AS HE WALKS IN A SOFT DRIZZLE TO his car next to the campaign headquarters in Little Rock, George Stephanopoulos hardly seems like a major player in any drama -- much less a presidential succession. Described by his colleague and close friend Paul Begala as a guy "well over four feet tall slumming in a jeans jacket with an MTV haircut," he has, at 31, leaped ahead of his elders to be at the red-hot center of the Clinton universe. While everyone knows who he is -- his face is now beamed round the world as transition communications director -- it is hard to figure out how someone so self-effacing ended up where he is.
In 1988 he worked on Michael Dukakis' campaign as head of the "rapid response" team, a wildly misnomered unit that reacted to Bush's assaults by dreaming up counterattacks that the candidate then rarely delivered. His main job, Stephanopoulos jokes, was to serve as a sounding board for one-liners to see if they would get a laugh. "I was just another short, over-smart Greek without a sense of humor."
Still, he made enough of a reputation for himself that in 1991 he was wooed by both the Bob Kerrey and Clinton campaigns. Stephanopoulos recalls the instant rapport that he felt during his first meeting with Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg. "Midway through the interview," says Stephanopoulos, "I started working for him."
This time around, his fantasies became the campaign. After traveling at Clinton's side through the primaries, Stephanopoulos settled last May into a messy office with two banks of phones. He became Clinton incarnate, so imbued with the candidate's philosophy and policy that when he spoke it was as if Clinton were there. "He made everything happen," says media consultant Mandy Grunwald. To mainline the candidate's unfiltered personality to the voters, Stephanopoulos orchestrated appearances on talk shows and MTV. He pulled together Clinton's compendium of economic solutions, Putting People First, a task that required him to ride herd on a disparate group of economic advisers, all of whom thought they possessed the cure for the deficit and the qualities to be Treasury Secretary.
Begala recalls screaming at Stephanopoulos not to allow network star Ted Koppel onto the plane to do a special on the campaign's last 48 hours, since it wouldn't air until after the election. "But George's argument was that when you see Clinton unhandled and unproduced, people like him. And he was thinking down the road. That's my definition of vision: anybody who can think beyond Election Day."
With an intellect unencumbered by a comparable ego, Stephanopoulos was able to bridge the chasm separating the campaign's often mismatched personalities. He made sure that Hollywood's laid-back producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who made the convention bio-film, was on speaking terms with chain-smoking, laser-intense Grunwald; he doled out face time on television among aspiring talking heads; not least, he soothed the brilliant, tightly coiled gonzo strategist James Carville by watching infomercials and Julia Child with him when Carville was too nervous to work.