Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (17 page)

There is evidence that even today Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Bush have hardly ingratiated her with the Bush family, as her husband has done so successfully. (In a 2012 interview, Barbara Bush would say, coolly, “We really have spent no time with her.”)

Barbara Bush’s skepticism extends to her brainy son, Jeb, the one she hoped would have been elected to the presidency.

“[Bill]’s been incredibly gracious to our dad,” the former president once said, “and if somebody is gracious to our father, he ingratiates himself to us.”
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Suggesting a self-interested motivation to Clinton’s outreach, the former Florida governor said, “President Clinton’s advisors have figured out that, in terms of character and integrity, a rising tide lifts all boats. So I could see President Clinton’s motivation.”
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In an email to family members that was leaked to the public in 2013, Jeb wrote that his father “helped restore [Clinton’s] sordid reputation” and “probably helped Bill Clinton [more] than anything [Clinton] himself has done.” It’s not clear whether Jeb thought that was a good thing.
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Many other Republicans certainly don’t. One former Republican officeholder says, “They legitimized him. They moved him from the left to the center. And from that point on, he hasn’t looked back.”

Superficial or not, the Bush-Clinton pairing has now won the praise and approval of the mainstream media. Which means the relationship has proven so beneficial to both the Bush and Clinton “brands” that it is not likely to end anytime soon, even as the 2016 election approaches. Indeed, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have begun delivering speeches together across the country (for a reported hefty sum).

In the fall of 2013, Hillary Clinton joined her fellow honorary cochair of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council: former first lady Laura Bush, whose own political ideology has always fit more comfortably with the Democratic Party. The event was hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, whose honorary cochair is Hillary Clinton herself—and the executive director is Melanne Verveer, who was the debut U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues.
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“The most single damaging thing the Bush family has done to politics was to resuscitate Bill and Hillary Clinton and give them a bipartisan veneer,” says Newt Gingrich in our interview. Given the fact that Bush was as radioactive to the left as the Clintons were to the right, the very public demonstration of bipartisanship between the country’s two most famous political families would only help them. “For their own reasons, the Bush people thought having Clinton with his father would be clever,” the former Speaker noted. “They’re right. The consequence may be a Hillary Clinton presidency.” That might have happened by now, had the Clintons not underestimated a young African American senator with a short résumé but long ambitions.

5

Death Defiers

“I don’t get it. Can you tell me what it is about this guy?”

—Hillary Clinton, 2008

Destiny beckoned Hillary Rodham Clinton. She had waited her turn. She had stood by her husband for the best and especially the worst—those most abhorrently humiliating moments. She had been the political spouse, a largely ceremonial role that she tried (and largely failed) to parlay into something greater. She had served for one full term as a senator from New York and handily won reelection for a second. Now was her time.

The timing suited the most well-known Democrat in the nation. The two-party system in the United States tends to swing like a pendulum, giving power to Republicans, then Democrats, and back and forth. It didn’t take high-paid political consultants—though she had plenty of them on her payroll—to determine that after two terms of the unpopular George W. Bush, a Democrat would have to be favored right off the bat to win the 2008 presidential election. And the Democrats needed her, of course—or at least that was clearly what she believed. They had lost the last presidential elections with wooden liberal elitists, Al Gore and John Kerry. Now they had a chance to make history with a woman.

According to the political punditry, as thick in Washington as cornfields are in Iowa, a Clinton nomination was inevitable. As one “prominent Democratic operative” told the
New York Times
in May 2006, “I do think she’s inevitable as the nominee, or pretty close to it. Put it this way: she’s as strong a front-runner as any non-incumbent presidential candidate has been in modern history.”
1
Columnist Bob Herbert, who quoted that operative, would write, “Many of [the political] strategists and party bigwigs—not all, but many—speak as though there is something inevitable about Mrs. Clinton ascending to the nomination.”
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Few in the know gave any of Senator Clinton’s potential rivals much of a chance. There was Joe Biden, a creature of the Senate, who came from the tiny state of Delaware, a bumbler who’d immediately begin the election by apologizing for racially insensitive comments toward another rival, Barack Obama. There was Chris Dodd, the senator from liberal and small Connecticut, who didn’t have much of any notoriety outside the halls of Congress. There was John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate for Kerry’s run, who was considered a lightweight pretty boy who had probably run for president one time too many. There was Dennis Kucinich, who knew full well he wouldn’t be elected but who wanted to drag the race leftward and make sure the most liberal parts of the Democratic Party had a voice. There was Bill Richardson, who modeled himself after Bill Clinton but lacked the former president’s intelligence and charm while having similar baggage when it came to womanizing. And there was Barack Obama, the well-spoken senator from Illinois, who had served only a couple of years on the national stage and whose most famous moment to date was a speech he had given at the 2004 Democratic convention. He was running, the conventional wisdom went, to bolster his credibility for a more serious presidential bid in the future.

None of these people posed a threat, at least in the collective mind of Hillaryland. They were blind to the Democratic Party’s deep-seated resentment toward her and her husband, ignoring shots across their bow by people like Howard Dean. And while Hillary had been busy making friends with the Republicans in the Senate, the resentment from those most ideologically aligned with her only grew. All of which would soon become apparent to the president-in-waiting.

She announced on January 20, 2007, two years to the day before she expected to be sworn into office. Speaking on her campaign website from a gold-colored sofa in her adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., Hillary sat alone. Talking into the cameras, the multimillionaire portrayed herself as a champion of the middle class, telling viewers, “I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, and we believed in that promise. I still do. I’ve spent my entire life trying to make good on it, whether it was fighting for women’s basic rights or children’s basic health care, protecting our social security or protecting our soldiers.”

In her remarks she followed the guidelines set up by Mark Penn, a moderate Democrat who had served as Bill Clinton’s pollster for six years while he was in the White House. During that time, he became one of the president’s most prominent and influential advisors. In 2000, the
Washington Post
concluded in a news analysis that no pollster had ever become “so thoroughly integrated into the policymaking operation” of a presidential administration as had Penn.
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From 2000 on, Penn transferred his services from one CEO of Clinton, Inc. to the other, serving as Hillary’s chief pollster in both of her successful runs for the Senate. Few people were as close to both Clintons as he was, and he was said to have bragged about his access, “a source of jealousy and suspicion among other senior staff,” reported
Vanity Fair
.
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Penn believed Clinton’s campaign should rally a coalition of voters he called “Invisible Americans,” a group that included women and the middle class.
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She ran as the candidate of experience. A tough and policy-minded Democratic Margaret Thatcher. That strategy appeared to be successful, at least at the outset. For most of 2007 she led all polls by double-digit margins. One Gallup poll released in October, for example, had her ahead of Obama, 50 percent to his 21.
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In an accompanying release, Gallup’s chief pollsters noted that “Clinton holds a commanding lead among nearly every major subgroup of potential Democratic primary voters. Some of her strongest showings are among women, nonwhites, those in lower-income households, those with less formal education, and Southerners.”

What the polls didn’t detect was the deep underlying resentment toward her among the Democratic base. The first to break free from the Clinton chokehold were the millionaires of Hollywood—which was logical, since they more than anyone had the power and financial means to separate from the Clintons with little repercussion. David Geffen, the Hollywood mega-mogul and former Clinton donor, was among the early defectors, lashing out at the Clintons in personal terms in a dishy interview published by Clinton nemesis Maureen Dowd, the snarky
New York Times
columnist. He labeled Hillary’s campaign “overproduced and overscripted,” in Dowd’s words. The years of Clintonian mendacity had not been forgotten. “Everybody in politics lies,” he said, “but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
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As one high-dollar Democratic donor explained to me, again under condition of anonymity, she and her friends felt betrayed by President Clinton. They felt like he had the perfect opportunity: It was a time between the end of the Cold War and before September 11, 2001. It was, for the first time in years, a period of relative peace. And markets were booming—the Internet was taking off, job growth was explosive, and there was much hope. It was Bill Clinton who was president over all this, a talented and impressive smooth-talking Southerner, and his liberal allies hoped that he could use the moment to accomplish big things—universal health care and a lasting liberalism. They were hoping that he’d be to Democrats what Ronald Reagan had become to Republicans. And instead he squandered it. Because he couldn’t keep his pants on—and got caught with the intern. Because he couldn’t run a White House without persistent and crippling chaos. And because in reality he never lived up to the potential so many of his supporters saw in him. Hillary, when she finally hit the trail, wouldn’t live up to the billing, either. Those willing to toss her overboard just needed to find another captain to steer their ship. They found him in the bitter cold of Iowa.

For whatever reason, the prim midwesterners of Iowa had never really warmed to the Clintons. Lingering memories of the Lewinsky scandal and the Clintons’ other personal foibles did little to help. Unlike nationwide polls, where Clinton still enjoyed a wide lead, she was in a dogfight in the state with John Edwards, who had been working Iowa for years, and a surprisingly confident Barack Obama. In mid-2007 some polls had her behind both men. Worrying about the potential for a surprise loss for the “inevitable” nominee, a senior Clinton campaign aide, Mike Henry, suggested she bypass the state altogether. The memo suggesting that Clinton turn her back on Iowans, which was leaked to the
New York Times
by a rival campaign, only made Clinton’s prospects in the state that much shakier.
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On January 3, 2008, a state that was over 90 percent white propelled Barack Obama to a shocking victory, demonstrating nationwide that the country was ready to elect an African American to the White House. (As polls had been predicting, Clinton found herself with a humiliating third-place finish.)

The Iowa victory made the prospect of the first African American president more of a reality than ever—and those eager to shuck themselves of the Clintons climbed aboard the Obama bandwagon almost instantly. Suddenly Hillary was facing a totally different race. Her once-strong lead in New Hampshire, which was to hold the next contest, crumbled. On the eve of the balloting, she was behind Obama in some polls by as many as 10 points. As CNN reported, “That’s a dramatic reversal from the last CNN/WMUR New Hampshire poll taken after Christmas and just before the Iowa caucuses, when Clinton beat Obama in electability by a two to one margin.”
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Just like that, Hillary Clinton was inches—or to be precise, one more election—from her political grave.

Her advisors knew she would never recover from a second consecutive defeat by a political novice. If Obama won both early contests, along with the likelihood of a third victory in the African-American-vote-rich South Carolina, which was the next primary on the calendar, then the race would be all but over. She would almost certainly be out of the race within days—her money would dry up, her endorsements would disappear. She would be what her husband never was, even in his (many) embarrassing moments on the national stage: a loser. And to make the sting worse, the final blow would be struck by the people of New Hampshire, the same voters who had revived her husband’s political fortunes during his 1992 campaign for the presidency, when he battled charges of adultery and draft dodging. Worse for Clinton, CNN’s pollsters reported that Obama had polled even with Clinton among female voters, “a voting bloc that she once dominated in the polls.”
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So she did what a woman is never supposed to do in national politics. She cried before dozens of television cameras. Intended or not, the moment touched the shriveled hearts of the Democratic voters who were abandoning her. The frosty shrew, as she was characterized in focus groups, showed she had a heart after all.

Up until that point, Mrs. Clinton ran as the Queen of the Democratic Establishment. She was programmed, protected, and robotic. Which is to say her campaign was almost from the outset on the wrong footing.

Her performance in 2008 won bipartisan scorn from veteran political pundits. “She’s always been a problematic candidate,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy tells me. “Her 2008 race was not very impressive. She kind of blew the lead to Obama.”

“I actually thought that when she was off the script, she was much better than when she was on the script,” says Bob Shrum. “Now, part of that was because the script was entirely wrong. She ran as a candidate of restoration in a period of change. . . . The day before the New Hampshire primary, when she cried, and people said, ‘Oh my God, she cried. It’s a disaster,’ I think voters liked it, and said, ‘I’ve seen a glimpse of who she really is.’ ”

Defying the polls and defeating Barack Obama by 2.5 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary, the Clintons also had defied death. Again. The most remarkable political comeback in American history journeyed forward, onward, upward, the presidency still in Hillary’s reach. The key to her comeback, which startled most Washington reporters, was women, who at the last minute switched back to Clinton by a margin of 13 points over Obama. “Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice,” Hillary proclaimed to an enthusiastic crowd in Manchester. “I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I’m so glad that you responded. Now together let’s give America the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me.”

For the first time since entering the race, Hillary Clinton was back on track. But first she had to get past Barack Obama—the guy she credited herself with helping get elected to the U.S. Senate only three years earlier.

Never one with a keen political antenna, Hillary was more confused than angry by Obama’s improbable rise. At a private dinner in Los Angeles shortly after her come-from-behind New Hampshire victory, she put it bluntly. “I don’t get it,” she said. She managed a passable imitation of Obama’s speaking style—hitting just the right notes of haughtiness passing for sincerity, and mocking his content-free happy talk—“We’re the change we’ve been waiting for.” That was the kind of speech a graduating college student might make—not a serious candidate for the highest office in the land. In fact it sounded a lot like a young Hillary Rodham at Wellesley College in 1969. She grimaced at the insanity of it all.

For Hillary Clinton’s supporters knew something about her colleague that many other Democrats seemed to (or wanted to) miss: As a politician, Obama was overrated to a perhaps unprecedented degree. As a person, he was a bloodless bore. In fact, Hillary’s own public caricature—arrogant, ponderous, chilly—was not really how she came across to her friends. Those adjectives did, however, describe the private just-above-room-temperature Obama. Perfectly.

Voters got a glimpse of the real Obama in the days before the New Hampshire primary. When Mrs. Clinton was bluntly asked by a moderator why voters didn’t seem to like her as much as Obama, her rival was given an opportunity to say something cheerful and gracious. Instead Obama responded with faint, seemingly mean-spirited praise. “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” he said coldly. It was another Rick Lazio moment—another man patronizing her, and the Clinton campaign made the most of it in New Hampshire.