It's Tuesday, the Ides of March. Twenty-eight years ago today, Bill and Hillary Clinton fled from the drum beat of scandal coverage in Washington. The first lady went to Colorado. The president headed to New Hampshire, the state he often gravitated toward when he needed to steady his political ship.
In light of what the Clintons would face in the second term over his sexual behavior -- and the lies he told, some while under oath, to cover it up -- it's easy forget that the first major scandal of their presidency was called Whitewater.
Its details are murky in our memories now, and were Byzantine at the time, but they involved various shady financial dealings, mostly by Hillary, when the first couple lived in Arkansas. In Denver, Mrs. Clinton told a crowd of compliant Democrats that ordinary Americans cared a lot more about issues than impacted their own lives -- such as jobs -- than about Whitewater. She wasn't wrong about that: The polls backed her up.
President Clinton made the same point forcefully in the New Hampshire city of Nashua. As White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, I went too.
New Hampshire voters are famously flinty and fussy. But because they pay such close attention to politics, they are discerning, and Bill Clinton always counted on Granite State residents to look beyond the "gotcha" political story of the moment and keep their focus on the bigger picture.
Clinton depended on that very trait while working crowds in Claremont after Gennifer Flowers jolted his presidential ambition with credible accusations of infidelity. He spoke at a trade school in Chatham after evidence emerged that he dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. The night of New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary, when he finished second, Clinton pronounced himself "the Comeback Kid" from a hotel lobby in Merrimack.
On the Ides of March in 1994, Clinton returned to his happy place. Seeking to escape the White House "bubble," in which reporters are literally roped inside a protective wall, I went to New Hampshire a day early to see if Clinton was correctly reading the room, so to speak.
The New Hampshirites I talked to didn't gush over Clinton -- gushing isn't really their style -- but the president's instincts were on the money. At the Apple Tree Book Shop in Concord, proprietor Eric Griffel told me that he hadn't heard anyone, friend or customer, make a single remark about Whitewater.
I heard similar observations in three New Hampshire cities. Although voters harbored nagging doubts about Bill Clinton's character, they conveyed a strong sense that they had other, more pressing, things on their minds.
"The economy," said Ashton E. Welch, the 51-year-old executive vice president of the New Hampshire Association of Realtors. "The numbers show things are improving, but every day it seems you hear of more layoffs. Home sales are up, for instance, but my wife has been out of work for two years. If you're a white-collar worker, those jobs aren't coming back."
Welch told me that he had recently advertised for an entry-level government affairs position in his association -- and received 407 applications.
Even fierce critics of the Clintons dismissed Whitewater as a sideshow. "They'll just cover it up," said Kay Dovas, a faithful reader of the ardently conservative Manchester Union Leader newspaper. "But what I want to know about is, where are all these jobs he promised? How's he going to wiggle out of that one? They're boarding up Main Street. The Holiday Inn is going to be auctioned."
When I reminded voters that the unemployment rate in New Hampshire had dipped below 6%, they countered that Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers don't always tell the full story.
At the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office in Concord, a young sergeant told me that he'd sent 33 local volunteers to Parris Island for boot camp, exceeding the goal set by his superior officers. "A lot of them, you know, two years after high school, are still working in a McDonald's," he said. "Jobs with comprehensive benefits, jobs with a future, are few and far between," added a second recruiter.
The people I talked to knew about Whitewater and why Clinton was coming to their state. But they welcomed a change in the political conversation. And not because they were rubes.
"Whenever a president comes, people get excited, but we don't forget ourselves," said Nashua police officer Bob Sullivan. "Once, when Clinton was campaigning here, he parked in front of City Hall -- and I tagged his car."
Sullivan wasn't too interested in Whitewater, however. Instead, he was intensely interested in whether the president was going to follow through on his policy proposals, specifically, his plan to hire 100,000 more police officers and his vision of vastly expanding national service by trading volunteer work for college tuition.
In what would turn out to be a precursor to the scandal that would eventually result in Bill Clinton's impeachment, voter after voter told me some version of this: They had no illusions about Clinton's personal peccadilloes, but were willing to overlook them if he delivered on his vision for jump-starting the economy and giving Americans a more level playing field.
A man named Jack Provost, who ran a Manchester shelter for women and children who lacked housing, basically told me he'd decided to simply ignore Whitewater because he approved of the president's housing policies.
He was a Democrat. But Ashton Welch, the Concord real estate man, was a confirmed Republican, and he said pretty much the same thing about Whitewater and, by extension, the focus of the national press corps.
"It's a big whoop about nothing," he told me. With a trace of pride in New Hampshire's restorative powers, he added: "It's a continuation of the trials and tribulations of the primary. He's going to weather it, so let's get on with things."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.