Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (21 page)

I discussed the subject with one of Clinton’s friends, a man who has golfed with him, worked with him in the West Wing, and who, like most former Clinton aides, spoke to me only on condition of anonymity. He knows the penalty for talking out of school—exile, humiliation.

Referring to the South Carolina disaster, he volunteers a thought. “[Hillary] knows better than anybody that whatever [Bill] does is intentional. So part of her has to be, when she’s lying in bed at night, going ‘was that real, did he make a mistake, or was it on purpose?’ ”

This clearly was something that had been on the former aide’s own mind for a while. “Want to go conspiracy theorist?” he continues. “How does Mark Penn, who’s her chief strategist, not know that the [primary] states aren’t winner-take-all, but proportionate? How does he, the guy that’s been at it forever, he’s her chief strategist, doesn’t have a brief—and Harold Ickes is there, too—on delegates and how they get amassed? You
have
to. How do these guys from the Obama campaign, they know the delegates and Hillary Clinton doesn’t? That doesn’t make sense. . . . It’s either unbelievable arrogance, or it’s sabotage.”

Penn, who had built up a share of enemies within the Clinton orbit, was an early scapegoat for Hillary’s disaster. “A lot of people would like . . . to see him go,” a senior Clinton advisor told reporters. “I think about all camps think it’s Mark’s fault,” a source described as a “Clinton White House veteran close to the campaign” told the
Washington Post
. “I don’t think there is a Mark camp.” On April 6, 2008, after several more stories pointed the finger at his management, Penn stepped down as chief strategist, and was rewarded with more blind quotes from his many enemies.

“The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination,” stated reporters Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut in the
Washington Post
exposé. Baker and Kornblut cited Howard Wolfson, James Carville, Harold Ickes, Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta, Paul Begala, and advertising consultant Mandy Grunwald as among Penn’s many enemies. They also would be long-term survivors in the Clinton orbit. Penn, however, would not. A 2013
Washington Post
article still branded him in Clinton circles as the man who “has been tagged as the egocentric villain of the campaign who sowed seeds of dissent.” The Clinton team let it be known that Penn would not be back for another Hillary Clinton run.

The same could not be said, obviously, for another person many blamed for Hillary’s travails. Speaking about Bill Clinton, Bob Shrum tells me, “I think he’s a very, very good strategist for himself. I don’t think he’s always a good strategist for other people.”

One explanation for Bill’s 2008 behavior is of course the obvious one. Bill was, and remains, deeply conflicted over the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. The former commander in chief worries about what that would mean to his place in history. “If she becomes president, Clinton’s fucked,” says a former senior advisor. She’ll be the first woman president, and “he’s gonna be the guy that got a blow job and was impeached.” Other senior Clinton aides, those who know him extremely well, share that view. That secretly the former president “dreaded” the idea of a White House return, where as one aide put it he would be “trapped”—kept out of decision making but also unable to fly around the world and do whatever he wanted. In other words, his bizarre behavior in South Carolina and elsewhere demonstrated an internal conflict between a guilt-ridden need to help his wife and his own self-interest.

Bill wasn’t the only person who cost Hillary Clinton dearly. By the time she was to enter the 2008 presidential election, it was not the Republicans who would give her the most trouble. They had been pacified by her well-crafted plan and in some cases even applauded her tough, resolute effort to battle Obama down to the wire in race after race. No, her problem was that the liberal, antiwar wing of her own party mistrusted her. Clinton tried to pacify them in 2007 at a hearing with General David Petraeus, saying the Iraq commander’s testimony required a “suspension of disbelief” and in effect calling the man with his generation’s most admired military mind a liar. But for Clinton, it was too little, too late.

As potential 2008 candidates emerged, many Democrats took a shine to Barack Obama. Obama wasn’t really doing much of anything in the Senate, except giving well-received speeches. But he contrasted well with Hillary.

“He wasn’t in the conferences trying to tell them what to do,” one senator says. “Hillary may have felt like she had the ability to tell him what political strategy to use, or we should push this legislation, we should agree to this and fight this.” Many Democrats were jealous of her, resentful, in a way that for whatever reason they weren’t of the far less experienced Obama.

“We all saw Obama as a fresh, clean candidate and not part of the Clinton crowd and mess,” one Democratic senator told a Republican colleague in explaining his support. That tension was going to sting Hillary Clinton soon, when she least expected it.

The new controversies emerging from Senator Clinton’s office only reminded Democrats again of the trouble-plagued administration of her husband. Says one Republican U.S. senator, “They got tired of defending them.”

Shortly after Mrs. Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, her Senate colleagues seemed eager to crush her momentum. The Obama campaign released endorsements from people who knew the Clintons well—Senators Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and John Kerry of Massachusetts. (Kerry is said by colleagues to still be afraid of Hillary over his apostasy.) Chuck Schumer, Hillary’s New York frenemy, offered private encouragement to Obama, as did Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, despite official pledges of neutrality.

“They were unbelievably jealous,” one Clinton aide tells me, in reference to the “treacherous” Democrats. “There were people in the Democratic Party who said, ‘Let’s get rid of this fuck.’ Right now if you poll governors and senators—anyone who’s in statewide elected office, eighty percent of them will tell you that they should be president, that they have what it takes to be president. Right? You don’t think Kennedy would resent Clinton? All these guys who took a pass [on running for president themselves] did.”

By far the most infamous endorsement for Obama that year came from former Clintonite Bill Richardson, who dropped out of the 2008 contest in January.

Richardson had been close to the Clintons for decades, and the former president lobbied him vigorously. The Clintons understood that the endorsement of Obama by someone so well connected to the Clinton inner circle would be a monumental embarrassment, especially with so many Senate Democrats turning against them. Clinton also seemed to consider Richardson an easy get, one susceptible to the former president’s charm and attention. Clinton flew to New Mexico to watch the Super Bowl with his former cabinet secretary, pressing him during the game not to endorse Obama or to at least stay neutral.
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Richardson would not commit—he joked that he would have endorsed Bill Clinton over Obama in an instant, but not Hillary, who he felt was more qualified for the job than Richardson was.

Leaving New Mexico empty-handed, Clinton then sent another former cabinet secretary, Henry Cisneros, a fellow Latino, to press the case.

“He thought I could deliver you,” Cisneros told Richardson.

“Why?” Richardson asked.

“I guess he thought we spoke the same language.”

“Politics?”

“Spanish.”

In the end, Richardson went with Obama. He did so, according to sources close to him, because he shared the views of many prominent Democrats. He believed Obama was special—a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Second, he didn’t want the old Clinton crowd back—a chaotic, backstabbing, drama-filled mess.

A Clinton aide later told the
New York Times
that the former president was “more philosophical than angry” about the endorsement. That, of course, was untrue. Clinton was heard to tell aides and associates that he would never forgive Richardson’s betrayal.

Richardson would be spared no invective from the Clinton team, particularly acidic comments in public and private from two of Clinton’s primary financial beneficiaries, Terry McAuliffe and James Carville. “Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Carville, in typical bombast, told reporters.
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Sources sympathetic to Richardson tell me a Clinton loyalist repeatedly bad-mouthed Richardson to reporters and fellow Democrats and spread rumors about his private life. Richardson took such a furious fusillade from the Clinton operation—they wanted their treatment of him to deter other would-be betrayers—that he seems to this day not to have gotten over it.

Despite the fury and invective, Richardson’s endorsement was not the biggest blow to the Clintons’ efforts. That one came from the heirs to that magical Democratic land called Camelot.

First JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, offered a stirring endorsement of Obama, evoking memories of her father. Then came her uncle. The so-called Lion of the Senate, an ailing Edward M. Kennedy came out for Obama despite a desperate months-long effort by the Clintons to keep him neutral.

Hillary had worked hard in the Senate to court the senior senator from Massachusetts. The families had socialized together on Cape Cod. Bill called Senator Kennedy repeatedly on the phone, pressing for an endorsement or, as a fallback, a pledge of neutrality.
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But Bill Clinton’s once-vaunted charm offensive somehow failed again. In fact, it backfired. Kennedy would let reporters know that he made his decision to endorse Obama after he took umbrage at a remark Bill Clinton made to him, that “a few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been carrying our bags.”
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That was only an excuse. The Kennedy family finally had a chance to excise its thinly concealed resentments of the “white trash” Clintons.

In a speech in Washington, D.C., at American University on January 28, Kennedy offered some early, obligatory praise of his colleague Senator Clinton. The rest of his speech, however, was filled with thinly veiled potshots at Obama’s rival and her husband.

“I feel change in the air,” Kennedy said. “From the beginning, he opposed the war in Iraq. And let no one deny that truth.” This was seen, as the Associated Press put it, as “an obvious reference to former President Clinton’s statement that Obama’s early anti-war stance was a ‘fairy tale.’ ”
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Kennedy too offered a poke at the Clintons’ long record of scandal and attack-style politics. “With Barack Obama,” he said, “we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion.”
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Al Gore, who enjoyed his moment to stick it to Bill, waited out the contentious primary contest
without endorsing
Hillary, whom he had come to know very well at the White House, before finally endorsing Obama. “This election matters more than ever because America needs change more than ever,” Gore would say at an event announcing his support.
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As the nomination slipped further from Hillary’s grasp, the Clinton team faced the prospect that she might never be president. A return to the Senate would be a poor consolation prize. The job that she had plotted for, the one a deeply conflicted Bill Clinton (at least in his more magnanimous moments) thought he owed her, seemed to have been taken from them. Perhaps forever. As a result Bill seethed at Obama indiscriminately—to George W. Bush, to reporters, to campaign biographers, to friends, to aides, to strangers on the street. The Clintons were so resentful that Hillary held on to her primary delegates, and her clearly losing campaign, far longer than decorum or reality dictated. Even after Obama received the sufficient delegates to be the nominee, Hillary’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, refused to allow the possibility that his candidate, and financial patron, would drop out of the race.

Once Barack Obama officially received the number of delegates he needed to be nominated on the first ballot at the Democratic convention in Denver, things in ClintonWorld got really weird. At a rally in New York, the losing candidate was introduced by McAuliffe as “the next president of the United States.”
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She walked out with a lip-biting Bill and to the sound of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
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Bill stood at center stage until Chelsea discreetly pulled him aside. Before a crowd in the hundreds, Hillary claimed—falsely, as the Obama campaign pointed out—that she had won a majority of the popular vote in the various Democratic primaries and continued to make the case for a candidacy that was to everyone outside of that room already dead.

Feelings against Obama ran deep, exacerbated by the belief that he’d waged a nasty primary campaign against Hillary and gotten away with it. This was, in fact, true. Obama had portrayed himself as above negative campaigning while successfully affixing that label to Clinton. In reality, he and his team waged a brutal below-the-radar opposition campaign against the onetime front-runner, one that was shielded by cooperative reporters. Obama operatives routinely brought statistics, news stories, and allegations to the attention of campaign reporters, under the strict proviso that none of the dirt be tied to their campaign. This worked for months, until one of their attacks—a memo criticizing Hillary’s campaign contributions from the Indian American community and labeling her the senator from Punjab—found its way to a Clinton staffer. Caught red-handed, a furious Barack Obama threw his own staff under the bus, claiming that his team, unbeknownst to him, had made a “dumb mistake.”
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According to associates, Bill Clinton was convinced the Obama campaign was also fanning the flames on the racial front. His new friend, the current president George W. Bush, was among those privately calling him and offering sympathy over the “unfair” racial attacks. Few recalled that Arkansas was the only state that did not have a civil rights statute when Bill left the governor’s mansion. Or how the young governor cavorted with segregationists to win elections. Or how his campaigns used racially coded language.
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None of that was relevant in 2008. Bill Clinton decided his feelings had been hurt by anyone daring to question his civil rights bona fides. And at the peak of a self-pitying frenzy, he wouldn’t be easily sated. “I think that wound . . . the guy who was once called the first black president and had a very strong relationship with the black community, probably ran very deep,” said a Democratic strategist.