THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE is more spectacularly “on-message” than any administration in memory. For example, every single person working there, from economist Gene Sperling down to the lowliest receptionist, has exactly the same worry about Bob Dole’s proposed 15 percent tax cut: It will “blow a 500-billion-dollar hole in the deficit.” Not “create a gap.” Not “open a shortfall.” Nope . . . “blow a hole.” And if you are wondering what the election is about, you can be sure that whether the speaker is George Stephanopoulos or Ann Lewis, the answer will be the same: “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Community.”
If this sort of thing is worthy of praise, then much of it must go to communications director Don Baer, the former political correspondent who was hired away from U.S. News & World Report to serve as director of speechwriting. He has held the top communications post for the past year. A lanky North Carolinian, with thinning hair and gold-rimmed glasses, Baer occupies a windowless and much-visited office in the West Wing. While Baer describes his job as “using all the tools of the presidency to convey the message,” his White House co-workers say the job goes further than that.
“Obviously he’s a very good communications director in terms of crafting a message that has a beat you can dance to,” says Tony Snow, a Baer predecessor as speechwriting chief in the Bush administration. “Even when the president is flip-flopping on issues, it looks natural. The Clintons are almost pathologically on-message. There’s not the hemming and hawing that you have in the Dole campaign, or had in the Bush White House. It’s working.”
Baer spends about a third of his time working on speeches (he wrote two of the president’s best-received addresses, one the Nixon eulogy and the other a Noonanesque tribute to the fallen at Normandy) and vets all presidential pronouncements written by White House staff. He was also instrumental in working what may have been the first bridge metaphor of 1996 (as in “bridge to the twenty-first century”) into a July 4 speech in Youngstown, Ohio. He’s in charge of sending internal talking points (as in “blow a hole in the deficit”) around the administration to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
But influential as Baer’s rhetoric is, he’s not merely a scribbler. One White House aide calls Baer “the Gil Favor of the White House message” (after the trail boss in Rawhide). “He’s involved in every aspect of governing. Is an idea ready? Is a speech ready? How do you look at the week? He truly drives this thing.” Many in the White House credit Baer with being among the first to recommend stripping Clinton’s agenda down to two things — the budget and Bosnia — during the government shutdowns last winter, a turning point in presidential discipline. Baer is also deeply involved in policy debates within the West Wing, associates say, and exercises a lot of sway over how ideas will be framed. If an idea can’t be sold, it won’t be put on the table. His is a style that seamlessly meshes policy initiatives and communications themes into a single style of governing. The in-party always claims it brings voters into the political debate. The out-party always calls it “the permanent campaign.” But it’s not new, and whatever it is, Baer has quickly mastered it.
He is also a reflection of Clinton’s move to the center; his very hiring two years ago, in which he was layered over other more liberal and more senior writers, indicated a shift in strategy at the White House. In the past year, he was tagged as the inside man for Dick Morris’s “values strategy.” When the weekly evening “Charlie meetings” (after Morris’s code name), held in the Yellow Oval Room in the White House residence, were broadened beyond Clinton and Morris, Baer was one of the first trusted staffers admitted to them. Baer was likewise a key participant in the midweek “Message Meeting” that Leon Panetta set up as a competing venue after Clinton’s balanced-budget declaration in June 1995. (Morris eventually took that meeting over as well.)
Baer thinks Morris’s primary contribution was to highlight ideas and proposals Clinton already had. In a strictly rhetorical sense, he’s right: Clinton gave a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in 1991 that featured the same themes as his 1996 convention address. It was Baer, together with policy aide Bruce Reed, who resurrected the “Opportunity — Responsibility-Community” triad from that 1991 speech. They first used it, glancingly, in the 1995 State of the Union and, con bravura, in Chicago three weeks ago.
But Clinton has given speeches on every side of every issue, and Morris did more than pull out the best tropes: He kept Clinton himself on-message and effected a historic rightward shift. With Morris gone, many inside and outside the White House think Baer could provide the missing “Morris influence.” Baer likes to say, “I’m just a translator.” He was responsible for conveying the essence of Clinton/Morris to writers and mid-level policy staff. And he did it in a way that earned him the high Washington compliment of “honest broker.” That ability to stay at one remove has kept him popular at the White House even in the wake of the tumult over Morris. (Baer and Morris have not communicated since the latter’s resignation.)
His popularity has another source. White House aides say there’s a division of labor by which Baer (along with Reed and other policy thinkers) is responsible for crafting a “positive” message, while Stephanopoulos and Rahm Emanuel, who head the “rapid-response teams,” are in charge of the negativism.
Baer is not like those revolving-door types who moan about politics and describe themselves as “really a journalist.” No: He likes this. He was a teenage Democrat, and one of his early post-college jobs was helping implement an affirmative-action program at the University of North Carolina, which was still under a court order to desegregate. (His own view of affirmative action is, “Mend it, don’t end it.” Hey, didn’t Bill Clinton say something just like that?) After four years of practicing law in New York, he was hired at the Washington-based weekly Legal Times. Two years later he was at U.S. News. By the time he left the magazine, he was editing its Outlook section.
“It didn’t surprise me at all that he was categorized as being in the Morris camp,” says a colleague from U.S. News. “There was something . . . both centrist and pragmatist about him. Most people working for him wouldn’t have been able to identify his politics. To a fault, he’s more interested in the process of politics than in any ideology: Who’s getting screwed by whom, . . . how this pointed up the hypocrisy of this person’s position. It didn’t matter whose hypocrisy that was — Republicans’ or Democrats’.”
Baer has an affinity with Clinton. While he had connections with the Clinton White House — he had worked with David Gergen at U.S. News and befriended Mark Gearan, his predecessor as communications director, during the 1988 Dukakis campaign — he was not a Gergen protege, and if anyone was most instrumental in bringing him on board, it was the president himself. Clinton liked the articles Baer contributed to U.S. News during the 1992 campaign. While other journalists — David Shribman of the Wall Street Journal, Joe Klein of New York, Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times — Ignored the more sensational aspects of the campaign for enthusiastic grapplings with “Clintonism,” Baer wrote with extreme empathy about Clinton’s background.
“I think it’s a southern thing,” says one of Baer’s journalist colleagues, who also knows Clinton. “Being of the South and still being rooted there, yet being driven and ambitious enough to prove oneself in the larger world — the two of them have a lot in common.” While Baer has always been a loyal Democrat, he’s not necessarily a liberal. Like Clinton, he has an idiosyncratic, instinctive, generally progressive politics that winds up at beyond-left-and-rightism. This enthusiasm can appear like ideological non- commitment or caginess. One New Democrat who met Baer at a dinner last year described him as “bland beyond decscription, a fount of cliches. ‘Clinton was the moral leader of the Universe,’ and all that.” But that’s only to echo the complaint adversaries make about the administration itself. Baer is, several people interviewed for this article said, “the ultimate Clinton Democrat.”
by Christopher Caldwell
