B y October, the polls we were getting didnt look too bad, but the atmosphere on the campaign trail still didnt feel good. Before we left for the Middle East, Hillary had called our old pollster Dick Morris for his assessment. Dick took a survey for us and the results were discouraging. He said that most people didnt believe that the economy was getting better or that the deficit was declining; that they didnt know about any of the good things the Democrats and I had done; and that the attacks on Gingrichs contract werent working.

My approval rating had risen above 50 percent for the first time in a while, and voters responded positively when told about the family leave law, the 100,000 new police in the crime bill, the education standards and school reform, and our other achievements. Dick said we could cut our losses if the Democrats would stop talking about the economy, the deficit, and the contract, and concentrate instead on their popular legislative accomplishments. And he recommended that when I returned to Washington, I should stay off the campaign trail and remain presidential, saying and doing things that would reinforce my higher ratings. Morris believed that would do more to help the Democrats than my plunging back into the political fray. Neither recommendation was followed.

The Democrats had no mechanism to move a new message quickly into every contested state and congressional district where it would make a difference; though I had done a lot of fund-raising for individual candidates and the House and Senate campaign committees, they had wanted to spend the money in the traditional way.

I called back to the White House from the Middle East trip and said I thought that, on my return, I should stay at work and make news rather than go back to the campaign trail. When I got home I was surprised to find my schedule packed with trips to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, New York, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Washington, and Delaware. Apparently, when my own poll numbers started rising, Democrats around the country asked that I campaign for them. They had been there for me; now I had to be there for them.

While campaigning, I tried to keep emphasizing our shared accomplishments: signing the California Desert Protection Act, which protected 7.5 million acres of magnificent lands in the wilderness and national park systems; highlighting the large financial benefits of the new direct student-loan program at the University of Michigan; and doing as many radio interviews about our record as I could. But I also did big rallies with boisterous crowds, where I had to speak loudly to be heard. My campaign riffs were effective for the party faithful, but not for the larger audience who saw them on television; on TV, the hot campaign rhetoric turned a statesman-like President back into the politician the voters werent sure about. Going back on the campaign trail, while understandable and perhaps unavoidable, was a mistake.

On November 8, we got the living daylights beat out of us, losing eight Senate seats and fifty-four House seats, the largest defeat for our party since 1946, when the Democrats were routed after President Truman tried to get health insurance for all Americans. The Republicans were rewarded for two years of constant attacks on me and for their solidarity on the contract. The Democrats were punished for too much good government and too little good politics. I had contributed to the demise by allowing my first weeks to be defined by gays in the military; by failing to concentrate on the campaign until it was too late; and by trying to do too much too fast in a news climate in which my victories were minimized, my losses were magnified, and the overall impression was created that I was just another pro-tax, big-government liberal, not the New Democrat who had won the presidency. Moreover, the public mood was still anxious; people didnt feel their lives were improving and they were sick of all the fighting in Washington. Apparently they thought divided government would force us to work together.

Ironically, I had hurt the Democrats by both my victories and my defeats. The loss of health care and the passage of NAFTA demoralized many of our base voters and depressed our turnout. The victories on the economic plan with its tax increases on high-income Americans, the Brady bill, and the assault weapons ban inflamed the Republican base voters and increased their turnout. The turnout differential alone probably accounted for half of our losses, and contributed to a Republican gain of eleven governorships. Mario Cuomo lost in New York with a miserable Democratic turnout. In the South, thanks largely to an extraordinary effort by the Christian Coalition, Republicans routinely ran five or six points ahead of their positions in the pre-election polls. In Texas, George W. Bush defeated Governor Ann Richards, despite the fact that she had a 60 percent job approval rating.

The NRA had a great night. They beat both Speaker Tom Foley and Jack Brooks, two of the ablest members of Congress, who had warned me this would happen. Foley was the first Speaker to be defeated in more than a century. Jack Brooks had supported the NRA for years and had led the fight against the assault weapons ban in the House, but as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had voted for the overall crime bill even after the ban was put into it. The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and youre out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated nineteen of the twenty-four members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage and could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House Speaker. In Oklahoma, Congressman Dave McCurdy, a DLC leader, lost his Senate race because of, in his words, God, gays, and guns.

On October 29, a man named Francisco Duran, who had driven all the way from Colorado, protested the crime bill by opening fire on the White House with an assault weapon. He got off twenty to thirty rounds before he was subdued. Luckily, no one was hurt. Duran may have been an aberration, but he reflected the almost pathological hatred I had engendered among paranoid gun owners with the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. After the election I had to face the fact that the law-enforcement groups and other supporters of responsible gun legislation, though they represented the majority of Americans, simply could not protect their friends in Congress from the NRA. The gun lobby outspent, outorganized, outfought, and outdemagogued them.............