![]() “Of course,” he said, “or we wouldn’t be asking.” But campaign finance rules strictly limited to $1,000 the amount of money any individual could donate, so if I was to reach Clinton’s total I’d have to put my credibility on the line with a whole lot of people. “Do you really think you can win?” I asked, signaling my own doubt. ![]() But an eleventh hour $90,000 to move the campaign just one stop signaled that the campaign was teetering on the brink. An ask for $500,000 would have made sense, to push to the finish line. This guy was running for President of the United States. The sum they requested told me just how bad things were. And since I was then CEO of Sony, he hoped I would reach out to the Hollywood community on the governor’s behalf. One of the chiefs on his staff called me the morning after the primary to say that for Clinton to move on to the next key primary state, they’d need to raise $90,000 by the end of that day. Not since 1952 had a candidate won the presidency without first winning New Hampshire, and since the Golden Rule of politics is “Money flows where the vote goes,” this loss put Clinton’s organization in fiscal crisis. He lost New Hampshire, which as a liberal Democrat he should have owned. Then, early in the 1992 primaries, he was pummeled by allegations of Vietnam draft dodging and sexual infidelity. His telling sparkled with intellect, passion, and heart, and we were convinced that Bill Clinton was bound to be President. Knowing that celebrity was a political currency that he’d want to tap, I gathered six hundred members of the Los Angeles entertainment community to hear him, and Clinton dazzled us by telling one compelling story after another that highlighted the country’s need and opportunity for improving public schools. We’d known him since his days as the “Education Governor” of Arkansas, when we invited him to speak at a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel benefiting Education First, an organization that promoted quality public education nationwide. His mastery of the art of the tell, in fact, played a key role in persuading my wife and me to offer our active support when he first declared his run for the presidency. ![]() Former president Bill Clinton once said that politics is “about giving people better stories.” Well, no one told a story to better political purpose than Clinton himself. ![]()
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