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Sperling, a man religiously opposed to having a social life, continues to log six 18-hour days a week, even though he has now acquired three assistants, who are already pasty-faced with fatigue and have gained the nicknames Thing One, Thing Two and Thing Three after characters in The Cat in the Hat. Reed, who much prefers to spend his time at home with his wife and two young children, has also been known to work well into the wee hours. The aides set up shop in the Ward Room, a small, private conference room next to the White House mess in the West Wing basement. There they have burrowed through back issues of Congressional Quarterly and other reference guides. But their new weapon is technology; after the G.O.P. sweep in 1994 Berman got everything he asked for--more staff, more powerful computers, Internet experts, scanners to feed vast numbers of documents into his computers so every speech, every vote, every bill can be retrieved instantly.
Sperling threw himself into the fast-response job beginning Easter weekend. He suspected that Dole might hit Clinton on taxes in time for April 15, so he started sorting through every tax increase Dole had voted for or helped pass during his 35-year career in Washington. Sperling decided that if Clinton was vulnerable on anything, it was the gas tax. That was the one tax that affected everyone, all working families, and Dole had voted against the latest gas-tax increase in 1993. At the end of the long weekend of research, Sperling wrote a three-page response in case Dole called for the repeal of the latest 4.3 cents-per-gal. increase. Sperling carefully calibrated the answer. In a nutshell, it was that between 1982 and 1990, including the years when Dole chaired the Senate Finance Committee, the tax more than tripled, to 14.1' per gal. Dole, a deficit hawk, voted for all the increases during those years, even though he did vote against the 1993 hike. A rapid response was thus born.
On Friday, April 26, the day Dole was drafting his letter to Clinton, Sperling worked around the clock drafting an economic-briefing book for a retreat by Democratic Senators in Delaware. He finally slouched home midafternoon for an hour's nap, then called his office to see if anything had happened. Something had. Dole had called for a gas-tax repeal, and the White House sounded air-raid sirens.
Sperling showered and changed and at 4:30 scooted back to the Old Executive Office Building, where he and fellow aide Barry Toiv called Joe Lockhart, the press secretary for the Clinton-Gore Re-Election Committee. Sperling told him, "We have everything."
Back in his office 15 minutes later, Sperling pulled out his memo of three weeks before, ran down the two flights of stairs to the basement and faxed it to Lockhart. Lockhart hit the phones and began spreading the line that Dole had finally found something to run against: his own record. Sperling meanwhile enlisted other White House aides, paging George Stephanopoulos, adviser Dick Morris, press secretary Mike McCurry and chief of staff Leon Panetta. In a conference call they decided to take a two-tiered approach to their quick response. The political attack of hypocrisy would continue to come from Lockhart. A more substantive, higher-road strike would come from Panetta, who would urge Dole to join deficit-reduction talks and discuss the tax change in the context of balanced-budget negotiations.