Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (11 page)

Band came to know more about Clinton than Band knew about anyone else in the world—and probably more about Clinton than anyone else has ever known. “In some part of his mind, he melded them into being one person,” says the Clinton associate. “You thought that if he said something, it was coming from the top. . . . If he called and said, ‘We need tulips for the apartment,’ you assumed it was the president who needed tulips for the apartment.”
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To his enemies within ClintonWorld, Band came to see himself as Clinton’s “equal”—entitled to eat at the most exclusive restaurants, sleep in the ritziest hotels, and carry around rolls of hundred-dollar bills.

Even before he exited the White House, Clinton examined various models to follow in postpresidential life. Unless his life’s ambition was to play golf or paint pictures of birds, there weren’t many great examples among modern presidents. George H. W. Bush understood his time in the spotlight was done and was happy to live a quiet life of luxury with his wife and family. Ronald Reagan gave a couple of speeches when he was out of office but his health left him in bad enough shape that he didn’t have much of a choice but to retire from the spotlight. Gerald Ford moved to the golf course and successfully stayed out of the news.

Clinton read books about former presidents with more active postpresidential lives, most notably John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter. Adams had remained in politics: He’s the only ex-president to really have a political life, serving nearly twenty years in the House of Representatives
after
the White House. Though both Clintons publicly mused that Bill might run for another office someday, that wasn’t really practical. For one, there was Hillary’s career to consider now. Bill’s campaign would just dilute the brand, taking money, attention, and support away from her.

As much as he hated to admit it, the most relevant example came from a man he despised: James Earl Carter Jr.

“Bill Clinton found the prospect of looking to Jimmy Carter totally unattractive,” writes
Clinton
in
Exile
author Carol Felsenthal. “How galling it was to Clinton to give even a moment’s thought to Carter, whom he genuinely disliked—Carter and Clinton had a long, unpleasant history, and the ever-pious Carter made no attempt to keep private his disgust at Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky.”
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Yet Carter’s case was perhaps the most relevant, since he, like Clinton, was a young ex-president and a Democrat in the modern era. The peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, was just fifty-six when he left office; Clinton was fifty-four. Like Clinton, Carter also believed he had much work yet to do and would carry it out as only an ex-president could. So Clinton studied the Carter Center, the do-gooder organization in Carter’s home state of Georgia established to promote human rights, mainly abroad. Clinton also studied the diplomacy and humanitarian work that his fellow former southern Democratic governor had done since leaving the White House.

“It was a brilliant strategic model,” says former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Republican, in an interview. Clinton has managed “to create a cloak of invisibility based on his sincerity and goodness, so whatever he does must be moral and justified.”

“Postpresidencies are wonderful because they get to avoid the big red-button, hot-button controversies,” Ari Fleischer told me. “The Clinton Foundation can focus on feel-good activities, all of which has helped bring President Clinton back.”

One person familiar with Clinton’s postpresidential agenda did not hide the element of cynicism within it. “Look at what a big deal the [Bill & Melinda] Gates Foundation is today,” he says by way of example. “But you also have to take into account why and how it started, right. I mean the Gates Foundation started as an antidote to the bad press he was getting by what he did as it relates to the antitrust stuff [involving Microsoft]. . . . Carter was largely the same in a way—to counterbalance what he did as a lackluster president.”

There were a few differences between the Carter and Clinton approaches, however. As one associate familiar with the projects put it to me, “President Carter does five hundred different things, but the Clinton model was to be more effective in a few things, more narrowly.” Those issues included a focus on global development and HIV/AIDS.

Also unlike Carter, Clinton had another primary motivating factor besides rebuilding his reputation: money. Lots and lots of it. Not having money wasn’t new for Clinton. He was always a poor man. He was born to a single mother in Hope, Arkansas, mere months after his father drowned in a ditch after losing control of his car. Clinton’s mother did her best to raise him by herself, but would often rely on his grandparents to watch him and raise him. Clinton’s grandfather worked two jobs: running a grocery store and, at night, being a watchman at a local sawmill, according to Clinton’s retelling of his family history.

Clinton “grew up feeling” the Depression, and with it came a sense of poverty and unease about money.
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It was a feeling that would follow him the rest of his life, and was particularly present when he left the White House. At that time, Clinton is believed to have had about $12 million in unpaid legal fees as a result of the various investigations into his affair with Monica Lewinsky, sexual harassment charges from Paula Jones, the Whitewater investigation, and other scandals that had embroiled him. Getting impeached had taken a financial toll on the president and his family.

It was his duty, he believed, to repay these debts and to ensure that he’d never be in such a financial situation again. And, because he was so unsure of his health even in the immediate years after leaving the White House, he wanted to provide for his family—more than enough to live on, just in case his health failed him and he unexpectedly died.

He’d do what he had done to get him this far in life already: a combination of joining his gift of gab with his ability to bring important people together into the same room to work toward a similar goal. But instead of making laws and political deals, now the primary focus would be to make money.

“No matter how much money he has, it’s never gonna be enough, because he was so poor at one point,” says a former aide. Filling his coffers with money is his way to make up for a childhood where he felt deprived, the aide reflects, and Clinton will embroil himself in all sorts of questionable deals in the pursuit of wealth. Money is the latest of Bill Clinton’s many addictions.

In 1989, after President Ronald Reagan left office, he received scathing criticism in the press for his decision to receive a $2 million speaking fee during a visit to Japan. The
Los Angeles Times
was among many in offering the opinion that “the main impression to be overcome is that he has been inappropriately cashing in on his eight-year presidency.”
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His postpresidential approval ratings tumbled. Reagan had nothing on Bill Clinton, who has cashed in on his time in public service to build a financial and political empire. Leaving office, Clinton would once again lower the bar for what was considered acceptable behavior, with only occasional scrutiny from the press.

The former president has earned well over $100 million in speaking fees, according to some estimates, including $17 million in one year alone. (A typical fee for a speaking appearance is $250,000.) He received a $15 million advance for his 2004 autobiography,
My Life
, which, reflecting its author, was largely considered a bulky, self-absorbed tome with moments of sparkle and brilliance.

Following Carter’s lead, Clinton established a number of do-gooder foundations. The first was the William J. Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit established in 2001 and dedicated to issues including “health security; economic empowerment; leadership development and citizen service; and racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation.” The second was the Clinton Global Initiative, established in 2005 with the mission of “conven[ing] global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.”

Clinton was also nurturing a political organization and assembling a coalition that would be ready for Hillary. In contrast to most former presidents, who were known to campaign on occasion for various big-name candidates, Bill Clinton stayed involved in a “huge number of political campaigns,” a former high-level Clinton aide tells me. “He’ll go out and do fund-raisers for people running for state senate and Congress and Senate and other things. They’ve kept their network very much alive that they cultivated when he was running for president the first time, even before he was running for president. If you look at some of the fund-raising he’s done for state and local candidates and even getting involved in races from time to time, that you wouldn’t necessarily think he’d get involved in, it’s pretty extraordinary.”

The aide added, “He knows every congressional district in the country. Clinton could go toe-to-toe with that guy around each district and what the dynamics are. It’s something he’s spent a lifetime thinking about and living. I think it’s just a passion, for lack of a better word.”

Maintaining this network had dual purposes for Bill Clinton. For one, Clinton is a natural barnstormer who loves making an argument before a cheering crowd of supporters. But the other reason was of course more personal. As one senior aide to the outgoing president told me, “he felt he owed Hillary the presidency.” This and Chelsea were what really held them together. The duo always kept their options open for a return to the White House, an opportunity that might present itself in 2004, when George W. Bush would likely seek a second term. But first there was a problem that the Clintons needed to overcome.

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Charm Offensives

“When Clinton was president, the common media portrayal from relatively hostile media was that Clinton was this lovable Bubba who was charming and a rascally rogue who just could manipulate people, but not very bright kind of people. But Hillary was this unpleasant grind . . . If anything, the exact opposite is true.”

—Michael Medved

Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of groups such as the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, her vocal opposition to Bush administration policies, and her continued belief in the need to counter the “vast right-wing conspiracy” were not feints. She remained a committed liberal throughout her Senate tenure, voting to raise taxes more than 232 times, opposing conservative judges nominated by President Bush to the bench, including Supreme Court justices John Roberts (the chief justice) and Samuel Alito, and eventually opposing the Iraq War, despite first supporting it. Her poll numbers reflected this. In the Gallup polls, her numbers were disastrous for anyone seeking to win the White House by appealing to independent voters. Her unfavorables were consistently in the mid- to upper 40s. Among independents she fared only slightly better. Among Republicans she was easily one of the most unpopular politicians in America. Gallup recorded her unfavorable ratings among that group consistently in the 70s and 80s. If Hillary had any hope of seeking higher office, she needed to do something to at least soften her image as a brittle, harsh leftist radical and win over a few center-right votes.

What has been little understood in the past decade, from 2001 to the present, is how successfully the Clintons undertook a systematic, comprehensive, and sustained effort to win over leaders in the GOP, especially figures who were once their biggest critics. In return, both Clintons were able to develop a bipartisan, statesmanlike image that had eluded them through eight years in the White House.

Hillary’s difficulties with the right were well earned. Not only had she famously raged against a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but she led efforts to wage a counteroffensive against them. As was revealed during the impeachment investigations, the Clintons hired private investigators to look into the personal lives of their political enemies. At one point, their dishonesty about these efforts won the ire of press secretary Mike McCurry. “On several occasions, McCurry threatened to quit if they kept deceiving him—once, early in the year when they misled him about whether they were using private investigators to research Clinton enemies and, more recently, when [White House counsel Chuck] Ruff refused to tell him whether Starr had issued a subpoena for the president’s testimony,” the
Washington Post
’s Peter Baker reported.
1

The Clintons also got lucky in who their enemies were. For the most prominent congressional Republicans during the Clinton administration—who tried to find out just how many laws the Clintons had broken, or who voted to impeach or convict the president of his crimes—decline, defeat, or disgrace awaited them. The aging and once widely respected Henry Hyde, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee, was outed as an adulterer, his sterling reputation tarnished. Also exposed were affairs by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who resigned; by Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, who would have replaced him; and by Dan Burton, the Indiana congressman who exhibited an almost Javert-like determination to uncover Clintonian duplicity and dirty dealings.

Thus what Hillary Clinton pulled off with her Republican Senate colleagues was nothing short of masterful. I spoke to many, if not all, of Senator Clinton’s biggest opponents within the Republican Party during her time as First Lady. On or off the record, no matter how much they were coaxed, not one of them would say a negative thing about Hillary Clinton as a person—other than observing that her Democratic allies sometimes didn’t like her. Their love affair with Hillary—at least in their private conversations—probably says more about their susceptibility to flattery and praise than it does about her personality. But it also demonstrates the difficulty her likely 2016 Republican challengers will face in trying to build a coalition against her. Hillary Clinton has built a virtual dossier of praise and support from Republican colleagues who might publicly denounce her for political purposes but in private seem to downright like her. That work began in the United States Senate.

To the surprise of many observers, Hillary Clinton seemed to work hardest to ingratiate herself to those who only recently had voted to throw her husband out of office during impeachment proceedings. She threw a baby shower for Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who had adopted a child.
2
She attended prayer breakfasts with a mostly evangelical crowd of right-wing Republicans, including Sam Brownback of Kansas, who memorably confessed to hating her and asked for her forgiveness. (She gave it gladly.)
3

One of the managers of the Clinton impeachment, Republican congressman Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, was nominated by George W. Bush as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. To his evident surprise, Senator Clinton voted in favor of his confirmation. Working with her, Hutchinson told me, was “always a joy. On the homeland security issue she was very supportive of what I was trying to do. And we had a very good working relationship.”

“I was very critical of [Bill] Clinton during the impeachment,” says another Republican Senate colleague, who requested to speak on background so that he could be more honest. “I didn’t go over the top, but I was critical. She didn’t seem to hold a grudge about that.”

“From a personal standpoint—as far as personality is concerned—I think she’s highly regarded by a lot of leaders around the world,” former Republican Indiana congressman Dan Burton, one of the fiercest champions of impeachment, told me recently in an interview. “That doesn’t mean that I think that the decisions that have been made are the right ones.”

“She was a very active member of the Senate and reached out across party lines, for obvious reasons of trying to get bipartisan support but also in a thoughtful way,” Georgia Republican senator Johnny Isakson said during an interview in his Senate office. “I remember, in particular, when we were doing TARP and some of the other things during the depth of the financial crisis, because of my background in housing and the tax credit that we had passed earlier on, she sought me out on a number of occasions, asked some very insightful questions that I could answer because of my experience. She was a very engaged member of the Senate and was a good senator.”

Other Republicans remembered her as sharp and occasionally playful. Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee chairman during the Clinton administration, who was then serving as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs for George W. Bush, recalls his department’s effort to shutter a veterans hospital in Canandaigua, New York. The facility was in an area of the state Hillary frequented when she was first campaigning for the Senate, and Senator Clinton was determined to lobby him to keep it open.

The duo met on a small love seat just outside the Senate chamber, where Clinton could plead her case between Senate votes. At one point the Senate clock buzzed, indicating an imminent vote, and members began streaming toward the chamber. Many passed the tiny couch, glancing with surprise at the cozy closeness between the Democrat and the Republican publicly known as one of the Clinton administration’s biggest opponents while party chairman.

“She’s sitting here, and I’m sitting here,” Nicholson says, pointing to tiny spaces very close together. “Cheek to cheek,” he says, “cheek to jowl.”

As startled Republican senators walked by, some stopped and gawked.

Hillary thought it was funny. “I’m really going to get you in a lot of trouble,” she said. Nicholson laughed. She also made a dogged case to the veterans secretary that proved to be forceful and data driven. And in the end she won.

“There was not enough political will to close the hospital, so we came up with a plan to make it a center of excellence for some . . . I think traumatic brain injury research,” Nicholson says years later. “So, it’s still open. It’s underutilized, and very expensive, but it’s a lovely facility.”

Other Senate staff members recalled an instance when Senator Jon Kyl, a staunch conservative from Arizona, hosted a press conference for an immigration bill he was sponsoring. The bill sought federal funds to help cover the costs of emergency-room care for illegal immigrants. A number of Democrats had signed on to the bill, including Clinton. None, however, was expected to attend the press conference, particularly since it was being held in the office of the Republican Policy Committee. Populated by brainy conservatives and with a mission to undermine efforts of Democrats, the RPC was one of the more partisan operations in the Senate.

Staff members stood agape therefore when Hillary Clinton walked right through the front door. “She was walking into the Death Star, basically,” one Senate aide recalls. “The ground zero of Hillary hating. People had their mouths open.” Clinton had come to support Kyl’s legislation and say a few words for the cameras. Not a single person in the room had expected her. Nearly all of them had considered Hillary Clinton as Public Enemy No. 1 of the Democratic caucus. And yet there she was.

One senator with whom Clinton became particularly close was the hawkish John McCain. “Hillary and I developed a very friendly relationship,” McCain acknowledges in a conversation in his Senate office. “She’s a very smart person, extremely smart person, and she immediately joined the Armed Services Committee, because that was what was not in her resume, and she went out of her way to have a relationship with me.”

“He respects her,” says longtime McCain advisor Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant and another erstwhile Republican opponent of the Clintons. “And McCain and Hillary like each other. They get along. He respects her. She’s tough. She’s everything that McCain likes. She’s funny. She’s smart. And she respects McCain.”

Almost by necessity, Senator Clinton also befriended another of her husband’s impeachment managers, Lindsey Graham, so close to John McCain that the two are the Senate equivalent of Bert and Ernie. One Republican colleague remembers Graham acting almost fanatical about his latest celebrity friend. “I remember he’d always say, ‘Well, Hillary said this,’ or ‘Hillary said that.’ ”

To McCain’s delight, Clinton also developed a reputation as practical and hawkish, which played well among the entire Republican delegation. She voted for the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. She even resisted calls in late 2005 for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, prompting the director of the liberal organization MoveOn.org to accuse her of “cowardice in the face of the right-wing noise machine.” But Hillary’s war views appear to have been ones of political calculation, rather than belief. Her colleague in the Obama administration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, now retired from government service, made headlines in 2014 by revealing that Hillary had confided to him that her opposition to the surge of forces into Iraq in 2007 had been motivated by her presidential aspirations. Gates wrote, “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary.”
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In her ingratiation efforts, Senator Clinton benefited from her stiff and unapproachable public image. Republicans expected the Cruella de Vil of Chappaqua. She startled them instead by appearing knowledgeable, quick-witted, and mischievous. Her personal qualities do not tend to come across in public settings—such as speeches and press conferences—but they are an underestimated strength in one-on-one encounters.

Michael Medved, the conservative talk radio host and a fellow student at Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton, offered similar notes in an interview for this book. “When Clinton was president, the common media portrayal from relatively hostile media was that Clinton was this lovable Bubba who was charming and a rascally rogue who just could manipulate people, but not very bright kind of people. But Hillary was this unpleasant grind, who was absolutely brilliant, with this kind of mega-mind and she was the brains behind the outfit, the ideological commitment behind the outfit. That was the conventional portrayal. . . . If anything, the exact opposite is true,” he told me. “And I think anyone who knew them in law school will tell you that. That Bill was much less likable than Hillary; Hillary was intensely likable,” Medved says. “In fact, to this day I don’t know anyone, literally not anyone, who didn’t like her, find her warm, sympathetic, a manifestly good person, well-meaning person, not full of herself, not puffed up at all, down-to-earth, and a good friend.”

Though neither would welcome the comparison, Medved likened Hillary to Rush Limbaugh. “She is one of those people, the two people that I have been privileged to know where it’s most striking that they are in person much, much nicer than their critics think, are Hillary Clinton and Rush Limbaugh. Rush is also an intensely nice guy and a good guy and somebody who is trustworthy and loyal to his friends.”

Echoing her “listening tour” when she ran for Senate, Hillary made an effort to appear to be trying to hear and understand the views of her political opponents. Michael Novak, a conservative Democrat and well-regarded Catholic writer, recalled for me his appearance at Renaissance Weekend, an annual event that the Clintons attended in Hilton Head, South Carolina, at which gathered policy wonks to debate the issues of the day. Mrs. Clinton, Novak recalled, made a point of putting him and another conservative Democratic colleague, the former speechwriter Ben Wattenberg, right beside her at her table. “I thought it was quite remarkable that out of all the people in the crowd she put two of perhaps the most conservative Democrats in the room [beside her],” he said. “Ben and I both formed the judgment she was much more to the left in her thinking—if not her acting—than either of us thought wise there for the Democratic Party or for her.”