Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (55 page)

On the morning of the very last day of the midterm election campaign, Clinton awoke well before dawn to fly upstate from Westchester to
Saratoga Springs. It was a cold morning, but 1,500 upstate Democrats had risen early to see him.

He confided jokingly that he had originally expected only “to do a few events this year to honor the people who had supported us,” noting that his wife, as secretary of state, was prohibited by law and custom from campaigning. “This is my 127th event,” he recalled as they laughed appreciatively. “And I’ve kept going because I am so concerned that in the fact-free environment of this election, people are going to choose exactly what they don’t want.”

That concern spurred him on a grueling series of jet hops, from two stops in the northern reaches of his adopted state on to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, then Beckley, West Virginia, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally Orlando, Florida, for a midnight rally.

The former president drew enthusiastic crowds everywhere, and they listened raptly to his latest political pitch, which included point-by-point explanations of the student loan reform, the health care reform, and the banking bill, as well as his argument that he and his fellow Democrats—not the Republicans—deserved the affections of the Tea Party.

Despite the big crowds, Clinton had a bad feeling about the election, and not just from reading polls. He had gone out on the road so often that fall, he said, because the American people “are starving for explanations. They want someone to tell them what the hell is going on. And in the present media environment it is imperative to repeat the same message again and again for anyone to hear it.”

What made him angry was that his party’s elected leaders had endured a crescendo of attacks from Republican politicians and right-wing media without even trying to answer them. As his small plane flew south, he expressed bewilderment that Democratic leaders had done so little to promote their legislative achievements, which he touted at every stop.

He was deeply frustrated with the White House, too. For the past year, Clinton had tried to persuade the president and his economic advisers to back an innovative green jobs program devised by his foundation staff. That proposal, which he had first brought to Vice President Joe Biden in an October 2009 memorandum, suggested that the Obama administration could stimulate $100 billion in private lending for en
ergy efficiency improvements in all kinds of buildings—with as little as $9 billion in U.S. Treasury commitments to a Federal Energy Efficiency Loan Guarantee Program.

Every billion dollars invested in building conservation would create as many as nine thousand new jobs in construction, design, and manufacturing, swiftly adding up to a million or more Americans rescued from unemployment. And a million new jobs would have lifted Obama’s popularity and Democrats’ midterm prospects.

But Obama had ignored this idea until, in July, he had finally invited Clinton to the White House for a conference with a group of business executives from companies such as GE and Johnson Controls that might benefit from the program. That meeting had amounted to little more than a photo op. It was portrayed in the media as Obama’s attempt to use Clinton to stroke corporate leaders alienated from his administration—and accomplished nothing.

Still, he defended the administration vigorously as he flew from rally to rally down the East Coast on that last day. In populist tones, he framed the election as a clear choice between destructive Republican policies that favor “people like me, who make more than a million dollars a year” and the great majority of Americans who don’t.

“Last weekend, I read a touching article about two ladies who started the Tea Party movement,” he said, referring to a profile in the
Wall Street Journal
. “They were outraged by the bailout. And who wasn’t? President Bush told me that signing the bailout made him sick.”

Yet the Dodd-Frank banking reform enacted by Democrats in 2009 against Republican opposition would “outlaw” future bailouts and make financial executives and shareholders pay if they recklessly squander assets. “So why would the Tea Party support the Republicans, who have promised to repeal that bill because their friends on Wall Street don’t like it?”

And, he noted, it was President Obama and the Democrats in Congress who have actually cut taxes for most Americans in the stimulus bill—not the Republicans. If the Tea Party movement wants more jobs, balanced budgets, lower taxes, and smaller government, he insisted, they should be supporting Democrats.

“Where is the love?” he cried. “I ought to be the Tea Party’s poster child.”

The crowds roared appreciatively every time. But when the plane landed in Westchester around 4 a.m., Clinton’s tired face broke into a wry smile and he muttered that the exhausting day of electioneering had been “a fool’s errand.” He had a point. Republicans won big majorities in both the House and Senate the next day—defeating every candidate for whom he campaigned in that final trip except Joe Manchin.

The strangest incident in Clinton’s vexed relationship with Obama occurred toward the middle of December, when the president invited him to the White House to discuss a controversial tax agreement drawn up by White House negotiators with the Republican congressional leaders who would assume control of Congress in three weeks. The deal preserved the Bush tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, while providing cuts in payroll taxes for working Americans, tax credits for manufacturing jobs, and an extension of benefits for the unemployed.

Having talked in the Oval Office for nearly ninety minutes, Obama and Clinton walked over to the press briefing room, which was dark and deserted. They found someone to open it up, and Obama instructed press secretary Robert Gibbs to summon reporters from a holiday party in the East Wing.

“It’s a slow news day, so I thought I’d bring the other guy in,” quipped Obama when they returned. Standing beside him was Clinton, with whom he had just been discussing the tax deal. Clinton had “presided over as good an economy as we’ve seen in our lifetimes, so I thought it would be useful for him to share some of his thoughts.”

He had been studying the country’s economic woes for an hour a day, Clinton said, “trying to figure out what to do.” And he had studied the deal that the president struck with the Republicans.

‘’The agreement taken as a whole is, I believe, the best bipartisan agreement we can reach to help the most Americans,” he said, then paused to digress. “I want to make full disclosure. You know, I make quite a bit of money now, so the position that the Republicans have urged”—to preserve the expiring Bush tax cuts—“would personally benefit me. And on its own, I wouldn’t support that. . . . However, the agreement taken as a whole is,” he repeated, “the best bipartisan agreement we can reach to help the most Americans.”

As soon as Clinton started taking questions, on Haiti, the START nuclear treaty, and the mortgage crisis, the president smoothly excused himself to join the first lady at a holiday party—but the conversation between the former president and the press continued for nearly another half hour.

Understandably, some accounts described Clinton’s sudden reappearance at the White House lectern after nine years as “surreal” and “bizarre,” but it was a moment for Clinton to savor. After so many spats and slights, his relationship with Obama had turned in a very different direction. They might never become close friends, but they understood each other. With that understanding had come respect.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

According to Bill Clinton’s calendar, the year 2011 was dotted with a series of significant dates: On January 21, he would complete a full ten years since his departure from the White House, to begin another life as private citizen and philanthropic leader—the period that his foundation would brand “A Decade of Difference.” On August 19, he would turn sixty-five, an age he once doubted that he would ever reach. And on October 3, he would commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his 1991 announcement of his presidential candidacy.

But before Clinton could mark any of those occasions, he would have to acknowledge on January 12 that a year had passed since the calamitous earthquake in Haiti. That destitute and deforested island nation was a place where he exercised considerable authority: as the U.N. special envoy; as the cochair, with Haitian prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive, of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC); as the cofounder, with George W. Bush, of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund; and, not least, as the spouse of the secretary of state, who oversaw the American assistance mission there, through agencies run by State Department staff, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The initial rush to help Haiti had resulted in pledges of nearly $10 billion from donor nations, plus hundreds of millions of dollars raised by private charities; as many as ten thousand nonprofit organizations had mounted projects to help rebuild the island’s wrecked physical and social services—to “build back better,” as Clinton often said. In the aftermath of the cataclysm, a time of mourning and deprivation, he had tried to encourage optimism about the future.

But a year later, that optimism was becoming more difficult to sustain. Anyone who visited the cities and towns on Haiti’s western coast, where the earthquake struck hardest, would still see the jagged dunes of smashed concrete, stretching into the distance, while over a million
people in and around Port-au-Prince lived in hundreds of temporary camps or, if they were less fortunate, in the streets.

Only 5 percent of the debris left by the quake had been cleared, according to the best estimates, mostly on the major avenues in the capital. The international airport had been repaired, but major infrastructure projects to construct new roads, ports, and housing had not yet been started.

To make matters much worse, a cholera epidemic had broken out the previous October, eventually traced to poor sanitation practices by a division of U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. The bacterial disease had killed at least 3,000 Haitians so far, and threatened to infect as many as 250,000. Dealing with the outbreak had distracted the government and aid organizations, and again, the level of international assistance proved woefully insufficient. The U.N. had appealed for about $150 million to pay for medicine and sanitation, and had raised only $44 million so far.

By early January, only 10 percent of the money pledged by foreign donors had been collected, and not even all of the first billion had been spent on projects yet. Politically, the Haitian government had been frozen since an inconclusive national election two months earlier, which had excluded the most popular political party, Father Aristide’s Lavalas, along with many eligible voters. The political stasis discouraged donor nations from fulfilling the multibillion-dollar donations they had pledged in 2010. They didn’t know what would happen to the money.

The chaotic electoral process appeared likely to conclude with a former pop singer—Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly—as the country’s new president, although for the moment President René Préval remained in power despite rioting by Martelly’s supporters in the slums. But Préval’s role was more symbolic than real. He and his ministers could block progress, but they could accomplish nothing on their own.

The journalist Amy Wilentz, author of two books on Haiti, described him as simply “an old-fashioned Haitian politician” who in the aftermath of the quake had found “the horror on the ground was too much for him to handle, both emotionally and practically.” Préval had failed to appear or make any public statement for three days after the earthquake, later explaining that he had been “in shock.”

Nobody had really expected the Haitian government to function in the wake of disaster, since it had scarcely functioned before. That was why the country’s
politicians and ruling elite had reluctantly ceded authority to the IHRC, which to them represented an unwanted infringement of sovereignty. With Clinton as cochair, that body was supposed to ensure a measure of effectiveness and transparency in a place known for neither.

Before he accepted that position—or any responsibility for Haiti—Clinton had known very well that no degree of progress would ever be sufficient and that there would be far more blame than credit, no matter what he achieved. Still, he, too, was frustrated by the slow crawl of relief and reconstruction.

Blame was already coming his way, although any knowledgeable observer understood that reconstruction on such an unprecedented scale, in such a miserably underdeveloped country, would inevitably require years and perhaps a decade. Removing the remains of the World Trade Center from Ground Zero in Manhattan, a much smaller job in an efficient modern environment, had required two full years. A relatively developed country like Indonesia, where Clinton had worked closely with government officials after the tsunami, had likewise required years to clean up its devastated coastline and begin to rebuild.

On the eve of the earthquake’s anniversary, the global charity Oxfam—one of the most active nongovernmental organizations in Haiti—released a report that criticized the overall reconstruction effort and the IHRC specifically in what news reports called “blistering” language. Oxfam analysts blamed the slow pace “on a crippling combination of Haitian government indecision and rich donor countries’ too frequent pursuit of their own aid priorities.” While praising the emergency relief campaign that had saved “countless lives,” Oxfam declared that the IHRC “has failed to live up to its mandate.”

Clinton realized there was little point in arguing with such criticism, but when reporters asked, he would answer. “It’s easy to see what hasn’t been done,” he said, “with so many still living in camps, so many homes still collapsed, and so much debris that hasn’t been cleared.” He pointed to the recovery effort’s advances, with three million cubic feet of rubble carted away, 50,000 families gaining access to potable water, 350,000 Haitians put to work, and hundreds of thousands of children returning to school—although many of their teachers had lost their lives in the disaster.