Marjorie Margolies Oral History

This is Paul Martin from the Miller Center of Public Affairs. I am here with former Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies. It is December 7, 2007, and we are in her offices in Philadelphia. 

If you wouldn’t mind starting out with your first meetings with President Clinton—

I don’t remember them.

He campaigned for you in ’92, or was that ’94?

In ’92 I think only Hillary [Clinton] came in. In ’92 our race was seen as such a long shot. When Clinton was campaigning we had several meetings at places where he was and all the candidates would kind of gather behind him. I met him a couple of times that way. Then there was one instance where we had set something up with a group of unions and Mrs. Clinton was coming through and it coordinated with us so we had a joint appearance. To the best of my recollection, he didn’t come in. He did come in in ’94 because we were so pathetic. 

He owed you at that point, my guess would be.

The one thing I learned instantaneously after just a little bit of time was that you can’t expect owed, you can’t expect appreciation, you can’t expect anything, because it’s triage. All they cared about that night was that it passed. Then it was almost over and then they were on to the next piece of legislation that they really needed to look at. They needed to look at the [James] Brady bill. They needed to look at—they were talking in terms of healthcare. There was so much going on. If you sit back and wait to be appreciated you’re missing the mark dramatically; you're missing the mark by a hell of a lot.

I can see that. So your campaign is not expected to win in 1992?

Let me tell you a little bit about the campaign. A very small and very unusual group of women came to me and said, Would you run? At that point Lawrence Coughlin was still in. He was running. He had been there for 22 years. I was working at NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation] and liked it, so I didn’t know whether I could do it. It wasn’t being afraid of it, but as I’ve always said so many times to my kids, You can’t win if you are not prepared to lose. This was the operative in my head. I said, You know, it’s really worth a try. 

They said that they would clear the field. They didn’t have the right to say that, and they couldn’t. There was somebody who had run against Lawrence Coughlin before and he entered the race. I think I beat him by 79 percent or something—

In the primary?

Yes, in the primary. In a way we were annoyed that we had a primary, but it turned out to be good because it was then covered. In the general—on election night I only walked in with a concession speech. There was no way I was going to win this. Everybody had been told that he (Jon Fox) was the prohibitive favorite. He had run and run and run and run. But he was a very interesting person to run against, a very nice guy, almost unoffendable. He was kind of fun to debate because he didn’t think as linearly as he could have under those circumstances. He also wore a very bad toupee. Barney Frank called me and said my theme should have been, I’m going to pull the rug out from right on top of him. 

We ran a pretty tight race. It turned out to be not a bad year, not a great year, but not a bad year for Democrats and for women. It was the Year of the Woman, which lasted for 365 days and then died. I was looking at something the other day where it showed the women who ran. I was stunned at how many didn’t win.

Really?

Oh, yes. I thought so many—I remember running with a lot of women but I didn’t focus in. Twenty-four of us won: 21 were Democrats, 3 were Republicans. Reflecting on it, I’m really glad I did it. I’m not so sure that I would have done it the way I did it, nor have written an obit for one vote, but it was an amazing experience. At no point did I expect to win, and I only had a concession speech. It was amazing. I never let my head get there. I never let myself get on the train and get down there.

You hadn’t been checking out the office space yet?

Not at all. I hadn’t been measuring the offices. I was shocked. I turned to my family the next day and said, I’m going to have to serve. I mean, I was really—

This isn’t just a joke. I have to actually go.

Yes, lighten up, walk it off. I was really surprised. But it was an amazing experience going to Washington, also knowing that I came from a district that—trying to figure out the difference between leadership and representation is a real challenge. I’m sure that as a scholar of Congress you know that.

It’s a daily task.

It really is. You assume, you hope, that they know you for what you stand for and for your—I don’t even want to use the word, but for your intellect, or your ability to collate, your thoughtfulness. You hope that is what they trust. 

Then there are all these factors that you don’t fold in. I’m doing women’s leadership around the world. You don’t fold in that if you run as an outsider and you do something that they think is folding to the politics, as opposed to sticking up for what you believe in, you hope that that makes sense. But with women especially, the pedestal is then pulled out precipitously. She’s just like all the rest of them. There’s also something that I’ve gotten into because we do a lot of polling in the classes that I teach and some stuff around the world. In polling, there is the minority factor. The one thing that you can’t measure is jealousy. It’s a very difficult thing for women. It never entered my mind that that would be a problem. But there is a lot of, Who does she think she is? 

When you look at Hillary, too, there is this. Women, the same way that folks who don’t want to be perceived as racist, will, at about a 6 percent margin—you don’t want a course in this, because you’ve taken all of this. You could tell me this. Why am I telling you?

It’s okay. Actually I was going to ask, during the campaign did you have poll numbers, and did you know how you were running versus Clinton? Were you tracking those sorts of things?

Let me tell you a little bit about the race. The race had a lot to do with my being linked to Lynn Yeakel. Lynn Yeakel was running against [Arlen] Specter, and Specter was the one who had come down so hard on Anita Hill.

Yes, just a year before that, in ’91.

Yes, on the Judiciary Committee. It was really a problem because we had no idea what would happen there. I frankly think that she would have been a very good Senator. She just didn’t run the strongest race. But we didn’t know that. We also didn’t want to be attached to something that was an unknown, so we tried really hard to separate ourselves out. There were people who were doing bumper stickers—Yeakel–Mezvinsky—because it was the Year of the Woman. We asked them not to do that. In July we were four points down. 

Who knows? We realized that that wasn’t real, we really did. It was fluky. We’d gotten a lot of press. Do you know about our family, that it’s a strange family? I adopted two kids before I got married. Then I married somebody with four kids, so we had six girls. Then there were five boys. [shows photo] 

Then we had, homemade, two boys. Then we became legal guardians to three more, so there are 11 kids. 

You have a campaign staff.

I tell you the kids story because it was an interesting campaign. We had all these kids walking around with MMM shirts. It was a good story. Had I been a reporter at the time I would have done a story on a candidate like me. It was an interesting campaign. 

Then it turned out to be the Year of the Woman, which we didn’t know when we got in, at all. And Lawrence Coughlin had pulled out. Lawrence Coughlin pulled out when I got in. I think he was thinking of doing it. I don’t think it was me. I wasn’t that strong. I was kind of known around here, but not really. 

We knew that we had this interesting story, and we were covered all the time, because it was interesting. And I knew a lot of the reporters.

That’s helpful.

It was helpful, and I wasn’t scared of the press, although I should have been. You think you know what they want but you really don’t. Anyway, we got a lot of free press and ran a very good race. Our field people were unbelievable. 

Every poll that we looked at in October, everything that we saw, showed that the race was changing considerably because of Lynn Yeakel. It looked like her numbers had completely gone astray. Our numbers were not as good as we thought they would be. Our sense was that our numbers were not as good. 

Anyway, I won by 1363 votes. But who was counting and who would remember a number like that? It was one of those things. We got to the hall and there were lots of people who were hopeful and I just felt so bad because I knew we were going to lose. I only had a concession speech. As the numbers started to change—and it was way late when the numbers came in—I changed it. My first line in the concession speech was to Andrew, my son, who was 10 then. He is now 26 and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. I had said, Close in Montgomery County is a win. I went through the whole thing and had said, You’ll have Mommy more, and all that kind of stuff. Then I had to strike all of that and just say, It’s a very exciting time for Montgomery County. 

In this speech I had talked about the fact that it was the first time that Democrats had made inroads in any way. The numbers were at least two-and-a-half to one. It was two to one in most, for sure, and in some places it was five to one. Montgomery County was a Republican stronghold, period. It was real [George H.W.] Bush country. So, it was a combination that it was a decent year—it was the Year of the Woman and some women really felt very strongly about voting for a woman and they decided they weren’t going to vote for Lynn Yeakel. I did much, much better than Lynn did in Montgomery County. She did all right, but I really—Anyway, so that was it. Then the insanity started. 

Suddenly you are a candidate-elect.

Somebody who did a fundraiser for me said something that was wonderful and it was actually true. When I grew up I said two things to my mom and dad—one I remembered and one I didn’t. The one I didn’t remember was that when I grew up I wanted to make a difference. I don’t really remember saying that. The second one was that I wanted to run away and join the circus. I got to do both when I went to Congress. 

And those two years were particularly a circus.

Oh, yes.

You have Bill Clinton running in 1992, and the press has all the information about Gennifer Flowers, and the other sorts of things like this. There are all sorts of rumors at this point. How did that jibe in 1992, running in the Year of the Woman? It seems that you have these very odd gender dynamics in that campaign. Do you run against Bill Clinton in ’92 or do you—not that you would distance yourself, but—not necessarily embrace at the same time?

We didn’t know what to do, with all honesty. We just didn’t know what to do. There were so many issues that we looked at, considered, ran on. I was always asked about it. This is the way I handled it. 

It’s important in terms of seeing how people in your position at the time dealt with a campaign like that.

I figured if I won, and I really thought it was a long shot, that we were going to have to work together. I didn’t know whether we would be friends or anything like that, but I thought that we would have to work together. And I liked them a lot. I would be asked a question like, Aren’t you embarrassed by this? I would grind it. I would always say, If you’re asking if this is embarrassing, for sure it is. But they think it’s embarrassing, I’m not alone in that. Bill Clinton and Hillary admit that this is something that’s embarrassing, but it’s also something that anybody who has a marital relationship understands, and that is, there are peaks and troughs in marriages. It’s clear that the two of them are dealing with it in a fairly sophisticated and honest and open manner. That’s the way I would deal with it. 

Even at the worst of times—but this was actually before he was nominated. If something had occurred, and there was always something that was being leaked out there, I never would have separated myself out from them, because I liked them. But yes, as a woman in the Year of the Woman, running under those kinds of headlines—it didn’t make it easy. 

I always kind of bumped it when I was asked about it, and I was asked about it fairly regularly because I came from a very Republican county. In the meetings that I would go into there was always a question saying, What about her? How could she stay with him? My answer always was, If you’re in any kind of a relationship with anybody, you know that there are valleys and you have to deal with them. If you’re in love with the person, you deal with them, and you deal with them in all different kinds of ways.

When you first decided to run, you mentioned this meeting with a group of women in the district who were encouraging you to run. Was Clinton already the nominee at this point? Did you know when you chose to run that you’d be running basically on the same ballot as Bill Clinton?

No.

So you decided earlier, when the primary was still happening?

The primary was still happening. I didn’t give myself a heck of a lot of time. The primary was still happening and I did not know who would be the nominee.

You must have had some calculation who you thought was going to be the nominee. My sense is that this happened fairly late, that Clinton didn’t seal the deal until March or so.

Right. It was maybe three or four months earlier. I was delighted that he won, mainly because I just think he is such an extraordinary candidate. To this day, he is articulate, unflappable, and frankly brilliant.

Yes, all the stories that we’ve gotten are very positive about his personal capabilities.

It’s also that—I think it is rare when you feel that you can put your hands on someone who really knows the issues, who really understands the innuendo, and who isn’t—so many politicians are strong and an inch deep and a mile long. He really is a mile deep on so many issues. I’ve been with him when I’ve just been astonished at his knowledge, and hers, too. You assume that you want to put somebody in there who is strong and is willing and surrounds himself or herself with fabulous people. But it’s just so much more exciting when you can work with somebody who is absolutely brilliant, and I think he is. I was always there with that comfort level. I just thought he was brilliant, and a charm bomber. The combination is rare.

Yes, especially in Presidential politics. You wind up with people who fall flat on the charisma side or who don’t necessarily seem particularly sharp on other things. 

So you win. It’s November, and then you are not inaugurated until January. The transition is a critical period for the Presidency. Is there any interaction between—

[interruption]

I was asking you about the transition period, whether you had any observations of this period or whether the White House was contacting you. You’re a freshman member of Congress at this point. Do they try to bring you on board, or are they so busy wrapped up with their own things?

We were too. There were many new members who knew legislation, although that could be confusing because most of the legislation, when you’re in a legislative body, not the U.S. Congress, the parliamentary procedure is quite different. I started with CRS, Congressional Research Service, having Judy Schneider—

Yes, I took a class with her as well.

She’s amazing.

I think she retired.

She’s thinking of it, but she comes up here to talk. She is just a sketch. So she came in and I asked her if she could help me out. Then we had meetings and caucuses and it was such an intense period. We had to try to get on a committee and I really wanted to be on Energy and Commerce. We put together booklets. We did all this stuff. Hillary did come over to meet with the Women’s Caucus. I remember that very distinctly. I can tell you that I was being followed around by Lifetime for the first hundred days.

The TV station?

Yes. I have a copy of it if you’re interested in seeing it. I know that we didn’t have any meetings with the Clintons, but Hillary had a meeting with the Women’s Caucus. Everybody was just too busy trying to figure everything out in that interim period, besides being a bit of a wash with regard to what we had to do, which was so condensed. 

This is a period where the Clinton White House was notorious for having lots of conduits to Congress, perhaps too many. Things were not going through the Liaison office, but the Chief of Staff and different folks on the staff were going directly to the Hill, so there would have been lots of opportunities to be contacted by them or wooed in some kind of way. But it might be that they were working on the John Dingells of the world.

I think they were. And I think they also saw me as such a marginal seat. It was just one of those seats that they expected—

To not be around in ’94, no matter what?

I don’t think that they—it’s still pretty hard to lose a seat. I just know that they knew it was almost a fluke that I won. I don’t think I was on the radar screen. 

Any sense from that meeting with Hillary Clinton what she was trying to do at that meeting?

She was trying to kind of feel us out. She was listening. She talked about their interest in making sure that women were in the loop, not only members, but a lot of the issues. One of the things that they were very interested in making sure that passed was Family Medical Leave, so that was discussed. They were starting to discuss healthcare. That was put on the table. We did discuss the toughness of abortion. 

There were three Republican members in our new group who were pro-choice with reservations. We had talked a lot about that in the caucus beforehand because we wanted to be as inclusive as possible. The new members had gotten together. That’s all in the book. We decided to push for things. We talked a little bit about that. Sexual harassment, Family Medical Leave, the codification of Roe v. Wade—we talked about all of those things. That’s most of what I remember about it. Part of my remembering has to do with the fact that I was being followed around and the cameras weren’t permitted in. 

If you want to see the hour-long documentary that was done, it was one of those—Carrie Meek is so adorable—she was one of the other four people. It was Carrie Meek, me, Blanche [Lambert Lincoln] and Patty Murray. The question was asked of Carrie Meek, Everything is supposed to be transparent. One of the things you ran on was transparency. Are you actually going to go into that meeting? Heck, yes! Hillary Clinton is coming over here to visit us. I’m going into that meeting.—She’s so wonderful—Are you kidding me? The First Lady is coming over here. I’m going to go in there, yes. She was essentially saying, I don’t care about what you’re doing.

This is the early part where she’s much more actively involved in policy from the outside point of view. Does she come over to the House seeming as if she’s the policy liaison? Do you take her that way?

I think all of us, at the end of the meeting, were really impressed with how smart she was and how much she wanted to understand the issues. But that wasn’t new to any of us. We all knew that this was somebody who was a force. There was no resentment, nothing like that, saying, Who the heck does she think she is? It was much more, This is a very well-informed person, and isn’t it nice that she’s going to be there to make sure that some of the things that we’re interested in are represented. And in an unusual way, because some of the things that we were interested in were clearly— 

As a rookie member of Congress—

Boy, was I a rookie.

Do you hear rumors or anything about how the committee chairs and the power brokers in the House are responding to a Clinton administration? Or the Speakers? There must be something circulating, chattering in the halls?

Especially in the beginning it was just so hard getting into gear. I remember the challenge of figuring out the issues that you can put on your plate. I was on three committees. Energy and Commerce would have been enough.

Easily.

I can remember when [John, Jr.] Conyers came into my office and said, I want you on my committee.

Judiciary?

No, Government Ops. I didn’t know how to say no. First of all, I was flattered that he did it. But I also knew that it was going to be a real stretch to make it meaningful. I had to pick a second committee so I picked Small Business just because I thought it would be a good fit for my district. 

I was in and out of meetings and literally unable to stay for the whole meeting, which was ridiculous. It was so counterintuitive. I was on Telecommunications for obvious reasons. We were talking about a huge issue—the Spectrum. I wanted to study it, I really wanted to learn it, and I was barely getting to the three or four newspapers that I would usually read. 

They were trying to get to the chairs of the committees and everything like that. There was a sense of embracing. We were invited to things. I can remember going to the Christmas parties and things like that. We were invited to things at the White House, but there was never any sense that—they were working with the whips; they were doing it the normal way—the Dingells of the world, the chairs.

Were you included from the Democratic caucus? How open is the caucus at this period? Do you know what the strategy is, going forward as a freshman member of Congress, or is that something [Thomas] Foley keeps in his back pocket?

I honestly did not think that they had one. I mean, as smart as Foley was, we did not get a sense that there was a creative strategy—or whatever it was, we didn’t get that sense. 

Okay.

I think if you talked to any other freshman, he or she will tell you that.

Is it that Foley doesn’t have a strategy, or that Clinton doesn’t have a strategy, or neither?

There were meetings where we—there was a sense that they had to lay out for us the things that were most important. There were not—I don’t know how to say it. If you respect [Newton] Gingrich as a futurist, we didn’t have that kind of—there were no people in our orbit who were doing that. As smart as the people were—call them whatever you will—there were no futurists. There were no people there who were crafting the Contract. The Contract with America was total and utter nonsense. You just can’t do what they said they were going to do, but it was exactly what the public wanted to hear. It was exactly what the public wanted to hear. We didn’t have that. 

We had been there for 40 years. The sense was that we would be continuing. We now had a Democratic President. The sense was it was going to be there for a very long time. We absolutely did not—we were not prepared for what happened until it was way too late. We knew that there were smart people in the White House. We knew that Foley was a smart guy, but not able to pull his flanks in the same way the Republicans are always much more capable of pulling in their flanks. We were a much more disparate body, period. I don’t have to tell you this, because you know this.

It’s a problem with Democrats.

It’s a problem with Democrats. We looked more like the rest of the nation than the Republicans do and that makes us very independent. Then when you have districts that are carved out to be minority districts, it makes for a very under-represented system, a repulsively under-represented system. But they know they’re going to keep their seats. What it does is it really pulls away from any kind of—I’m not going to give you this lecture, because you know it.

It’s important to get that sense from you. Was it a problem that Foley couldn’t control the chairs of the committees? Obviously he doesn’t control them the way that Gingrich passes the reforms that he passes in ’94 and consolidates power in the Speakership.

It’s a combination of our not being—whatever word you want—as the Republicans are and likely will be. It’s a combination of the fact that if you look at those guys, there are three looks. I’m convinced that some of them don’t appear on the floor at the same time because they’re the same person. If you look at us, it’s much more of a motley crew. So part of it is that we are much more representative of the U.S., and part of it was because there wasn’t a sense—this is so much not the right word—there was not the kind of punitive sense that the Republicans chairs had. They knew that if they didn’t vote for something that was important, they would lose their chairmanship. Under no circumstances did that happen—as Democrats prided themselves on being independent.

 [interruption]

We were talking about your sense of the strategy of the House at this period, especially the early part. 

In all fairness to them, they may have been crafting an extraordinary strategy that I was unaware of. There was so much going on and I was on so many committees. I was seriously just trying to stay alive. This is not terribly interesting, but I had all the kids. We voted on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I was there Tuesday night and Wednesday night. I knew it would be so hard to hold on to this district, so I really worked it on the weekends. I was here five nights (in Montgomery County), usually, and I stayed there two. 

So you’re working desperately to do all the things you needed to do: constituency service, answer mail—

Yes. Well, I wasn’t doing that myself, but I was trying to organize the office so that it worked. We had the normal growing pains. We had people in the office who weren’t working out. We had the district office not agreeing with the Congressional. By and large we had a phenomenal office. I don’t know if you know who was in my office. Jake Tapper—do you know who he is? He’s now senior correspondent for ABC [American Broadcasting Corporation] News, Amy Walter, who is a regular on CNN. Our staff was absolutely great—when we lost, almost every Democratic office on the Hill had a hard time placing their people. Every one of my people got jobs. 

That’s great.

I had the best staff. I had a fabulous staff.

Did you get the sense at the early part that the Democrats on the Hill weren’t helping your case for reelection, or at least were making your job hard?

Ken Smukler felt that way.

This was your chief of staff?

He wasn’t really chief of staff, he kind of ran my campaign. He was our major consultant. I didn’t. I thought that that was the way it worked. We were a freshman member from a marginal district, fairly progressive, although I think we spend too much, way too much, which was the reason why I ultimately voted for the— 

Let me talk to you about something that did happen. I would like to figure out how I can straighten it out. I don’t think that I am even a footnote in history, period. Our campaign didn’t work. It is one of those things that happens. But I absolutely never said that I would never raise taxes. I never said that. As a matter of fact, when I was asked, I always dealt with it this way. I was asked all the time, Would you sign a pledge to never raise taxes? I would say, No. I would say, I’m not going to be a ‘read-my-lips’ candidate, because we do not know. I don’t know enough about it. You’re sending me down there as somebody who is an outsider. I do not know enough about taxes and what will be the problems we face. Suppose we have a disaster or a war? I said it that way every single time. 

However, our ad against Jon Fox was that he had said that he would never raise taxes and we found fourteen different votes that he made that were raising taxes. So that was our ad. There was no way that we could identify who we were. It just wasn’t going to happen. But we could slam him. Our polls showed that the only way we could win was to slam Jon.

That’s usually how you beat an incumbent.

He wasn’t an incumbent but the prohibitive favorite. The only way to do it was to slam him. Our commercial was, He’s raised taxes. He says he hasn’t. I never said that I wouldn’t raise taxes. But when the vote came, the 30-second commercial against me was, She broke her promise. She’s a liar. It just never happened.

So you think that they just drew an inference from your commercials?

Right, or they just said something that wasn’t true. It’s the one thing that I really regret. A book just came out with women in Congress. See that huge book on the bottom shelf? They’ve got it wrong. Textbooks that refer to the vote say, She promised never to raise taxes. I just never promised. It wasn’t a thing I did.

What’s fascinating about the story leading up to you being the decisive vote is—it’s mercurial—people can tell the story and draw the meaning that they want to draw out of it. Ah, here’s an example of somebody who was a bad representative for voting against her district and look what happens to them, or, Here’s someone who voted her conscience and actually was the key vote that led to ten years of growth. It’s a perfect political story.

Yes—I’m sorry I’m in the middle of it, but the thing had to pass. Everybody did it. [Robert] Michel stood up on the floor that day and said, We know that this has to pass. Read his speech. When I walked in that night they (the Republicans) were high-fiving. I was so mad. I was watching the vote. Democrats were behind me and they were saying they were going to change their votes. I said, What, are you crazy? We’re not going to get anything done for five months if this happens. Are you guys nuts? There was such a spinelessness there.

But Bob Michel votes against it.

Oh yes, he stood up and said, We know darn well this has to pass. We’re not going to vote for it, but it has to pass. What is that? I was so sad for my country. Really, I felt so bad for everyone. Another thing that was reported incorrectly was I did not call him. I was told that he thought I called him because there were so many calls being made simultaneously.

The President?

Yes, the President thought I called him, but it was all this stuff going back and forth. People were saying, Oh God, who can we talk to? I got on the phone and he said, What would it take?

This is in the cloakroom?

Yes.

There’s one version of the story, and I could have read this on Wikipedia for all I know, that claims that you had told them earlier than that, If you really need me, I’ll vote for it.

No. Earlier in the night they all came to me and I said, I know how important this is but you’re nuts to come to me. It was that kind of conversation. Then I stood outside. There’s a picture of Kenny [Smukler] and me and Amy Sobel standing there. I said to them, I think we’ve got to vote for it, and both of them said, You’re crazy. They can find somebody else. I said, I hope they can, but I’m getting the feeling that it might be awfully close. I used a couple of inappropriate invectives. We’re talking about people who want to stay here. So that was it.

Had you given any—

All day long.

You must have gone through this in your mind. Why are they picking me? Had you given any signal that you didn’t care whether you stayed or left?

No, none. But it was back to what I’m saying. Nobody much cared, they just wanted the damn thing to pass. In that slice—it used to take 16 pictures to make one second of film—on that slice, that one-sixteenth of the pie, all they cared about at that time was passing that piece of legislation. They didn’t care whose heads rolled. They gave lip service to the fact that, We don’t want you to go down on this, but by and large they just cared that by the end of the day this darn thing passed. I could understand that. I totally understand it. It was just a headcount thing. I had said no all along.

And you voted against it, the first bill in April.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █  

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █

Did you get the sense at the time that they were basically calling everybody and they got through to you, or did they have a very short list of people that they were working on?

I think what nature does is it protects you from remembering very bad accidents, and voting at 218. It was just like a very bad, head-on collision for me. It was so dramatic, it was so awful. They had to find an office for me. It was so unpleasant. It was absolutely one of the most unpleasant days of my life. In order to get me out of some of these community meetings in the district there had to be police. It was just so ugly.

Your constituency hit back very quickly.

Right, 1.2 percent of the population faced tax increases and they all lived in my district. Nobody else in any other district in the entire United States was going to be hit by these tax increases, according to the polls in my district.

This is sort of the more representation side—

Clinton knew. I’ll never forget what he said. This is the 14th wealthiest district in the country. I didn’t even know that. I knew we were wealthy; it was a very fancy district. What happened, interestingly, was in ’82 there had been a ratcheting of the tax code that came online in ’92, which reduced refunds in some manner. So what happened is it appeared as if people were being taxed, getting less back in returns, when in fact they weren’t. The feeling in a very wealthy district was that immediately—there was no way that that happened that quickly. People were walking up to me and saying, I didn’t get anywhere near what I should be getting back because of your vote. It had nothing to do with that.

So things triggered, just bad timing?

It was really bad timing.

Which is how taxes are normally raised, right? I’ll raise taxes today and it won’t take effect until 20 years and by that point you’ll forget about it.

Or it will roll in, or something like that. It was a Bush (41)—it was done at the same time that more was taken out of the check for—payroll was increased. It was so complicated. 

So the immediate aftermath is not abstract. You’re feeling it very directly—nastiness from the constituency.

There was huge nastiness. I remember going to a meeting—I had lots of them afterwards. My explanation was four minutes and it was good. Their hit on me was 30 seconds and it was better. But when I explained it, people understood. They were very good. There was always a lot of press. There were kids on the floor doing posters that said Liar. I remember the kids because I would talk to them. They were not from the district. I remember that, as I passed them, one of the kids looked up and said, Is she a Republican or a Democrat? They had no idea.

So they’d brought in a hit squad, basically.

Yes. They had no idea who I was, or what had happened. There were lots of people in the audience. It was interesting. A guy raised his hand and said—it was a question that had been given to him because he was stuttering all over it. Did I send you down there to represent me or did I send you down there to lead? I want you to represent me. I was so tired. I happen to be a bit exophthalmic, and I said, That’s exactly what I’m talking about! There were only two seconds of that, but that’s what they ran on television. My kids said to me, You looked certifiable. You looked wacky. It was interesting. But that’s what happened. I would have loved to have run the race against me.

Was it almost like a Howard Dean moment—the video?

Not quite as dramatic. I said, That’s exactly what I’m talking about! That was it. You’re sent down there to lead, in fact. In many cases you are able to represent, but the real reason you’re sent down there is to create some serious leadership for the people whom you represent. But the first thing I said was, That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I just looked like such an idiot on that one—and they played it over and over and over again. 

So is there a point in time when you basically know you’re not going to come back after ’94?

No, I thought I could pull it off. I thought we ran a really good race. I thought there was a chance, and I didn’t lose by a lot. I thought I could pull it off. I knew it was going to be a really tough race. I had no idea that the Contract would have the sticking power that it did. I didn’t know it was going to be the kind of tipping point that it was. It never entered my mind that people would be so gullible, frankly. 

I think that’s the point at which everyone understood, first of all, how incredibly divisive—people know that negative advertising works. You walk into any kind of control group, any kind of focus group, and everybody says the same thing: I hate negative advertising. You throw out negative advertising and you re-poll them at the end and it works. It just works. This was an easy one. I had made myself an easy target. 

After this vote happens—this is early. You’ve only been in the House for eight months, right? This is August of ’93. You have NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] coming right after that. How does the White House—my guess is that they want your vote on NAFTA as well.

At that point I was just written off. I don’t know. They didn’t come after me hard for anything after that. They knew that I was trying to figure out what the rest of the term would look like.

I didn’t know whether they were maybe feeding you opportunities to get back on the good side with your district. My guess is that a NAFTA vote would—most of the Democrats voted against it. They built a coalition with Republicans—that your vote would sort of help you get back in good graces with your district. 

The one thing that I learned when I was down there was that these pieces of legislation were so non-item specific, even NAFTA, that you could debate on either side, convincingly. There were parts of NAFTA that I agreed with and parts of NAFTA that I didn’t agree with. But if the question is, was I given a bye on anything? No, I wasn’t. If they had called me and said, We really do need your vote— 

Again?

I would say, I’ve given at the office. They knew how tough it was.

What about other things that they could do for you? Did they open up projects or other things that you could bring to your district as one way of trying to secure the election?

We wanted to bring a transportation project that had to do with transportation from the city to the suburbs, and [Thomas] Foglietta killed it. He said to me—it was a really extraordinarily thoughtless answer—We just don’t want people moving out. We don’t want commuters leaving the city, going out to suburbs. I said, You’ve got to be kidding. It was a modest amount, several million. No, there wasn’t that sense.

This is sort of pre-the period where earmarks become big? They take off maybe in ’94, after you’re gone. Gingrich sort of opens up the bank. Yours would have been a case that, if I was the Speaker of the House—

Exactly.

Let’s give her anything she wants. 

It wasn’t happening then. I was so conscious of not wanting to be there. I really think that we overspend. To say, Pork is bad, except if it comes to my district, is an outrage, as a base closing commission. Absolutely, we’ll agree with it, except if it is in my district. It’s so irresponsible. That’s what we do. People say, Throw the bums out, just not my bum. It’s the irresponsible mess of the system. 

Now, I still think that we have a really good country and I understand the fundamental that we’re here to make sure that bad laws are not passed. But it is still quite amazing to me that our representatives are not as responsible as they should be with regard to, especially, spending. That was my whole thing. 

One of the arguments that I thought would be very salient—regards to the vote—was that this was really as much a [Alan] Greenspan bill as anything else. If we’re starting to tackle deficits, good for us. I don’t know if you remember what happened quite a few years later when Clinton said that he thought he had raised taxes too much?

No, I missed that.

You have to look that up. It’s my personal favorite. I am a believer that he was a really good President. I never will be interested in dissing him. But he did say, I think I raised taxes too high. There was a big hullabaloo—I forget exactly which year it was. The Wall Street Journal called me.

Now you figure this out?

It was front page, and my quote was, Oh, my. That’s all. It was the only thing that I could think of that was not going to be something negative when I really respect him so much. That was my quote. They said to me, When did you first read it? I remembered exactly. I was on the treadmill and it was on page 17 of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I went, You’ve got to be kidding me! Yikes! I didn’t quite say that to the Wall Street Journal. I said, I was on the treadmill and I was reading it. They said, What was your response? Then of course his quote became front page. I said, My response was, ‘Oh, my.’ That was the quote. That was it. The deciding vote on this piece of legislation, and Marjorie Margolies said, Oh, my. 

This must have been leading up to the ’96 election?

No, no, it was way later. It may have been in ’98 or ’99, well after that. Hillary said, as did Bill, that he had woven that into speeches for a long time, but somebody had pulled it out, noticed it, and it became a headline. I had never heard it from him.

Fascinating. 

That’s what I felt too.

There was a lot of chatter about the fact that there was the BTU tax in initially and the House takes a tough vote on it and then the Senate balks at it.

And if they were going to raise the across-the-board tax from—4.6 percent?

I can’t remember the details.

They were thinking of raising it two percentage points, whatever it was. They said that if it went from 4.6 to 4.8—I’m getting the numbers confused—they would have lost another six votes. They were shaving at the margins at that point. The votes were going down for the most extraordinarily—I didn’t say I’d vote against it, but I said I was against across-the-board tax increases because it really did hit the wrong people in the wrong pocket. I said that often. I didn’t say I would not do it, but I said I was against them. It was across the board, but it didn’t have shelf life and everybody knew it didn’t have shelf life. It’s an easy conversation to have. Across-the-board—nobody remembers that I said that. But it didn’t have shelf life, as well you know. 

One of the things that you mention in your book is that, if that vote didn’t go through, the Clinton Presidency would have been basically stopped in its tracks. 

I thought it would have been. For 44 months it would have been a lame-duck Presidency—or an extremely challenging one. 

Why? You have a Democratic House and Democratic Senate. Why would the Presidency—part of the question is is why did you think that the vote was that urgent at that point and that it couldn’t survive?

It was a Presidency that needed momentum, and this was the linchpin of the Presidency. My feeling was if it was stopped, and it would have been, if it was stopped dead in its tracks and the bill had to be re-written, I didn’t think it would come out any better or any different, frankly. The momentum would have died down. 

I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know if that was true or not. But it was what most people who I thought were thoughtful were saying. It was what a lot of the columnists were saying, and a lot of people in my office and beyond whom I respected. This was such an essential budget. It would have been so hard to recover from something like this. In fact, the midterms showed how weak—how much the respect for this administration would—if what they were basing their whole approach, movement, sense of responsibility, deficit reduction—didn’t pass, I really just thought he would have been a lame duck. 

Now, having watched him in action, I think he is the kind of person who can catch the bullet in his teeth. There are very few people who were capable of doing that. The things he was able to live through would have felled most Presidents. But, at the time, that was the way I felt. 

One of the hallmarks of the way that political scientists think about Congress, especially majority power, is that the whole point of majority power is to not have to take votes you’ll lose. You get agenda-setting power, you get to make the rules, you get to do all these sorts of things, so one of the things that is mysterious about this vote is why not just tweak it a little bit so you get 230 votes and you have no trouble with it?

I’ve asked myself the same question a hundred times. These votes are so hard to read. You remember the Congressmen who were angry with him for some reason, for some arcane—He’s not going to get my vote on that. Then the Republicans—there was such partisanship. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought, This is just silly. We’re holding up a nation. It didn’t make any sense to me. I just was not a good politician. 

I was mentioning your interview yesterday to the folks I was staying with, and when I told them the story of how it comes down to your vote and then Al Gore has to break the tie in the Senate, their response was, Why did it have to be that close?

Oh, yes.

Also, the sequence is that you vote first and then the Senate votes the next day, I think.

Right. I don’t think it was quite that close, but yes.

Maybe a day or so?

Yes.

Bob Kerrey is supposedly on the fence the entire time and uncommitted. Do you have any knowledge that this isn’t just going to be for nothing, that the Senate would actually pass this thing?

I assumed that the Senate would. I assumed that the Senate would be the easier body. But then again, I didn’t have my Ph.D.

Since Foley is no longer Speaker at that point—Gingrich has a very different structure and style, in that they bring up almost no vote that they don’t have solid majority.

I rest my case. The fact of the matter is that’s the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The essential difference is they know how to pull in their flanks and we often don’t.

Let me move to your experiences on Energy and Commerce. This is clearly a plum assignment for a rookie member of Congress. Most people fight their entire period trying to get on this committee and you get it right off the bat. How did that work? How did you get onto the committee? Was there any interference from the White House on this, or is this inside the House?

I don’t know. I don’t think that they had anything to do with it. I asked to be on it. We actually put together a book, kind of a presentation for them with what I thought I brought to it. I don’t know if I still have a copy of it. A couple of us got on. You’re right, everybody was posturing from other committees to try to get on. I don’t know how many freshmen got on. I don’t know why. 

The argument was in our Pennsylvania caucus. Ron Klink, somebody I’m really friendly with now, his argument was, Why don’t we put somebody on who has a seat that he/she can hold? She’s going to lose. It’s such a marginal seat. I was so angry. First of all, it was way before the vote or anything like that. I said, Ron, wait a minute. I’m going to try and hold onto that seat. Everybody kind of laughed. 

In the caucus the feeling was, Why don’t we put her in a place that will give her something to show that she’s strong with her district? I don’t think that that necessarily had anything to do with the ultimate decision. They interviewed people. 

You interviewed with Dingell?

No, no, it was with the Democratic leadership. I remember walking in, thinking, This is like sorority rush.

High school hazing?

I told them why I thought I should be on it. It was actually a good placement because I had done a lot with healthcare and I had done a lot with television and telecommunications. So it wasn’t a bad placement, but still it was a lucky thing to happen. 

Do you have any fingerprints on the Telecommunications Act of ’96? Did they start working on that at that period?

A little. Yes, we started to work on it then. There were a lot of conversations about it. I’m sure if you read the internal records from the committee there were lots of opinions that I had that may have been incorporated into the legislation, but I wouldn’t know.

Obviously the biggest thing that happens—this is ’94—healthcare doesn’t get out of committee.

To say the least.

Can you give us the inside story of what was happening there and why it fails?

I think, and the Clintons will tell you this too, that it was way too detailed. Rightly or wrongly, the feeling was that it was something that was being imposed, as opposed to being something that was framed and then the Congress could work together with the White House. I didn’t actually mind the way they handled a lot of these things because it was such a complex issue. They had to break it into these different parts and everybody wanted to be a part. At some point somebody had to say, Let’s try to do it this way. Ira Magaziner, who was brilliant, and Hillary did what they thought was best at the time, and they learned a huge amount from it. It was just that Congress thought it was—I wouldn’t know if the word is arrogant, but Congress thought that it was something that was being imposed on them, as opposed to presented. [interruption]

After we lost, there was this extraordinary kind of head-spinning. It was actually a very sad time, very sad. We were called into the White House in groups, because there were lots of us. I’m looking at my notes from the meeting in the White House. I was called in with [George] Buddy Darden, Butler Derrick [Jr.], Dick Swett, the architect, Steve Smith. [Leon] Panetta was there, Karen English, who was just a darling person, Ted Strickland, [Peter] Barca, [John] Reed, [William] Sarpalius, and I know that [Daniel Rostenkowski] Rosty was there. There were quite a few. There were several people standing. [David] Price was there—

Who made it back, eventually.

Yes. At the table with all of us who lost were—I believe it was Clinton, Gore, and somebody else. I don’t have that written down. It was a very interesting meeting. People were trying to be super polite because they knew how really dramatically affected the White House was, and how much they were touched. There were all different kinds of thanks. My notes say, This is such a bizarre year. I’m going to try to read from my notes, but some of this may not make sense.

The conclusion was, and I think this was from the President, that we lost the propaganda war. He said, Never in my life has perception been so at variance with evidence. And, You should always be proud of what you did. It’s cold comfort in the fullness of time. What we did will be vindicated. He just said that we couldn’t market what we did, and that so much of what we did is in trust at the bank. He thinks that talk radio had a lot to do with it. Gore looked at me and said, You’d be good at that. 

Butler Derrick said that he really regretted that what went on had to happen on our watch. His conclusion was that people just didn’t like government and it happened on our watch, and that we were willing to focus on issues but people weren’t willing to listen to that. He suggested to Clinton that he focus on one or two issues—that, as the spokesman for the Democratic Party, You have to make the message simple, which is what the Republicans did with regard to the Contract. Don’t try to out-Republican the Republicans. It was the feeling in the room that one of the reasons we lost is because we were trying to be more Republican than the Republicans. I didn’t necessarily feel that way but that was one of the feelings in the room.

This was probably before people know that Dick Morris is talking to him on the side.

It’s hard to tell the public what’s right. I started to talk about that, that the real challenge is being honest, especially with people who have what they think is much more at stake. My favorite call ever in my office was when somebody called and said, When is the government going to get out of my Medicare? [whispering] When we don’t have any more.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

I think it was Butler who said, I appreciate your being my President; some of my constituents don’t. The President then said under his breath, Most of them don’t. He was feeling the heat at that point. Buddy Darden said, You stood up for what you believed, and the crowd you’re dealing with wants to destroy you. Derrick said: Don’t worry about Smith. Write them off. We are southerners and we don’t like a southern President. Price said, It has shaken some of my confidence. I did a job and I served my constituency, and their vote was right. He got caught in that. Al Gore talked about, a raging moderate. Price said he was really caught in having turnout from the wrong places. We behaved as centrists and it didn’t work. In other words, they’re going back to the theme that we’re trying to be like Republicans and we shouldn’t be. 

Clinton said, There is no time for victory laps. I’m not so sure that what he was referring to was that there’s no time for victory laps because, We can’t give them time. We are very vulnerable to talk radio…the worst of both worlds. He said the best members lost, future-oriented, mainstream—this is what I was talking about with regard to people who were futurists. What bothers me is ’92 saw a huge change and in the end the real shifts that we were aiming for just didn’t happen. Price said, It’s hard to energize core constituencies. 

[reading notes] I think P is Panetta. I’m not sure. I did such a bad job. I should have immediately transcribed this when I got back but I didn’t. I have two things that Panetta said: We didn’t know that it was happening, and, We weren’t able to resist or we didn’t resist. We should be talking about economic growth. We should be talking about people feeling anxiety, but understanding that eventually these things are going to straighten themselves out. He said what happened was this kind of personal insecurity, not the security that we talk about now, but economic insecurity. The Republicans are better at the politics of resentment. That’s what he said. 

[George] Hochbrueckner said, We were here to do what’s right. Consider running again. We were tagged as the party of big government. That was the theme, that they tagged us as the party of big government. We didn’t come back with anything. We should be doing more press conferences using his charts. Hochbrueckner again: Stress what the Democrats accomplished. 

Rosty: In my district I lost the election. I was beaten over the head for two years. The country doesn’t want to be governed, they just want to bitch….You were my ninth President. I have never seen such service. People have no idea how much service you’ve given. They only give excuses. 

With RR—I don’t know what that means. [Inaudible] lower the top margin rate. Congress doesn’t know what they want to do. Tug, pull. Republicans lean back and let it happen. Oh, we were tugging and pulling. Republicans just lean back. They play for tomorrow’s headlines, tonight’s news. People just don’t like government so they’re going to change the party. Welfare was a big issue and they revised it in the eye of the beholder.

Democrats….No one admires more with you more than me. I don’t know what that means. Don’t know his ass from third base. Lazy, all they do is they’re negative and they beef. I don’t know what that is. I was writing all too fast. 

Karen English, whom I love, said I lost, but I don’t want to over-analyze. I lost the grass roots. She said, You use the same tactics as the Christian Coalition, as the NRA [National Rifle Association]. Implement the plan that they had. Everyone likes to hear themselves talk. She stood up in our caucus and said the real shame would have been had I not made those votes. She was fabulous. Now, she won because—it’s in the book—Barry Goldwater called and said that her opponent was misrepresenting him and that he would like to support her. She won, but it was a very marginal district, also.

Ted Strickland: My wife and I said that, if reelected, I want to spend the next two years defending you. The Democrats believe in a lot of good things, not all of equal importance. Ted Strickland said that he was up by 20 points three weeks out and he lost by less than 1 percent of the vote. Everyone in the room said it was the same thing. It was that they got their message clear. The Contract was what people wanted to hear. We were stunned that people would believe it. It was part of the zeitgeist. We must look at what the Christian Coalition did. That was the whole feeling. I’m a Methodist minister, he said. I worked in an orphanage for eight years. I put my best thinking together. You have the ability to inspire people. You can save us, inspire us. [Ed. note: He was ordained at Asbury Theological Seminary.]

In most of these stories what’s interesting is that, granted, they might be being polite, but there’s a sense that it’s the Republicans who won, not the Democrats who lost. A lot of people see this period of time as—you had all three branches of government and you couldn’t get healthcare through.

Oh yes, no question about it. These people were being very polite. I walked away feeling that we were being a bit disingenuous, but I walked away feeling like everyone was so down and so hurt, and we knew that the White House was hurt, that nobody wanted to rub salt in the wounds. So as opposed to saying, For crying out loud, we had all three branches, we had the White House, we had a real chance to make some important decisions and this is what we did wrong, it was a feeling of, We let them win. And I think to a certain extent that’s true. 

Peter Barca: Angels in heaven decided we’d be back. I’m mad as hell that Newt Gingrich is going to be the Speaker. Then he said, I walked out with my head hanging high.

Swett is Thomas] Lantos’ son-in-law. Lantos is a Holocaust survivor. He has eight or nine kids. Swett said, We have to hold our fights behind closed doors. 

Clinton: Oh, the weapons ban. It’s a fundamental fact that the majority feels oppressed, and they don’t care about the debt.

That’s down the road, that’s future.

Right. Reed said, Chapel Hill speech, best of many good ones you’ve given. It is referring to the Clinton Chapel Hill speech. It is just sticking people on what they need to hear. That was also something that was repeated and I keep repeating it. People need to know what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. That was kind of a theme in that meeting. 

Sarpalius said, It’s an honor to work for you. You’re an excellent speaker, this is to the President. You should have more press conferences. Lyndon Johnson ran for President and won every county in Texas but one, and the next day he closed the Air base there. 

That was also a feeling in there that, how can these leaders in our party not vote for what we need them to vote for? They’re not—not this punitive thing. It was something that all of us kind of smiled at, because what he was saying was that you’ve got to—the carrot and the stick—there are too many carrots here. We’re all committed to helping you. We believe in you. Please don’t forget us. Call on us. That’s what Sarpalius said.

I don’t know whether or not this is helpful. 

It’s useful to see how people are interpreting this end, at least for them, in this election, and how a President makes sense out of such a significant setback. 

What would this be? If you made a mistake, it was underestimating Rush. Rush Limbaugh? 

You were saying that he was fearful of talk radio.

If he made a mistake it was identifying Rush. Are you going to be psychologically responsible? This is Rosty saying, I liked Jimmy Carter. He brought me in every other Tuesday for four years. But my grandchildren are going to say, ‘Who the hell is Jimmy Carter?’ They’re not going to say, ‘Who the hell is Bill Clinton?’

So you think Rosty had a good relationship with Clinton?

I don’t know. He seemed to in that room. I had to fight to get beat. I’m swinging from the rafters to get beat. Be physically responsible. I don’t know what that is. Anyway, those are my notes. I wish that after it, I had been more—what does it say here? Oh, Rosty was talking about Reagan and he said to Clinton, I just didn’t think you were that good an actor. I wish I had been more vigilant. I’d love to get some of those people together and see what they remember about that meeting. I don’t think it was an easy meeting for Clinton.

Sure, having all these people in the room that to some degree lost because of actions he made.

Most people in the room certainly would not have said it, but they partially blamed the leadership.

One last question and then we’ll let you get out of here.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to call me. 

People who were actually still in the House after the election in November. Is there another session where you’re actually in contact with many other member of Congress between that and the new session?

You mean when we came back after we lost?

Yes.

Yes, but it’s a weird funny time. Everybody is kind of saying, Sorry you lost.

Is there any growing consensus that explains, from the Democratic leadership, what happened in ’94?

I don’t think they understood. I think they needed time. There was this kind of anamnestic response. Do you know what an anamnestic response is?

A little bit.

It’s when the bee bites you for the first time and nothing happens and then the bee bites you for the second time and you have to be taken to the hospital because you swell up. But nothing would have happened had the bee not bitten you for the first time. The anamnestic response was, Yes, we know what happened. They created something. The public heard what they wanted to hear. We had been there for 40 years. Now we can balance the budget, we can spend more on the military, we can give you back your tax dollars, and we can do it all on waste, fraud and abuse. It’s baloney.

So the first response was, It’s very simple. This is what happened. Rush Limbaugh, talk radio. Then when we took it apart and looked at it, it became very clear that the undertow was strong. It was much of the conversation that we had here today. It was fairly widespread. It was our not having that message, our not using how strong we were, our not stressing that our economy was going in the right direction and that we had actually started it. We then gave it to the Republicans. To this day they say that we had a surplus at the end of the century because Republicans were in charge in the House—it is just appalling to me. We’ve never stood up and said— [phone interruption] 

We should probably close it at that.

I don’t know if I gave you what you needed.

Part of it is just getting, in your words, what happened, rather than having journalists’ reports or other people’s reports.

The only thing I feel so bad about is that people think that I actually promised that I would never do it, that I lied and I broke my promise. I never did. I was quite clear, as I stood on the floor of the House, that I had never made a promise that I wouldn’t raise taxes; never, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I said it over and over and over again, I’m not going to be a ‘read-my-lips’ candidate. I think that’s the wrong thing to do. I said it over and over again, but it didn’t resonate. It is so indicative of what people wanted to hear and didn’t want to hear.