Word: hammerschmidt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...enough to turn down other offers (for instance, to be on the House staff for impeaching Nixon). He meant to run for office, but not locally -- this was the Republican corner of Arkansas, after all. But as the 1974 race approached, the popular Congressman from that area, John Paul Hammerschmidt, strongly vouched for Nixon, who was under fire for the Watergate offenses. Clinton knew, from his close friend Hillary Rodham, how vulnerable Nixon was to impeachment -- she had accepted the offer to work on the staff that he refused. The two were visiting each other, back and forth between Washington...
Clinton became convinced that Nixon would take Hammerschmidt down with him, and he began to canvass his new friends in and around the university for a candidate to run against Hammerschmidt -- he wanted a Democrat who planned to live permanently in the district. But when no one else would do it, he announced his own candidacy. As a young law professor with '60s-style hair, a Yale and Oxford background and liberal cohorts from the university on his team, he should have been an easy loser in this enclave of the state's few Republicans. But he ran surprisingly well...
...unexpected showing against Hammerschmidt gave Clinton the statewide attention he turned into electoral victories for attorney general (1976) and then for Governor (1978), offices that took him to the very center of the state, where the Arkansas River divides uplands from lowlands, Ozarks from Mississippi rice. He had, in effect, been circling this place for years, aiming at the power center of the state...