Friends of Bill
Looks like time really does heal all wounds…
We’ve gotten a sneak peak at The Sundance Channel’s new documentary, “The Return of the War Room,” which revisits the people and themes from the 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign, “The War Room.” In the film, Republican consultant Mary Matalin – whose candidate, George H.W. Bush, lost in 1992 to her soon-to-be husband’s candidate, Bill Clinton – seems to have gotten over the sting of defeat and come to appreciate the political acumen of Bill Clinton.
Although Matalin concedes that she was devastated by the 1992 loss, she says in the film that the Clinton campaign’s “ability to ju-jitsu negative into a hyper-positive was something that nobody had seen before and you can’t do that without a combination of good instincts and deep skill — and he had it. And we saw it, we saw it from the beginning. … Clinton was a stand out. That guy was the real deal and a full package. … Clinton was a turn the page candidacy.”
Fifteen years after the original movie, “The Return of the War Room” (which debuts on the Sundance Channel next week) revisits such Clinton characters as Matalin’s hubby James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala, Stan Greenberg, Bob Boorstin, Lisa Caputo, Rahm Emanuel, Mandy Grunwald, Mickey Kantor, Ricki Seidman and Dee Dee Myers.
“Part of the reason that we had a war room was to tell people that there was a war room,” says Stephanopoulos. “It was just to send the message that this campaign was going to be different, this campaign was going to be tough.”
Boorstin says the war room was created to show that “we had the balls, quite frankly, to take on the other side.”
Those in the film seem quite pleased with the war room’s success, even claiming that it’s been replicated all over the place.
“Everyone has a war room now,” says Carville, who argues that Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela and Ehud Barak all took a cue from Clinton’s 1992 operation. “If you don’t have one, you’re not real. It’s like a company without a board of directors.”
Former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon (still with the campaign when his “Return of the War Room” cameo was shot) admits that the McCain campaign has its own war room. “There is a literal war room now in the McCain campaign where you walk by and there’s twenty people monitoring every communication, every second of the day and there’s rapid response.”
But Stephanopoulos thinks the war room’s time may have come and gone. “Is the era of the war room dead? It’s been surpassed and its been transformed.”
