Fortunately, much of my life was quite positive. Obviously recently, going through political campaigns has become extremely tough, and so I think what you find out is you wind up pretty quickly in the crossfire. I hoped tremendously that Hillary would win, and it was very difficult moments throughout the campaign. It's easy to telescope the campaign that didn't win without having to constantly remind people, "Well, OK, we won in '96, we won with Blair, we won in so many races with her in New York." To put in context here, what 30 years of your life has been, so you can say, "Well, we're going to move on to the next big challenge or the next win." I had to go through that here and go through that in the past. Although I emphasize that the personal challenges that people don't see can be far more difficult than the public challenges that both I see candidates go through and that I think all of us in politics wind up going through.
Can you tell me a war story from the campaign?
The day before New Hampshire was the hardest day—the polls showed we were going to lose, the press said we were going to lose and they said the campaign was over, and people were already trying to point fingers. I went back to my room and wrote a memo on what to do next—if we lost or if we won—and had it ready for the next morning. You have to take those hard moments and figure out what to do next rather than get stuck or paralyzed. You have to channel all the energy, anxiety, and frustration into something positive and forward-thinking and that is always the best way to deal with adversity. You have to have a picture of the way out.
When you say there's a way out of even the toughest moments, do you mean there's a solution, something that, if you think about it, you'll figure it out? Or do you mean that time will heal and you'll feel better?
Both, actually. Time does a lot for most wounds, but a lot of crisis work is solving problems and trying to come up with a solution. I wrote the 3 A.M. ad because it looked to me like Texas was going to be lost. The kind of intensity of that kind of situation can produce more creativity. A lot of people joke that I don't even get going until the last five minutes of a crisis. You have to work very hard at trying to solve really difficult problems. If you can keep trained to the idea that for almost everything there is a solution, that's the kind of attitude you've got to have in crises.
When you feel personally discouraged, do you try to pump yourself up? Or do you accept, "It's OK for me to feel hopeless for awhile, and it's normal for me to feel discouraged," and just ride it out?
More the second. Many times, in a discouraging moment, it's that discouragement that may drive you to find the solution or the next thing to do. You have to feel it, you can't let it go by without feeling it. So the answer is not to try to pretend it wasn't a difficult moment. The answer lies in feeling that, having it keep you going.
What's the trick to that? How do you find that feeling?
That's where I think it's just an innate reaction. Some people know how to hit a baseball, other people have a different kind of reaction under crisis. Again, I feel that having had my difficult experiences when I was 10, it made me sensitive to what my clients were going through in some of their difficult moments. It was hard for other people to relate to what I think a lot of the clients personally go through. The public will only see the public side, but they have private and personal reactions to everything that goes on as well.
Any other lessons you've learned along the way?
If I were going to summarize it, it's keep your wits about you. Understand that you're never going to be successful unless you go through some defeats or failures and are able to overcome them. Work like the dickens to overcome them and recognize that it's a normal part of every single life. There's no such thing as a life without adversity and no success without it.
