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If the President's strategy was hard to read, it may be because Clinton didn't have one. Since last spring, many of his top aides had advised that the greater political advantage lay in saying no to everything. Clinton has for the most part listened instead to adviser Dick Morris, who thought a budget deal would rob the G.O.P. of its best campaign issue going into the '96 race. So Clinton hovered in between, hoping for the best of both worlds and, in the meantime, doing everything he could to exploit the divisions within the G.O.P. ranks.
In the heat of the battle, Clinton joked to Dole that the two of them should fly to Florida together and work out a deal. Dole for his part tried hard to keep the talks on track and avoid a spitball fight. McCurry had taken to referring to the House leadership as "that gruesome group up there," inspiring an alliterative retort from Tony Blankley, who called Clinton and Gore the "budget-busting barons of bankruptcy." When Clinton told Dole Wednesday that he was about to make a statement about the shutdown, Dole urged that the President be a little more circumspect. Clinton ended up blasting the House for its stubbornness but praising Dole, Gingrich and, amazingly, Armey by name. The strategy, McCurry admitted, was to isolate the House extremists. "We're trying to make it very uncomfortable for them to keep this government shut down for another hour," he said.
By this time it was every man for himself. And so it was Dole who, in a single stroke, made sense of all the chaos and left his rivals looking like amateurs. He had gone along with the muscular House strategy for months, hoping the shutdown would help pry the President away from his base. But as the crisis wore on, he saw he wasn't getting any leverage. Dole kept telling his team the message had to be the balanced budget, not the shutdown. "We've got to find a way to get out of this mess," he would say. He needed to get back on the campaign trail. And he could not imagine anything much dumber than forcing people to work without pay while paying others who could not work.
On Tuesday, when Dole surprised everyone and proposed a continuing resolution to fund the shuttered agencies, House Republicans were outraged; some began calling their party's presidential front runner "Mr. Caveman." But by Thursday even Gingrich and his allies acknowledged they were playing a losing hand, and they left the negotiations to go back to the Hill and regroup. Kasich and Senate budget chairman Pete Domenici returned from a meeting with Panetta and told their colleagues they were now convinced Clinton was stonewalling. White House officials say Kasich and Domenici were simply discouraged that they could not roll the President as they had hoped. "Listen, you guys," Panetta told them, "did you think this was going to end with you being able to walk out and declare victory? That's not how negotiations work."