. . . And Then Came Carrot Cake

By MARGARET CARLSON WASHINGTON

Forty-eight hours after he gave one of the worst speeches of his life, one that precipitated the biggest one-day drop in the stock market in 16 months, President Clinton delivered one of his best. Unlike the quickly put together 10-minute effort from the Oval Office, the address to Congress would be worked on in marathon sessions for two solid days.

Two weeks earlier, the President had called Paul Begala, the aide who greeted him as he emerged from the shower every morning from New Hampshire on, and asked him to duplicate the campaign war room at the White House, this time to sell his economic plan to the country. One of Begala's worst moments came when he, communications director George Stephanopoulos and Gene Sperling, deputy assistant for economic policy, met with the President in the Oval Office on Tuesday evening with less than 24 hours to go to review the latest version of the speech. Sperling, who had barely slept since the Bush Administration, was looking so sick that Begala moved to another couch to avoid catching something. How, he wondered, could they meet the President's truth-in-budgeting requirement if the key link between the wordsmiths and the propeller heads hammering out the numbers in the Roosevelt Room was having a near death experience?

After furiously scribbling down every change Clinton wanted, Begala and company returned to the Old Executive Office Building, where they propped Sperling up in a soft chair and covered him with all the jackets and scarves in sight. Throughout the night, the slumbering economist, who had begun to resemble Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, would be consulted. "Hey, Gene," communications deputy David Dreyer would shout, "how much does a surcharge on millionaires pick up?" Sperling would mumble some number, and they would let him go back to sleep.

Meanwhile, Clinton would take his only break, grabbing his friend from Arkansas, Harry Thomason, and heading for the residence bowling alley. The President squeezed his size-13 feet into the size-10 shoes left by the Bush Administration and shared the one ball for three games until the blisters began to form. Upstairs, amid a growing mound of coffee cups, pizza boxes from Listrani's and burn bags filled with discarded drafts, the team was trying to compress Clinton's huge vision for America into a size-10 Treasury. By dawn Wednesday, there was a crisp stack of pages on Clinton's desk to be torn apart.

Begala and the team got together with the President after he wrapped up his lunch in which he prespun the network news anchors who would be giving instant analysis on a speech that at that point consisted of pieces of paper scattered the length of the table. At 2 p.m. there was little economics in the first 11 pages. The President talked through a passage about having to play the hand you're dealt after 20 years of exploding debt. "A big part of the job," says Begala, "is being able to take dictation. I always remember I'm the monkey and he's the organ-grinder."

By 6:30, the President came to the screening room in the residence with time for only one run-through. The tough passages about taxes and spending had been moved up four pages, but the President laughed at the new ending. "I had written about 'these precious moments,' " Begala recalls, "and he says, 'Paul, do you want me to start dancing up there?' " Begala had inadvertently written in a line from a popular song in the '70s, When Will I See You Again. Clinton told Begala to play with the notion of CARPE DIEM, written across a sweatshirt Begala's mother had given him. As Clinton headed to the family quarters to shower and change, Begala rushed to the word processor outside scheduler Nancy Hernreich's office to fiddle with language about seizing the day, decipher Clinton's marginal notes and find a numbers person. So many people were crowded into this cubicle -- speechwriter David Kusnet, Stephanopoulos, the crew from the war room who had not left the compound since Sunday -- that it looked like the Marx Brothers' stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Hillary Clinton was reworking some of the jargon in the middle of the speech with economic adviser Robert Rubin. The motorcade was forming on the South Lawn.

By the time the computer disk was ready to be hand-carried to Capitol Hill, where it would be fed into the TelePrompTer, Clinton had already climbed into the limo with Hillary. They reconciled the penultimate draft with Begala's last attempt at a conclusion as they rode to the Capitol. Begala got into the van with Stephanopoulos, grateful that Clinton is always his own best speechwriter.

About a quarter of Clinton's address was improvised, including the ad-libbed aside to snickering Republicans who doubted his estimated deficit numbers. The meal with the anchors paid off, as to a man, they praised the performance in the postgame analysis. Afterward, in the cloakroom, the President allowed himself a quiet, "Pretty good, wasn't it?"

Back at the White House, the President hollered for Begala to gather "the kids," as Clinton refers to his thirtysomething gaggle of aides, and come up to the solarium for a party. By 11:30 p.m. Mrs. Clinton had said goodnight to Chelsea and joined the group. The carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting was all gone, and cherry pie had magically taken its place, like so much that happens in the White House. The President invited Begala to join him in the screening room for a movie, but in the interest of sleeping and getting packed for the road show that was to start in the morning, he declined. Not so Hillary. Well after midnight, the President grabbed her, and they headed off to watch a rerun on C-Span of the hours-old hit everyone in the country was talking about.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington