All Too Human: A Political Education by George Stephanopoulos

and policy, briefing Clinton before interviews on likely questions and the reporter's angle, checking in with our consultants back in Washington, reading newspapers, magazines, and policy journals for news books and new facts to freshen the stump speech. When Clinton spoke, I took notes — partly so I could help explain his thinking and point out his best lines to the press, partly to help remind Clinton which riffs were especially effective. I was there to hear what worked and to help whittle away what didn't. On the plane, I tried to absorb the thoughts he revealed in snatches of conversation between catnaps and countless hands of hearts. Each hand was a tutorial: Either he was reaching across the table to teach me how to pass the cards, or leaning back into his headrest with a meditation on, say, the right way to confront David Duke: “You can't question his being born-again. … We Southerners believe in deathbed conversions. … Just say we can't go back to the days when his kind of thinking held us all back.”
    On a late Friday night in November, Clinton expounded on that theme before his largest campaign audience yet — at the Church of God in Christ convention, in Memphis. Clinton was flying in from New Hampshire, but I had spent the week in headquarters and was missing the road. With Memphis only a couple of hours away, David Wilhelm and I decided to take a drive.
    Entering the convention, I was struck by the sensation of never having been in a room like this before. David and I were about the only white faces in a crowd of men in immaculate suits and women in elaborate hats. Stray organ chords drifted over the murmurs of the congregation. The arena was alive with expectation, fellowship, spirituality, and a sense of fun — somewhere between a Sunday service and a rock concert.
    But if I was at sea, Clinton was at home. He knew this place and its people, had prayed with them in tiny churches on the back roads of Arkansas. Here, too, he had made it his business to know who they were and what they cared about. If Chicago had been politics as theater, this was politics as liturgy.
    He entered the hall, a lone white man surrounded by a cluster of black clergymen, looking like a heavyweight with his cornermen before being called into the ring. He was staring straight ahead, almost in a trance, oblivious to the crowd. I would soon learn the meaning of that look: Clinton was composing his speech.
    As he moved toward the stage, I sat on a concrete step in the aisle, ready to be carried away. This was my guy, and I wanted him to succeed — especially here, in front of an African American audience, where he could preach his message of drawing black and white workers together in common cause. Just like Bobby Kennedy had tried to do before an assassin's bullet struck him down. Then came court-ordered busing, urban decay, the Democrats' drift toward identity politics, and a generation of Republican candidates from Nixon to Bush whose winning formula was crime, quotas, and welfare queens. By 1991, RFK's “black and blue” coalition was a distant memory.
    Maybe Clinton could put it back together. That was his dream, and mine. I wanted him to be the Bobby Kennedy I first heard of in second grade, when our whole school was ushered into the auditorium to pray for the great man who'd been shot the night before and was fighting for life on an operating table. The Bobby Kennedy I read about when I first moved to Washington. Jack Newfield's elegy to RFK's 1968 campaign introduced me to a world of young men like Jeff Greenfield and Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky, who had hooked up with a Kennedy to help change the world — brash, tough-minded idealists who wanted to stop the war in Vietnam and start a war on poverty at home, from Bed-Stuy to Appalachia to the Indian reservations in the mountain west. Young guys who helped make history.
    If Clinton could be Kennedy, maybe I could be one of them — and maybe tonight would be part