump speech that the Lincoln Bedroom should not be for rent, even at subsidized prices.

Clinton's campaign explains away the negatives by citing Republicans and by noting that she leads all national Democratic polls - and by saying she's the least-well-known, well-known person in America. Maybe. But not here. Everyone knows her here, which is why I've come.

They've known her forever - back from 1974 when she first came to the state with her Arkansas boyfriend by the name of Bill, and from a few years later when her name, remarkably, became a hot issue in Clinton's losing gubernatorial campaign. That was 1980, when Clinton became, as he likes to say, the youngest ex-governor in American history.

"I think the idea of Hillary started here," Rutherford says. "People here call their politicians by their first name. When Clinton was governor, they called him Bill. Down here it's David and Dale and John Paul and Jim Guy. And Hillary - Bill and Hillary.

"One time, when I was working for Senator Pryor, John and Annie Glenn were in town, and they were in a receiving line. Everyone is calling the senator David, and Annie says to me, 'These people act like they really know him. In Ohio, they call John senator.' They do know 'em here. And in Arkansas, if you don't call them back by their first names, you've got a political problem."

The Clinton legacy is everywhere here. If the past is a foreign country, as they say, in this one at least they have signposts. Somehow, it all seems as familiar as a Faulkner novel or maybe Joe Klein's Primary Colors Clinton tome. You start on President Clinton Avenue, keep close to the Arkansas River, take a turn up to the heights where the two modest Clinton houses are located, as well as the school where Hillary belonged to the PTA and the softball field where Chelsea played. Or you turn at the Capitol, which is a not-quite-so-grand replica of the U.S. Capitol. Or you go to the Rose Law Firm, where the ghosts of Whitewater and, of course, Vince Foster rest heavy.

Or you go to the imposing structure that is Little Rock Central High School, where, 50 years ago, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent nine black children from entering the school. Bill Clinton says that day was when he first learned about the concept of social justice.

One can't-miss stop on the not-quite-so-historic Clinton tour is Doe's Eat Place, which looks like a rundown diner, because that's the look they were trying for. It worked. It also became the semi-official headquarters here when Clinton ran for president in 1992, where Carville and Begala and Stephanopoulos and the rest came for the steaks and tamales.

One photo on a wall of photos shows the owner and the chef at the 1993 inaugural ball. On the Web site, they say the restaurant is still a Clinton hangout. But general manager Debra Wadley, who emerges from a steamy kitchen with a towel tucked around her neck, says not to be taken in. "I've been here for 17 years and I bet he's been here maybe 17 times."

She knows the Clintons, though. Everyone knows the Clintons. She remembers the '92 campaign and how, she says, the out-of-towners "were shocked when they came to Little Rock. They thought all the women would be barefoot and pregnant and God knows what they thought the men would be. After a while, though, they were saying, 'Hey, this is a pretty cosmopolitan place. You can actually get a pretty good steak.' "

Outside the restaurant, there's a car with a bumper sticker that says, "Bush: Like A Rock. Only Dumber." Inside, it's easy to find Hillary fans. Wadley says, "Bill's more popular. He's got the charisma. Hillary's got the toughness. I know that's the wrong thing to say about a woman, but she is tough. And if she was a man, everyone would be for her. She'd win easy. But I don't think a woman can win in Arkansas."

When I ask her why not, it's all she can to do not to laugh.

"Didn't I tell you we were backwards here?"

•

"I'm your girl."

Hillary Clinton at a presidential forum

Jane Dickey lets me in on a secret. But not right away. First, there are mysteries that must be explained and understood. And, besides, if there's anything you learn in Little Rock, it's that the Friends of Bill and Hillary - and Dickey is both - are loath to give up family secrets to outsiders.

If media interviews aren't politely refused, they're taken on warily. There's too much history, and too many people looking for the mud it's built on.

Dickey is a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm - yes, the Rose Law Firm, the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi and the only one where certain billing records became a national soap opera.

When Dickey arrived 30 years ago, there was a different kind of history being made.

When she arrived, there was only one other woman lawyer at the firm. You can guess the name. Hillary Rodham had been hired a few months earlier. She had come to Little Rock with her husband, who had just been elected attorney general, and was looking for work. But that's not the secret.

Dickey was there to watch as Hillary Rodham chose not to be called Hillary Clinton, a decision that became, to the surprise of both, a scandal in Arkansas - and nothing less than that. That's no secret either.

When Hillary Rodham - out of Yale Law School, a professor at University of Arkansas law school - interviewed at Rose, there were no women lawyers there to greet her. In fact, there was only one woman lawyer at a major firm anywhere in Little Rock.

Dickey started work in 1977. And if the world was changing for women in the workplace, it was changing just a little more slowly here in Arkansas.

What Dickey remembers is that she was glad she'd already been offered a job before the Clintons got to town. "They were looking for a woman," she says. "But goodness knows, what were they going to do with two women?"

What everyone else remembers is the name. A few years later, in the 1980 governor's race, the name, Hillary Rodham, would be on the lips of everyone in Arkansas. As Doyle Webb, an Arkansas Republican politico, remembers, "That's all anyone was talking about in the beauty shops, in the barbershops. Why wouldn't she take her husband's name? What's wrong with her - or him?"

There were other issues, but Frank White, the Republican who upset Clinton, ran TV ads showing his wife as "Mrs. Frank White," just to make it clear. Clinton lost. And, if you're looking for a sign from the past, Hillary Rodham became Hillary Rodham Clinton by the time Clinton won the job back two years later.

"People were shocked that she didn't change her name," Dickey tells me. She laughs about it now. Laughter comes easily to Dickey, who's as Southern as the little farm town in southeast Arkansas where she grew up.

"Women would speak to me about it because they knew I worked with her. What surprised me was, first, that they cared whether she changed her name. And second, that they thought I cared - and that I would go back to her and tell her that she was making a big mistake."

When Hillary came to Arkansas, she was the rising star in the Clinton galaxy. She had given the graduation speech at Wellesley College - and that had gotten her the cover of Life magazine as a voice of, yes, a new generation. She was a lawyer on the House Watergate committee. The timing couldn't have been more fortuitous for an ambitious young woman to end up anywhere other than Arkansas.

But in Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, he argues that the bargain the Clintons made when they moved to Arkansas was very much a Bill Clinton bargain. The plan, he writes, had been for Clinton to go home to Arkansas, run for Congress and then, when the Clintons married, she could pursue her career in Washington while he was in Congress.

But, instead, Clinton loses - this is 1974 - and Hillary had to make a decision. Hillary Rodham Clinton - whom Bernstein describes as a hippie-looking chick from Chicago and Yale, big glasses and no makeup and who would buy a wedding dress off the rack - eventually chose Bill and chose Arkansas. But Arkansans didn't necessarily return the favor.

"She was simply too independent for most Arkansans to understand her," Dickey says. "I think the fact she had a professional career and she kept her name and didn't have Chelsea yet, I think she was viewed as an anomaly."

An anomaly, she says, was not a good thing to be in Arkansas for a woman at the time. That was then. This is what Dickey thinks now: "For most voters, the fact that she's a female is beside the point. I think she's finally achieved that. It's pretty phenomenal and pretty hard to believe. I wouldn't have thought I'd ever see that in my lifetime."

There are plenty of women lawyers in Little Rock today, where Dickey is just another big-firm lawyer making big-time deals that make the world turn.

Oh, and she has that secret.

Dickey says she never told Hillary about the women who approached her about the name controversy. And there's something she didn't tell those inquiring women, either, but she did tell me, 29 years into her marriage:

"What they didn't know, what I didn't tell them when they were talking about Hillary's name, was that I had kept my name, too."

•

"When you're born in Arkansas, they stamp Democrat on your birth certificate."

Doyle Webb former Republican officeholder

If you talk to Republicans in Arkansas, they'll tell you that everything that happened with Hillary Clinton in Washington happened here first. If this were a movie, Hillary, the Arkansas Years would be the prequel.

I went to see Doyle Webb in Benton, not far from Little Rock, for background. He invites you into his office, which features a giant seal of the state of Arkansas on the door. He used to be a state senator from here in Saline County - the first Republican in that office since Reconstruction.

The South, once solidly Democratic, has gone solidly Republican in the post-Reagan era. But not Arkansas. Every statewide office here is filled by a Democrat. The legislature is Democratic. On the other hand, George W. Bush carried the conservative state both times.

Webb says it's cultural. And yet, his mother was a Republican who, he says, had acid thrown at her car for campaigning for Republicans. He's been to seven Republican conventions himself.

He also says, "If any Southern state would vote for Hillary, it would be Arkansas."

Not that he thinks it will. Almost everyone agrees that Bill Clinton would carry Arkansas if he could run again. But Hillary, he says, is not Bill. Not here and not in Washington.

There was the matter of her name in the Arkansas race - and the Hillary Rodham Clinton who went to Washington. In Arkansas, she headed up a controversial education overhaul, just as she'd do later, nationally, on health care. Republicans will tell you of the time she confronted Tom McRae, who had the temerity to run against Bill in the 1990 Democratic primary, at a McRae news conference - and compare it to her "vast right-wing conspiracy" defense of Bill on the Today show.

Webb says Arkansans took Hillary Clinton personally, just as some took it personally when she decided to run for the Senate from New York.

"There were people who believed that she was here because her husband was here and she probably wanted to live anywhere but Arkansas," Webb says. "Arkansans think that way. 'You mean, we're not good enough for you? You mean, that mall in Little Rock isn't good enough for you? You mean, that Piggly Wiggly isn't good enough to shop at?' We're a provincial bunch."

When Hillary Clinton came to this year's Democratic Jefferson- Jackson dinner, she drew 4,000 people. When she came for her endorsement from Democratic Gov. Mike Beebee, state Republican Party chairman Dennis Milligan said, "She says that she loves and is passionate about Arkansas. If that's the case, why isn't she the senator from Arkansas?"

•

"I guarantee she was the most controversial first lady in Arkansas ever."

Bill Vickery, Republican consultant

I go to see Vickery, the political consultant, who calls Clinton "a polarizing figure first and a woman second."

He also says no one in Arkansas was surprised when she became a controversial first lady in D.C.

"Nobody," he says, "woke up and said, 'Oh my gosh, where did that come from?' "

He's not surprised she's doing so well. He says when the Democrats debate, she's the smartest person in the room. You get the idea that for some here, that isn't necessarily a compliment.

But there's also this from Vickery: "I contend she's a unisex figure. I've had the opportunity to meet and work with Prime Minister Bhutto. My God, a woman in the Muslim world, and there's very much this femininity about her. I'm not trying to bash Hillary, but I never think of her as a woman. I mean, I don't. Only when it comes to politics. You know, O.J. became black the day he went before a black jury. Hillary Clinton becomes a woman the day she needs to pick up 60 percent of the female vote."

Vickery has brought along a young woman assistant, who would prefer I didn't use her name. I watch her as we talk. She's either vaguely amused or vaguely shocked, listening to the chatter of middle-age men.

I ask her, "You think Hillary Clinton's not a woman?"

"I wouldn't say that," she says. "No, I definitely wouldn't say that."

Vickery laughs at himself, but then goes on.

"I've always theorized that there are these briar patch arguments with the Clintons. Bill Clinton always wins when you make it about him. The impeachment thing, our guys fell right into the trap. I'm saying, 'You guys have no clue. When you make it about him, you lose.' "

He says the same thing is true for Hillary Clinton and points to the Arkansas education battle when she wanted to make veteran teachers be tested.

"It was the classic Southern pol thing here in Arkansas. 'We don't need a woman to tell us . . .' Well, you can imagine. And she won that argument. They made it about her. And she won."

It could, he said, happen again.

•

"I think she will change how the world spins."

Danielle Mesmer 15, on a possible Hillary Clinton presidency

I leave Arkansas and head for Las Vegas, where Clinton is doing an event. It's a slight culture change. And the culture changes again when we go, as the locals say, from Las Vegas over the hump to Pahrump, which is maybe 60 miles away and which is most famous for the Chicken Ranch and other legal brothels - not that Hillary Clinton shows up at any of them.

She goes to the Skate Zone, where they pack maybe 2,000 people into a makeshift skating rink. The median age must be around 70 in this booming retirement town. Down the road, Heidi Fleiss, not yet retired, owns the Dirty Laundry where there are not only washers and dryers but - get ready - mirrored floors in the bathroom. I report. You decide.

Fleiss, by the way, has endorsed Clinton, which is not surprising since everyone has an opinion on Clinton.

For many Republicans, Clinton has become an obsession. One of the big debates in inside-baseball circles is whether Rove is bashing Clinton because he wants her to lose the Democratic nomination - or because he thinks bashing her will help her win the nomination.

According to a salon.com story, Sen. Trent Lott told a college Republican crowd in July that the reason people were beating up on John McCain was because the "media thinks he is the most serious challenge to Hillary Clinton becoming president."

And on the Democratic side, Elizabeth Edwards says that her husband is better for women than Clinton because she's, well, a woman who has had to compromise on women's issues because, well, she's a woman.

I had been to several debates where I'd watched Clinton practice her make-no-mistakes, I-hate-the-war-regardless-of- how-I-voted strategy. But it had been a while since I'd seen her on the stump. This is where her supposed warmth-deficit would show.

The first person I talk to in Pahrump is a local singer named Maria Anderson, who says Clinton's "eyes, they're kind of evil. Her smile is gracious, but her eyes, they're cold. There's nothing in there. It's scary."

And this is at a Clinton rally. At the same event, Carol Roseberry says, "I think women are judged more harshly than men. Donald Trump has had three wives, and all you hear about is Hillary. I don't know if I would have handled the situation the same way, but why doesn't anyone talk about Trump or Rudy?"

Hillary gets up to speak. I notice that she's droppin' her G's. I guess she figures it's a Western crowd. Most of the people I talk to aren't necessarily from the West - but they all seem stunned she has come to little Pahrump.

Clinton knows how to work a crowd. She likes to talk about experience.

Skip Rutherford says her best experience might be the retail politics she learned back in Arkansas. And when she says, "Are you ready for a change?" you'd swear that, suddenly, she was the change candidate.

In her talk, Clinton says, "I'm very proud to be running to be the first woman president."

The crowd roars.

"I'm not running as a woman," she says, "I'm not running because I'm a woman. I'm running because I think I'm the best qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running."

More applause.

Diane Stomner, a retiree, is applauding hard. I ask her why.

"I think she understands people like me because she's a woman, because she's a mom, a wife. I think she understands running a home."

Does she think America is ready to elect a woman?

Clinton has come to rural Nevada testing the Democrats' Western strategy - the reason the convention is coming to Denver - and to get that question answered.

Stomner looks around the room, thinks for a few seconds and then answers.

"I think so. Most people in this town are conservative Republicans. Look how many came out. I guess there's a lot of closet Democrats here. Or maybe just a lot of people who want to see for themselves what she's really like."

In the end, the question about Hillary Clinton is at least twofold: Is America ready to elect a woman as president, and is America ready to elect this woman?

Four-part series

Saturday: The Rocky checks out the private to-do lists as the city, politicians, party members and vendors figure what they need to get done before Aug. 25, 2008.

Monday: The long, long road to Denver for the Democratic presidential candidates, chronicled by reporter M.E. Sprengelmeyer.

Today and Wednesday: Denver's convention may well create history by choosing either the first black or woman as the presidential nominee of a major party. Columnist Mike Littwin profiles Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

littwinm@rockymountainnews.com