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While the public relations effort to mold Hillary into a traditional my- heart-belongs-to-hubby First Lady means that campaign insiders are reluctant to publicly acknowledge her substantive role, her imprint on the staff shake-up seems clear. With Hillary as the principal guardian of the candidate's body and mind, it is telling that just before the convention she propelled the couple's longtime friend Susan Thomases -- a sometimes confrontational New York City lawyer -- into the powerful slot of head scheduler. In that role Thomases serves Hillary's agenda to make sure Clinton's tendency to please everyone -- to let discussions drag on, to keep on the campaign trail until he's robotic with fatigue -- does not get the better of him.
"One of the reasons she wanted me to do the scheduling is that she knows I understand that her husband needs sleep and needs time to think," says Thomases. Until recently, she was the epicenter for controversy within the campaign, which may explain why she has received scant public credit for shrewd judgments like doggedly promoting the bus-tour idea within the Clinton camp. Top strategist James Carville defends her in these terms: "The most powerful force in the universe is inertia, and Susan is the most anti-inertia person I know."
Clinton himself, as a ranking insider put it, is "the real manager of this campaign." On the morning after the convention, Clinton told his top aides that he was restructuring the operation. The decision stemmed in part from a campaign flare-up in early June, when several senior staffers complained directly to the candidate about Thomases' tendency to meddle in areas like polling that were far outside her formal role as Hillary's staff director. The ultimate resolution was Thomases' new job as the campaign's internal Dr. No -- the final authority to resist demands on Bill Clinton's time. In a larger shift, campaign chairman Mickey Kantor was in effect kicked upstairs to handle long-term planning on such contingencies as a Clinton-Gore transition as well as handholding the egos of Democratic powers.
Thus emerged the unlikely trio that now holds day-to-day responsibility for directing the campaign -- Carville, George Stephanopoulos and Betsey Wright. Each represents a different facet of the totality that is Clinton. Carville is the grit, the guts and the unyielding determination. Stephanopoulos, like the candidate a Rhodes scholar, mirrors Clinton's thinking and intuits his likely responses. Wright, Clinton's chief of staff during most of his years as Arkansas Governor, is the keeper and the ardent defender of his record.
Carville and Wright are the dominant agenda-setting forces at the 7 a.m. staff meeting in the third-floor war room of the Little Rock headquarters. Even now, the Clinton campaign has an informality that would make a Republican organizational purist wince. Wright, in fact, laughingly calls the campaign structure mystical. To understand the dramatic summer transformation of Clinton's candidacy from junker to juggernaut, take a closer look at the triumphant trio in Little Rock: