Our convention opened on the twenty-sixth, with appearances by Jim and Sarah Brady, who appreciated the support the Democrats had given to the Brady bill, and Christopher Reeve, the actor who, after being paralyzed in a fall from a horse, had inspired the nation with his courageous fight to recover and his advocacy for more research into spinal cord injuries.
On the day of my speech, our campaign was rocked by press reports that Dick Morris had frequently been with a prostitute in his hotel room when he was in Washington working for me. Dick resigned from the campaign, and I put out a statement saying that he was my friend and a superb political strategist who had done “invaluable work” over the past two years. I regretted his departure, but he was obviously under enormous stress and he needed time to work through his problems. I knew Dick was resilient and felt sure he would be back in the political arena before long.
My acceptance speech was easy to give because of the record: the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in twenty-eight years; 10 million new jobs; 10 million people getting the minimum wage increase; 25 million Americans benefiting from the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill; 15 million working Americans with a tax cut; 12 million taking advantage of the family leave law; 10 million students saving money through the Direct Student Loan Program; 40 million workers with more pension security.
I stated that we were going in the right direction and, referring to Bob Dole’s speech in San Diego, said, “with all respect, we do not need to build a bridge to the past; we need to build a bridge to the future… let us resolve to build that bridge to the twenty-first century.” The “Bridge to the 21st Century” became the theme of the campaign and the next four years.
As good as the record was, I knew that all elections are about the future, so I outlined my agenda: higher school standards and universal access to college; a balanced budget that protected health care, education, and the environment; targeted tax cuts to support home ownership, long-term care, college education, and child-rearing; more jobs for people on welfare and more investment in poor urban and rural areas; and some new initiatives to fight crime and drugs and clean the environment. I knew that if the American people saw the election as a choice between building a bridge to the past and building a bridge to the future, we would win. Bob Dole had unintentionally given me the central message of the 1996 campaign. On the day after the convention closed, Al, Tipper, Hillary, and I kicked off my last campaign with a bus tour, beginning in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, with Governor Mel Carnahan, who had been with me since early 1992, going through southern Illinois and western Kentucky, and winding up in Memphis, after several stops in Tennessee, with former governor Ned Ray McWherter, a huge bear of a man who was the only person I ever heard call the vice president “Albert.”
Ned Ray was worth so many votes that I didn’t care what he called Al, or me for that matter. In August, Kenneth Starr lost his first big case, one that reflected just how desperate he and his staff were to pin something on me. Starr had indicted the two owners of the Perry County Bank, lawyer Herby Branscum Jr. and accountant Rob Hill, on charges arising out of my 1990 gubernatorial campaign. The indictment stated that Branscum and Hill had taken about $13,000 from their own bank for legal and accounting services they did not perform in order to reimburse themselves for political contributions they had made, and that they had instructed the man who ran the bank for them not to report two cash withdrawals of more than $10,000 each from my campaign account to the Internal Revenue Service as required by federal law.
The indictment also named Bruce Lindsey, who had served as my campaign treasurer, as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” alleging that when Bruce withdrew the money to pay for our election day “get out the vote” activities, he had urged the bankers not to file the required report. Starr’s people had threatened Bruce with an indictment, but he called their bluff; there was nothing wrong with our contributions or the way they had been spent, and Bruce had no motive for asking the bank not to make the required filing on it: we would be making all the information public in three weeks as required by Arkansas state election law. Since the contributions and their expenditure were legal and our public report was accurate, Starr’s people knew Bruce hadn’t committed a crime, so they settled for smearing him as an unindicted co-conspirator.
The charges against Branscum and Hill were absurd. First, they wholly owned the bank; if they did not impair the bank’s liquidity, they could take money out of it as long as they paid income taxes on it, and there was no suggestion that they had not done so in this case. As to the second charge, the law that requires a bank to report cash deposits or withdrawals of $10,000 or more is a good one; it permits the government to follow large amounts of “dirty money” from criminal enterprises like money laundering or drug dealing. The reports filed with the government are checked every three to six months but are not open to the public. As of 1996, there had been two hundred prosecutions for failure to file the reports required by the act, but only twenty of them were for failures to report withdrawals. All of those involved money that was tainted by an illegal enterprise. Until Starr came along, no one had ever been indicted for a negligent failure to report deposits or withdrawals of legitimate funds. Our campaign money was undisputably clean money that had been withdrawn at the end of the campaign to pay for our efforts to call voters and offer rides to the polls on election day. We had filed the required public report within three weeks after the election, detailing how much money we had spent and how we had spent it. Branscum, Hill, and Lindsey simply had no motive to hide from the government a legal cash withdrawal that would be a matter of public record in less than a month. That didn’t stop Hickman Ewing, Starr’s deputy in Arkansas, who was just as obsessed as Starr with going after us and not nearly as good at disguising it. He threatened to send Neal Ainley, who ran the bank for Branscum and Hill and who had been responsible for filing the reports, to prison unless he testified that Branscum, Hill, and Lindsey had ordered him not to file it, even though Ainley had earlier denied any wrongdoing by them. The poor man was a little fish caught in a powerful net; he changed his story. Initially charged with five felonies, Ainley was now allowed to plead to two misdemeanors. As in the earlier trial of the McDougals and Tucker, I testified on videotape at the request of the defendants. Though I had not been involved in the withdrawals, I was able to say I had not appointed Branscum and Hill to the two state boards on which they served in return for their contributions to my campaign.