Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (20 page)

By law, Media Matters for America is a tax-exempt organization that cannot back political candidates. Nonetheless, the David Brock–run operation became an all-but-official supporter of the Clinton campaign, there to “expose” Obama supporters in the press and defend her against controversies of all kinds.

In December 2007, for example, Media Matters went after MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, as they would throughout the election season, for his apparent preference for Obama over Clinton. So determined was the organization that it examined “every evaluative remark Matthews made on MSNBC’s
Hardball
during the months of September, October, and November” and concluded that Matthews was “extremely hostile toward Hillary Clinton.” On January 4, 2008, the organization defended Clinton against a panelist’s assertion on Fox News that her “nagging voice” was turning off men. Again, on March 11, 2008, it defended her against accusations that she had implied Obama was a Muslim. (She had denied he was a Muslim during a television interview while slyly adding, “as far as I know.”) “When people suggest that the press employs a separate standard for covering Clinton, this is the kind of episode they’re talking about,” the website complained. “There simply is no other candidate, from either party, who has had their comments, their
fragments
, dissected so dishonestly the way Clinton’s have been.”

The conservative-leaning website the
Daily Caller
would later report that “[f]ormer employees of the liberal messaging organization have told [the
Daily Caller
] that Brock, a well-known supporter of the former first lady, was often in communication with her presidential campaign during 2008 and was in regular email contact with longtime Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal as recently as 2010. . . . Indeed, from the time that Obama announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, until Edwards dropped out on January 30, 2008, Media Matters ran 1199 posts for Clinton and only 700 for Obama. 378 posts mentioned Edwards.”

These were the exceptions, however. Much of the media, enamored with Obama’s candidacy and (momentarily) relieved at the prospect of paying back the Clintons for a decade of bullying and rough treatment by their media team, seemed only delighted to pile on. The defections of the media and Senate Democrats hurt the Clintons. But Hillary also had another surprising weakness or, more accurately, the same old vulnerability that had dogged her for more than a decade: a renegade husband.

6

Out of Control

“If she becomes president, Clinton’s fucked. He’s gonna be the guy that got a blow job and was impeached.”

—senior aide on Bill Clinton’s 2008 “sabotage”

While Hillary struggled against a surprisingly resilient foe, Bill Clinton was making more disastrous headlines. For one, his complex and largely mysterious financial relationship with Ron Burkle came to a bitter and well-publicized end—news that broke right in the middle of Hillary’s primary fight. The former president was said to be demanding a $20 million payout from Burkle in exchange for ending the relationship. Meanwhile, his ties with Burkle were raising questions about conflicts of interest between the Clintons and scores of foreign entities with which Burkle’s fund did business, such as the government of Dubai.
1

Hillary was having money troubles of her own. She had raised over $100 million for the 2008 race and had spent it all by January, due to a top-heavy campaign organization and an unexpectedly tough Obama challenge.
2
By February, she was in the embarrassing position of having to loan her campaign $5 million while Obama continued to rake in record sums from donors.
3
Fortunately, her husband had improved their financial standing in the time between leaving the White House and Hillary running for president—for once, she was able to pull from her own coffers.

Clinton’s narrow, death-defying New Hampshire victory meant a long primary fight against Obama—one that Hillary was certain she had the team and experience to win. Only days later, however, her hopes crashed again. In the most unlikely of places. Wrecked by the most unlikely of people. The smooth-talking Bubba who had improbably been labeled America’s “first black president,” William Jefferson Clinton, suddenly seemed to make it his mission to alienate black voters. In South Carolina, of all places, a state in which as much as half the Democratic electorate was African American.

As the
Los Angeles Times
among others reported at the time, the former president had overruled Hillary’s campaign advisors such as Mark Penn, who believed that Obama was almost certain to win South Carolina and who wanted to cede the state to him.
4
The
New York Times
, for one, paraphrased Clinton advisors as saying that Senator Clinton was “pursuing a national campaign strategy that includes South Carolina but that does not elevate the state to the level of critical importance that it usually has in the presidential nominating contest. This reflects the Clinton team’s view that it does not expect to beat Mr. Obama in South Carolina, where he enjoys strong support from black voters, and that it wants to lower expectations there.”
5
Never lacking confidence in his own campaign skills, Clinton decided to head there himself, launching what one pundit would describe as “a not-very-charming charm offensive” and what the pundit would describe, quoting an unnamed campaign aide, as “a quixotic ‘one-man mission’ in territory that had already turned fallow.”
6
And he didn’t care much if Hillary’s campaign aides liked it.

Indeed, Bill Clinton, according to aides, thought his wife’s campaign was hopelessly disorganized, run by unworthy cronies who lacked any street smarts. This wasn’t an unorthodox view. Hillary 2008 was, as the
Washington Post
put it, “a campaign that is universally acknowledged to have been a management catastrophe.”
7
Which is why he didn’t listen to their suggestions. At all. The hostility between the Bill and Hillary camps during the campaign was legendary.

A later autopsy of the 2008 campaign in
Vanity Fair
discussed the outright war between teams Hillary and Bill—as two rival business partners disagreed on the best way to move their enterprise forward. One Hillary fund-raiser told the magazine that “Bill Clinton was out of control . . . even the night she won in New Hampshire. Even Hillary couldn’t control him.”
8
Sidestepping his wife, Bill began to offer his advice directly to figures like Penn and Wolfson. He offered to create his own operation within the Hillary campaign headquarters, until members of the campaign talked him out of it.

The
Vanity Fair
piece so infuriated the Clintons that they mounted an effort to identify its sources. One of the “main sources,” according to an insider, was an obscure Clintonista, who, by the way, now works for a Clinton rival.

As he headed south, the former president did, however, agree to one request from his wife’s campaign team: not to bring along his latest mistress. According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s juicy campaign book,
Game Change
, rumors of the former president’s affairs involved no fewer than three women—Belinda Stronach, Julie Tauber McMahon, and Gina Gershon.

That the former president was involved romantically with women outside of his marriage while campaigning for his wife’s election to the White House was hardly shocking. Nor, to be fair, was it unique to Mr. Clinton in that election cycle. At least Bill and Hillary maintained a cordial relationship; the same could not be said for the leading candidate on the other side of the aisle, John McCain, and his wife, Cindy, who fought unproven infidelity rumors on both sides of their marital equation. Similarly, unproven infidelity rumors long plagued New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, the former UN ambassador and cabinet secretary, who was waging a long-shot campaign against Hillary in 2008. And then there was of course John Edwards, whose affair with a B-list documentary producer while his wife, Elizabeth, was dying of breast cancer made headlines for months.

That Bill Clinton was willing to refrain from flaunting his extracurricular activities in front of reporters during his South Carolina trip was seen by Mrs. Clinton’s aides as a (rare) act of discretion. “There were a lot of advisors who told him that was a bad idea,” a former Clinton aide tells me, laughing. Unfortunately for Mrs. Clinton, that act of discretion was his only one.

The spiral started when a furious Bill Clinton—whose contempt for Barack Obama was already infamous—seemed to castigate his candidacy as mythic. In the midst of a harangue about Obama’s reputation for having good judgment and his positions on the Iraq War, Clinton groused, “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” It seemed pretty clear to many reporters that Clinton was referring not just to Obama’s Iraq vote, but to his entire candidacy.

In truth, Clinton aides couldn’t believe the good fortune that seemed to follow this Obama guy from the outset. In his first Senate race, he lucked out as his most formidable rival, Jack Ryan, a handsome multimillionaire and Harvard grad who’d given up a high-paying job at Goldman Sachs to teach at a parochial school outside Chicago, imploded after his former wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs, including “a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.”
9
The Ryan disaster—involving charges of a kind Bill Clinton would have likely survived—led state Republicans to make the disastrous choice of replacing him with African American iconoclast Alan Keyes, perhaps best known for staging a hunger strike when he was barred from a debate during the 2000 presidential elections. Keyes, who was not even from Illinois, was a gaffe-prone disaster from start to finish, managing only 27 percent of the vote.
10

Once elected, Obama offered hopeful, if empty, rhetoric that was inexplicably and uncritically embraced by much of the Washington media. His star, more like a supernova, was so bright, Obama didn’t even bother to stand for reelection before seeking out the White House. “Everybody else is waiting in line,” one Senate colleague recalls, “and he’s like ‘fuck it.’ ” Obama never had to work for it. It all seemed to fall into his lap. And he was winning the adulation within the Democratic Party that had once belonged to Bill. That more than anything pissed Bill Clinton off.

The former president further exacerbated the problem when he dismissed Obama’s imminent victory in South Carolina by comparing him to another African American candidate—one who had no hope of winning the nomination. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said, adding that “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”
11

Clinton was furious with reporters covering the campaign. His legendary charm was gone. “Shame on you!” he yelled at reporters at one point on the trail, a clip replayed endlessly on television and YouTube. He accused Obama of playing the “race card on me.”
12

The racial controversy Clinton touched off infuriated African American officeholders, who rallied around Obama and sent Mrs. Clinton’s numbers even further south. Suddenly the Clintons had a race problem. The campaign seemed snakebit on the question. Even when former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young endorsed Hillary, he unhelpfully noted in a live television interview that “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”
13

Only Doug Band was there to lend support. Just as he’d always been over much of the past decade. When Clinton was about to go into his heart bypass surgery, Band was beside him. When Clinton met with Kim Jong Il to bring home two American women imprisoned in North Korea, Band was standing behind him. When Clinton and President Obama played golf, Band was in the foursome. And when a finger-wagging Clinton lost his cool with a Nevada television reporter during the 2008 caucuses—“Get on your television station and say, ‘I don’t care about the home mortgage crisis. All I care about is making sure that some voters have it easier than others, and that when they do vote . . . their vote should count five times as much as others.’ That is your position!”—a balding Doug Band was in the camera shot, with a worried look on his aging face, standing behind the only employer he’d ever known.
14
Band was also in South Carolina, where he reportedly was furious over the media’s attack on his boss and the implication he was a racist.

In that, Clinton also received sympathy from an unexpected quarter. One senior Bush aide remembers hearing the president say that he made a point of calling Clinton “on the days that nobody else would call him,” like the day that he was called a racist by the Obama team in South Carolina. On the phone, Bush apparently told Clinton that he knew he wasn’t a racist and that he was still his friend. Bush said, “Those are the days when you need friends to call you, but sometimes they never do.”

By the time Bill was finished, the damage sustained by his wife’s campaign was mortal. “What killed us was South Carolina,” a former Clinton official told
Vanity Fair
.
15
In a CBS News poll, 58 percent of South Carolina voters “said Bill Clinton’s involvement was important to their decision and most of them voted for Obama. Seventy percent believed Hillary Clinton had unfairly attacked Obama. As a warning to Clinton, just 77 percent said they would be satisfied with her as the nominee.”
16

From then on, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seemed to meander from one controversy to another—some of her making. Many of her misstatements on the trail awakened the image of Hillary the Liar, an image she’d tried to extinguish after a decade of senatorial work. She had, for example, claimed for years to have been named after explorer Sir Edmund Hillary—until it was learned that she wasn’t. She claimed to have been opposed to the 2003 Iraq War from the start—like Obama. Only in Obama’s case was that true. One prominent TV reporter remembers hearing word that Hillary claimed she once arrived in Bosnia under sniper fire. “That couldn’t be the same trip I was on,” she thought, but it was. The one in which Hillary was accompanied by Chelsea and was greeted at the airport. There was, of course, no sniper fire at all. Even when she tried to speak the truth and say what was on her mind, Clinton found trouble, such as when she made a reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy to justify staying in the race against Obama, which led to furious outcries that she was rooting for his death—and to the long-standing wrath of Michelle Obama.

Hillary was not expected to be a flawless stage performer like Bill. Yet many of the bafflingly tone-deaf missteps in 2008 were made by her husband. At one point, Senator Obama, to his obvious delight, noted that he wasn’t sure which Clinton he was running against. And yet Bill Clinton’s irate harangues continued, stunning veteran reporters and campaign operatives who’d long admired his ability to charm audiences. Months later, he was still angrily defending his comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, declaring, “You gotta really go some to play the race card with me. My office is in Harlem, and Harlem voted for Hillary by the way.” With his temper rising, he ranted, “I have 1.4 million people around the world, mostly people of color, in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and elsewhere on the world’s least expensive AIDS drugs,” and the quote about Jesse Jackson “was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere.”
17

The once sympathetic CBS News website published a column titled “Bill Clinton’s Lost Legacy.” In it, the author noted that Clinton’s former labor secretary, Robert Reich, had accused Clinton of spearheading a “smear campaign against Obama” and quoted former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle describing Bill Clinton as “not presidential.”
18

To close observers, Bill Clinton’s lead-footedness seemed increasingly puzzling. It certainly was to his wife. Hillary often marveled about how her future husband managed to talk his way into a closed museum while they were dating at Yale Law School. How he could have handled things so badly now was a subject of speculation and amateur psychoanalysis.

Some aides wondered if Clinton’s heart surgeries—in 2004 and 2005—had left him a step off his game. Still others, including close and longtime Clinton associates, thought a more sinister motivation might be at work.