Campaign drama in Clinton's 'war room'

NEW YORK - When D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus set out to make a documentary about the 1992 presidential election, they struggled to gain much traction.

The two major presidential candidates — George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — turned down their requests for access. The third — Ross Perot — denied he was running.

The only opening they got was with two Clinton campaign staffers — James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, both largely unknown at the time — who didn't seem to mind having the husband-and-wife filmmaking team around.

"So we said, 'Maybe we can make a film with you guys?'" Pennebaker told msnbc.com.

Stephanopoulos was unsure. But after some back and forth with Carville, Clinton's senior strategist, Pennebaker and Hegedus were allowed to record the campaign, with a big caveat — they could only shoot what went on in a central area of the Little Rock, Ark., campaign operation dubbed "The War Room."

"It was the booby prize, frankly," Hegedus said of getting partial access to the desk-filled, noisy nerve-center of the campaign. "But once we stepped in there, everyone was so interesting and so passionate. It was just mesmerizing."

Slide show   Clinton's legacy Take a look at some of the images that defined Bill Clinton’s presidency. more photos

The resulting film, "The War Room," was released in November 1993, ten months after Clinton's inauguration. The documentary helped make stars of the two main characters, Stephanopoulos and Carville, as it brought the public a rare look behind the scenes of a national campaign.

The filmmakers, who have been directing documentaries for decades, recently re-interviewed "The War Room's" original characters, many of whom have become well-known political analysts, consultants and journalists. Those interviews were woven together in a new movie, "Return of the War Room," now showing on the Sundance channel.

"One of the questions that's been rolling around my mind is, is the era of the war room dead?" Stephanopoulos asks in the new film.

"The war room was very, very intense, but it was kind of like a butterfly, because it had a short but glorious life," says Carville.

'The economy, stupid'
The filmmakers said the first time they met Carville, back in 1992, they thought somebody had let their "crazy uncle" into a campaign meeting.

"When we stumbled across James Carville and he was the so-called head of strategy, or whatever his title was at the time, we were like, 'You have got to be kidding,"' Hegedus said. "Of course, you spend a little time with James and you get the character out of the way and he is brilliant."

Perhaps most memorably, Carville distilled Clinton's strategy into three short phrases, which were written on a wall: "Change vs. more of the same"; "the economy, stupid"; and "don't forget health care".

"It's kind of obvious, but there are really only two messages in presidential politics — it's time for a change and stay the course," Paul Begala, a senior adviser on the 1992 Clinton campaign, says in "Return of the War Room." "But sometimes the obvious escapes smart people. So James, because that war room was full of Rhodes Scholars, wanted to put something up there to keep them on task, keep them on track."

To the filmmakers' advantage, the 1992 campaign was an interesting one. Bush, an incumbent president, was trying to extend 12 years of Republican rule, while Perot, the third-party candidate, was on a quest to raise the profile of the federal deficit.

"Perot was such a primal scream for change. And he was so flawed and yet he got 19 million votes," Begala says.

MORE FROM POLITICS

Politics Section Front

Moderates propose health care cost controls Obama: Jobs report is ‘modestly encouraging’   Houston mayor enters Texas governor's race Reid cooks up health-care deal   Atlanta contest shows battered black electorate Homeland Security chairman faces ethics probe Lawmakers: Social secretary should testify Obama sees some consensus at job summit NATO to add 7,000 troops to Afghan effort NYT: Wider Pakistan drone use OK'd Politics Section Front   Add Politics headlines to your news reader: