All Too Human: A Political Education by George Stephanopoulos Page A

of that process. Maybe this speech would pass into the realm of political myth, like John Kennedy's 1960 speech on church and state that put him over the top in West Virginia, or his younger brother's sermon against violence, delivered impromptu in Indiana the night Martin Luther King was shot. Or maybe, more likely, this would be just another Friday night in a campaign that would never be remembered at all. But campaigns are fueled by fantasy too.
    Clinton delivered that night. After a hug for Bishop Ford, he started out slow, easing into the speech as if he were groping for words. Picking up speed, he praised the church, “founded by a man of God from my state,” and reflected on his own Baptist faith, making connections, drawing them in. With a lilt in his voice, he told this mostly black, mostly Southern crowd that he had flown here through the night from a very different place — New Hampshire, “almost all white, very Republican.” But for the first time in their lives, Clinton said, people in New Hampshire had something in common with “people like you who have known hard times.”
    “Amen,” called the crowd.
    “America is hurting everywhere tonight,” Clinton continued. “Our streets are mean.” More amens, more speed. Clinton picked up the pace, moving from a prayer for Magic Johnson to a condemnation for David Duke before settling on the heart of his message — the “new covenant, a solemn agreement which we must not break.” Government must provide opportunity; people must take responsibility. “If you can go to work, you ought to go to work.”
    “Yes, sir. … Tell it now.”
    Clinton was talking straight, and the crowd was responding. If anyone dared to attack Clinton for playing the race card on welfare reform, I had the perfect counterpunch:
“You don't know what you're talking about. When Clinton told twenty thousand African Americans in Memphis that people on welfare must work, he got the biggest applause of the campaign.”
    But he didn't stop there. Clinton quoted Abe Lincoln, praised the “power of oneness,” and promised to take this same message of personal responsibility not only to this black audience in Memphis, but all over the country, from the “high-tech enclaves of Silicon Valley to the high-powered barons of Wall Street.” He was challenging, preaching, reminding all of us that “we're all in this together.”
    Right as Clinton closed, I jumped up to catch him backstage before the next task of the evening — an interview with Dan Balz of the
Washington Post
. I had been talking to Balz nearly every day and had urged him to be there that night to see Clinton at his best.
    During the formative weeks of a campaign, long before the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the candidates fight for scraps and angle for the slightest bit of coverage, especially in national newspapers like the
Post
. If Balz, the top political reporter at the country's top political paper, wrote about the Memphis speech, people would pay attention. Even what didn't make it into the paper might make a difference. At the beginning of a campaign, key reporters create a kind of bush telegraph, sending messages from one outpost to another. Balz would trade information with a source, who would tell his boss, who would chat with a big donor at a cocktail party. The buzz would begin.
    My job was to help it along. In the holding room, I pulled Clinton aside to brief him on what Dan was working on and to suggest some points that would play into Balz's story line on the black vote. I felt a little bit like I was introducing two of my friends who didn't know each other, hoping they would get along. We needed this meeting to go well; people had to know how moving Clinton was that night. Before I left to get Balz, I urged Clinton to talk about Bobby Kennedy's example in the interview. He absorbed my mood and fed it back with his memories of 1968.
    But I returned with Balz to a terrible sight. Clinton was