Paula Unruh, White's campaign manager, understood that. It mattered not at all what White looked like or sounded like or what he stood for: This election had little to do with him and everything to do with young Bill Clinton. Now there was all this hype about him being the boy wonder of American politics, but polls showed him losing to a blustery, beefy savings and loan executive named Frank D. That had been a moral victory against a respected incumbent in the most Republican section of the state, and it made Clinton's reputation.
"It was not tough at all."īut this was tough, and it was different from Clinton's first race for Congress back in 1974, which he narrowly lost to John Paul Hammerschmidt. "It was more like Bill was being elected president of his senior class," said Diane Blair, a political science professor and close friend and adviser. Perhaps his election as governor of Arkansas with more than 60 percent of the vote two years earlier had come too easily. It was not yet one year into the decade that was supposed to witness Clinton's political ascension, but already, shockingly, at age 34, it seemed to him that everything might be going down the tubes. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham and several friends from Hot Springs and Fayetteville. They gathered at the redbrick governor's mansion in Little Rock one morning in late October 1980: Gov.
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