Road warriors.

• Author: Saal, Matthew A.
• Position: Bill Clinton's presidential campaign

In getting their candidate to the White House, Clinton's campaign aides did something unusual.. They got out of the way

In September 1991, three weeks before her husband announced his candidacy for the highest office in the land, Hillary Clinton sat in the front seat of her navy blue Oldsmobile, slapping her hand against the dashboard, making her pitch about retail politics and Bill Clinton. If they had any chance of winning, she said, their toughest battle would be to prove to the American people that they, unlike so many other national candidates, were not isolated from the voters. "Bill and I have lived in an extraordinarily personal political environment," she said. "We love the opportunity to go out there and talk to people and listen to them. If a campaign does not teach the candidate, then how can people feel like they have any part of it?"

Hillary's pitch was as old as politics itself. But she seemed so earnest at the time that it was hard not to wonder whether the Clintons, like so many eager candidates before them, would fall victim to the Madison Avenue packaging that has come to dominate presidential politics. Today, 15 months later, the answer is clear. But the surprising twist is not so much that the Clintons clung relentlessly to the notion of "letting Bill be Bill"--after all, they certainly had confidence in themselves-but that their campaign staff first saw the virtue in the strategy--and then made it work.

Random though they may have seemed in the fury of the election, the so-called "turning points" of the campaign--playing the sax on late-night TV, a blizzard of televised town meetings, thousand-mile bus tours, and a radio tete-a-tete with a raunchy shock-jock who'd been calling him "Bubba Butt" for a month--were anything but arbitrary decisions. There was a common thread, the one that Hillary was so adamant about hack in September in the Oldsmobile. Sure, Clinton had policy ideas, but so did Paul Tsongas. And yes, he had experience as an executive, but so did George Bush. What Clinton had that was special was an ability to make a personal connection with voters. And if he had any chance of winning, that was his ticket.

Coming up with the strategy, however, was the easy part. The challenge was putting it into practice, which, of course, is where the campaign comes in. But the skill of chief strategist James Carville and his staff was not merely that they recognized their man's talent, but that they did something truly unconventional in modern day politics: They resisted the urge to make their man into something he isn't, and they let him directly connect with the voters. Here's how they did it. paying to take voters' questions and showing that you had nothing to hide was something else entirely. "We were all thinking that we have to do more to get above the radar screen," says one aide who was at the Greek dinner. "We had to circumvent all the political clutter on TV in New Hampshire...