COLUMN ONE : Clinton’s Strategy of Triage : ‘Don’t be greedy little pigs,’ remarked an adviser, abandoning some big states as probably hopeless. Those that got immediate, massive attention were key to winning White House.

Three months before Tuesday’s election, a small group of Bill Clinton’s top political aides sat down in the former editorial conference room of a now-closed Little Rock, Ark., newspaper, stared into an abyss and gambled.

Surrounded by computer terminals, maps of television markets, mounds of paper and half-cleaned ashtrays, they discounted wildly enthusiastic polls as a cruel hoax.

In June, political analysts had left their candidate for dead. Now, in August, the same pundits were declaring him 30 points ahead. But the voters, these strategists knew, had scarcely begun paying attention and many still felt uneasy with Clinton--a man whom 99% of the nation had never heard of a scant 10 months before.

Bush, they felt sure, eventually would use that discomfort to rebound. And when he did, the full force of the Republican electoral machine--victorious in five of the last six presidential contests--would begin to bear down on them in an arc of states from Wisconsin south to Georgia.

Survival would require a ruthless form of political triage that would involve pouring money and energy into key states, while leaving others almost untouched.

The decisions made in that windowless room in Arkansas exemplified the characteristics that allowed Clinton’s campaign to succeed where so many previous Democratic efforts had failed: Be willing to take risks. Set your plan early. Stick to it.

The group that met in August divided states into three categories.

California, Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York. Almost no resources would go into these states. Clinton’s massive leads there would serve as the heat shield on a space capsule--designed to burn up when the high-flying craft began to return to Earth and leave only enough margin to guarantee survival.

Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona. In the end, Clinton might win them, but to pour resources into those alluring but expensive battles would be to fall into a trap. “Don’t be greedy little pigs,” Paul Tully, the Democrats’ master of political targeting, warned his colleagues.

Instead, the campaign’s resources would have to be concentrated in a handful of states: key industrial battlegrounds in Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania; Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina in the South; a handful of states running down the spine of the Rocky Mountains.

In the final days before the election, as President Bush zeroed in on voter doubts over Clinton’s character, those decisions made in late August proved decisive.

Despite the scope of Clinton’s victory, his margins in many key states were razor thin. Clinton took Georgia by less than 20,000 votes, New Jersey by 57,000, Ohio by just over 1 percentage point.

It was the campaign’s ability to target its resources that allowed those margins to hold. “We spent 94% of our money in only 18 states,” said Clinton chief of staff Eli Segal. “We won all but one.”

As they poured money into the battlegrounds, campaign strategists could afford to send Clinton in long flanking maneuvers through non-battleground states such as Florida, Texas and South Carolina and into traditionally Republican areas of the West, forcing Bush to spend precious time and money protecting his diminished base.

The targeting went far beyond simply geographic regions. Bush gaining points among blue-collar men in the Midwest? Buy time for ads during the World Series. Support softening among younger women in Georgia? Place ads on “Murphy Brown.” Older women in New Jersey? Buy daytime soap operas.

The net result was clear. “We’ve built walls around these states,” Mandy Grunwald, Clinton’s advertising director, said in the anxious days just before the election. “They can chip away, but they won’t be able to break them down.”

Specific Targets

To be sure, by targeting his resources, Clinton might have deprived himself of the 49-state victory some partisans dreamed of. Each state had its partisans. In the last days of the campaign, for example, staff members waged a spirited battle over whether to pour resources into Florida.

“It’s like sending Napoleon to Moscow,” chief strategist James Carville objected when others pushed the idea. In the end, Carville prevailed, and Clinton narrowly lost the state. Similarly, the candidate himself will probably grumble for years about not winning Texas.

By focusing his attention almost obsessively on the single issue of the economy, Clinton may have reduced his ability to claim a mandate for many of the programs he wishes to pursue.

But Carville and other top Clinton strategists argue that concentrating their resources allowed them to survive. The entire campaign “shows how difficult it is to win a presidential election as a challenger,” Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos said a few days before the balloting. “Look at all the mistakes Bush made, and we haven’t really made any, and this thing is still going right down to the wire.”

Victory in politics always comes as a combination of luck and design.

In this race, the luck part of the equation is easy to see. Clinton had the benefit of a stubbornly sluggish economy, Ross Perot’s initial withdrawal from the race only hours before the climax of Clinton’s convention in July, the almost incredible political miscalculations involved in the Republican Convention’s appeals to the party’s right wing and Bush’s seeming inability to understand or fully respond to the popular anger against him.

The design half of the equation--the factors that allowed Clinton to take advantage of his luck--were more carefully hidden.

Much of the design had its roots in a series of decisions made at the low point of the campaign--late in May, as a dispirited and overweight Clinton began his final slog through the last primaries, overshadowed by Perot’s independent candidacy and seemingly unable to shake the questions about his own character and integrity.

The Problems

To Grunwald, Carville and pollster Stanley Greenberg, who had stepped back from the daily campaign hustle to begin to lay plans for the general election, Clinton had proved a tenacious and skilled campaigner. Each of the three, however, had learned by bitter experience about the deep-seated doubts voters had about Democratic candidates. Clinton, they knew, faced serious problems.

First, the constant pounding Clinton had taken in the primaries, particularly from former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., had deepened voters’ doubts about his character.

“It’s simple,” said one senior Clinton adviser at the time, “voters think he’s a lying sack of crap.”

Second, campaign aides were stunned to discover from their focus groups that despite months of exposure, most voters still had virtually no idea of Clinton’s background. What people did know--that he was young and had risen fast, that he had attended prestigious colleges and that his wife was a high-powered lawyer--led many to conclude that he must have been born rich and privileged.

Changing that perception and driving home the message that Clinton had been born in humble circumstances and shared the background and the values of the middle class would become a major focus for the convention in July.

Third, through most of the primaries, Clinton’s campaign had been run with an ever-widening and confusing array of strategists, consultants and (in many cases self-appointed) senior advisers. Campaign staff in Little Rock continuously found key decisions about scheduling and strategy second-guessed by outsiders with access to the ear of the candidate or, in many cases, his wife.

That problem, too, would be solved at the convention as Carville, backed by Hillary Clinton, sold Bill Clinton on a plan to make the idiosyncratic Cajun the campaign’s undisputed chief strategist.

But the single most pressing problem the campaign faced in late May and early June was a simple one: No one was paying attention. Much of the press had written Clinton off as a hopelessly damaged candidate. And the public seemed enthralled by Perot. In the final days of the primary campaign, Clinton constantly found himself answering questions not about himself, but about Perot.

As the spring electoral season closed, Clinton took the first of several steps toward solving his problems. First, at the insistence of Hillary Clinton, the candidate put an end to discussion of moving campaign headquarters out of Little Rock for the general election.

Although the decision seems minor, it proved of great importance in the end. Staying in Little Rock insulated Clinton’s campaign from the huge crush of both reporters and self-declared political experts in Washington, virtually forcing the aides to focus strictly on their work and avoiding much of the debilitating finger-pointing that consumed Bush’s campaign.

Second, Clinton asked Segal, a longtime friend, to move to Little Rock and take over as his campaign’s chief of staff.

Segal quickly helped engineer several important staff changes, bringing Stephanopoulos, who had been traveling constantly on Clinton’s airplane, back to Little Rock as communications director, in charge of running the message side of the campaign, and placing Grunwald in charge of the campaign’s advertising effort, which had been handled during the primaries by her partner, Frank Greer.

Grunwald had for several weeks been pressing an idea for how Clinton could break through the seeming press blackout that had surrounded him as he fell into third place in the polls. Clinton, she argued, should break with the traditional modes of campaigning and begin appearing on popular culture programs--on Phil Donahue, Arsenio Hall and the morning network news programs--to convey his ideas directly to voters who ordinarily ignore political news. Grunwald and Stephanopoulos sold the idea.

That decision led to one of the campaign’s most enduring images--Clinton, wearing dark sunglasses, playing his saxophone on “Arsenio.” In sociological terms, the event marked a watershed--the final melding of the worlds of politics and the television culture. Republicans scoffed, saying the appearance made Clinton look undignified and non-presidential. Later in the campaign, Republican strategists would use the picture of Clinton and his saxophone in an attack advertisement.

But Clinton strategists rejoiced. Their candidate had begun breaking through, recapturing public attention. As he garnered hours of free television--appearing on practically any talk program that would take him--his campaign dropped plans to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy time for him to broadcast his message.

Focus on Economy

A few days after “Arsenio,” on June 21, Clinton took the second major step toward putting his campaign back on track--releasing his revised economic plan. The plan helped restore his bona fides as a candidate with serious ideas and provided him with the slogan that encapsulated his fall campaign--”putting people first.”

The importance of having issued an economic plan became apparent within 10 days. On July 2, the government released new statistics showing the unemployment rate soaring, rather than falling. That one piece of news dominated public discussion and seemed to crystallize a gnawing sense of discomfort voters had about the economy.

At that point, the economy moved to center stage of the campaign and never departed.

Clinton strategists had worried that Perot would move to capture the economic issue for himself by releasing his own economic plan--a move that might have marginalized Clinton. But the Texas billionaire stalled. He did not release his plan until after he withdrew from the race in July. Instead, he locked himself in a nasty name-calling contest with the White House.

As Perot and White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater traded epithets--”monster,” Fitzwater said, “dirty tricks squad,” Perot shot back--voters began to perceive Clinton once again as a candidate with serious ideas. His favorable ratings began to rise.

By the second week of July, the pieces were beginning to come into place for Clinton. He had regained public attention. The campaign debate had focused on the issues he wanted to discuss. His campaign had emerged from debt and settled its internal organizational problems--something the Republicans would not accomplish until nearly Labor Day. And his choice of a running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, seemed to strike a responsive chord with the public.

As the polls started to turn upward, aides began to lay plans for how Clinton would kick off his campaign after the convention.

Clinton strategists had spent weeks trying to figure out a way to dramatize for voters the campaign’s message that their candidate was a “different kind of Democrat,” someone who was in touch with the values and aspirations of middle America. It was campaign manager David Wilhelm who ultimately hit on the device that turned into political gold.

“Perot was in television studios, George Bush was in the White House. We wanted to do something that would be in stark contrast--Bill Clinton on the road, meeting people,” Wilhelm says, explaining his idea. “In the context of a likely attack on Bill Clinton and Al Gore as liberals who were ‘out of touch,’ what better way to show you are in touch than on the bus?”

By the time the first bus trip ended, Clinton had assumed a massive, although transient, lead over Bush and the temporarily departed Perot. It was in that euphoric climate that Clinton’s targeting team--Greenberg, Wilhelm, Grunwald, field strategists Craig Smith and Michael Whooley and Tully, who died a few weeks before the election--began their meetings to hone strategy for the fall.

Several pieces of data could be tracked to help determine how likely a state would be to support Clinton--the change in the rate of unemployment and the growth of personal income in the last year, the state’s willingness to vote for Southern candidates in the past.

But the most important predictor was a simple one: Bush’s job rating.

Repeatedly during the campaign, Bush complained that his popularity had been hurt by a “relentless pounding” from the other side. That was no accident.

Given the importance of Bush’s job ratings to Clinton’s poll standings, “we decided to embark on a strategy of driving his job performance down early on,” Greenberg said. “Whatever our positive message would be, holding Bush’s job performance down was key.”

The best way to do that, campaign strategists found through their twice-weekly focus groups, was to put Bush’s face on television. Not only did voters not see such advertisements as negative--after all, the campaign was merely showing the President’s own words--but the sight of Bush saying “read my lips” or proclaiming that the recession was over worked better than anything to enrage the blue-collar “Reagan Democrat” voters Clinton needed.

The Clinton attacks successfully neutralized Bush’s own attacks, which in scattershot style covered everything from the Arkansas record to Clinton’s plans for taxes to the Democrat’s draft history, but which stayed on no topic long enough to do substantial damage.

Following Carville’s vaunted rule of “quick response,” the campaign responded to Bush attacks within a day, sometimes even within the same news cycle.

The result was that from the end of the GOP Convention--where strident rhetoric on family values raised Bush’s standing in the conservative South but delivered to Clinton several key states in the Northeast--until Perot’s re-entry into the race Oct. 1, the polls essentially did not move.

Perot’s Return

Perot’s re-entry gave the Clinton camp its final scare. Hillary Clinton, who had assumed all along that Perot’s withdrawal from the race was a ruse to evade press scrutiny, pressed for the campaign to attack Perot. Campaign aides prepared detailed plans to do so.

But research by Greenberg and his fellow pollsters--who by that point were surveying 10,000 voters every two nights in as many as 30 states--found Perot essentially immune to attack. His followers simply did not want to hear negative information about him, Greenberg explained.

Perot’s simple presence in the race hurt Clinton, muddying the clear distinction the Democrats had tried to draw between the “candidate of change” and the “candidate of the status quo.” But until the very end, Perot trained nearly all his direct fire against Bush. Only during the final weekend did he begin to hammer on Clinton, attacking him for running a small state with low-wage industries.

“If he had done that to us two weeks ago, it could have been real trouble,” Clinton aide Richard Mintz said the Sunday before the election. But by then, it was over.