Unlikeable (7 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
But the S-word didn't seem to damage Obama, for within forty-eight hours, he had piled up a double-digit lead in the polls.
It looked like a repeat of Iowa.
Toward the end of the New Hampshire campaign, Hillary found herself in a small Portsmouth café, answering questions from sixteen undecided voters, most of them women.
“My question is very personal, how do you do it?” asked Marianne Pernold Young, a freelance photographer. “How do you, how do you . . . keep upbeat and so wonderful?”
Facing the likely prospect of defeat, Hillary indulged her penchant for self-pity.
“You know,” she said, tearing up, “this is very personal for me.”
This wasn't the first time a candidate for the Democratic nomination appeared to cry during a New Hampshire primary campaign. Edmund Muskie, the former governor of Maine and an early favorite for his party's nod in 1972, was reported to have tears streaming down his face while he stood in a snowstorm and delivered a speech defending his wife. As a result, Muskie was attacked as a crybaby and his candidacy was doomed.
Some critics said Hillary's tears were phony. But whether genuine or not, it didn't seem to matter. When Hillary turned on the waterworks, the liberal media hailed her for being brave and for revealing her “personal” side.
“The feminist debate that raged two decades ago will henceforth be settled in favor of crying,” Timothy Noah wrote, tongue in cheek, in Slate, an online magazine.
Against all the odds and expectations, the newly “humanized” Hillary won in New Hampshire. When one of her aides congratulated her on the victory, Hillary said,
“I get really tough when people fuck with me.”
She mounted a fierce, five-month-long battle against Obama. After she lost to Obama in the Maine caucuses, she went negative, launching a blistering series of attack ads against Obama that appealed to white working-class voters and racialized the campaign.
In the end, Hillary racked up nearly eighteen million primary votes, virtually tying Obama in the popular-vote total. But Obama defeated her in the arena that counted: convention delegates. Obama won 2,285½ delegates to Hillary's 1,973.
Obama declared victory on June 3, 2008.
Hillary refused to concede.
Her mother had told her never to back down. Her father had taught her to have a hide like a rhinoceros.
Hillary threatened to contest the nomination right up to the Democratic Party's August convention.
Finally, after four days of kvetching and carrying on, she threw in the towel.
Hillary viewed her near-death experience in the January 2008 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary as a critical turning point in her political life. In her opinion, it proved she could come from behind and connect with voters and be a credible national candidate.
Through the long years of the Obama presidency, it was her experience in New Hampshire that kept alive her determination to run again for president.
And memories of victory in New Hampshire helped to bring her full circle to the presidential campaign of 2016âthis time around as a candidate with no killer challenger in her own party. Instead, she would have a projected $2 billion war chest, a massive data-driven ground operation, a liberal media lusting for a female president, and most demographic trends in her favor.
But Hillary also entered the 2016 presidential campaign with a boatload of baggageâa tissue-thin résumé as a U.S. senator and secretary of state, a Vesuvius of scandals, widespread Clinton fatigue, a reputation for mendacity, no clear rationale for her candidacy, a brawler's reputation for foreign interventions, and a forbidding personality.
Chuck Schumer, her former Senate colleague from New York, called her “the most opaque person you'll ever meet in your life.”
Many top Democrats in Iowa, site of the first-in-the-nation caucuses, were put off by her unlikeability.
“Elizabeth Warren, I could enjoy going out to lunch with her. Hillary less,” said Lorraine Williams, the chairwoman of Iowa's Washington County Democrats.
In recent years, candidates who succeeded in capturing the White HouseâRonald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obamaâhave all had one thing in common: a compelling personality that inspired millions of people to trust them.
Hillary Clinton is missing that chip.
She is the polar opposite of charismatic.
She can only
pretend
to be likeable
.
A PANTSUIT-WEARING GLOBETROTTER
A PANTSUIT-WEARING GLOBETROTTER
Clinton presented [Russian foreign minister Sergei] Lavrov with a gift-wrapped red button, which said “Reset” in English and “Peregruzka” in Russian. The problem was, “peregruzka” doesn't mean reset. It means overcharged, or overloaded. And Lavrov called her out on it. “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked Lavrov. “You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.
â
FoxNews.com
THE PRAETORIAN GUARD
THE PRAETORIAN GUARD
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
âPlaywright Arthur Miller
A
natural tension exists between all new secretaries of state and the career Foreign Service officers who run Foggy Bottom's bureaus and its embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions around the world. That tension is normally smoothed over by incoming secretaries who show a decent respect for the opinion of the permanent bureaucracy and ask for help to find their way around.
Not so Hillary Clinton.
On her first day on the job in January 2009, Hillary came striding confidently down the State Department's seventh-floor gallery, which was hung with oil portraits of her predecessors going back to the first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. She
looked for all the world, as one staffer recalled,
“like the capo di tutti i capi, the boss of bosses, trying to intimidate everyone in sight.”
Her heels clicked in unison with two made members of her political familyâHuma Abedin, her deputy chief of staff, and Cheryl Mills, her chief of staffâwho marched in lockstep behind Hillary and flanked her on the right and left.
Mills was Hillary's Tom Hagen, the Godfather's consigliere. She represented her boss in all matters.
A Stanford Law School graduate, Mills had earned a place in the Clinton inner circle when, as associate White House counsel, she delivered a passionate legal defense of Bill Clinton during his 1999 impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. She was a senior adviser to Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign, was a member of the board of the Clinton Foundation, and was a key player in some of the Clintons' cover-ups.
As Hillary's chief of staff at the State Department, according to the
Wall Street Journal
, Mills “told State Department records specialists she wanted to see all documents requested on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and later demanded that some be held back.”
“In another case,” the
Journal
also reported, “Ms. Mills's staff negotiated with the records specialists over the release of documents about former President Bill Clinton's speaking engagementsâalso holding some back.”
The seventh-floor staff soon learned to expect big trouble whenever Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin were summoned to
Hillary's inner sanctum. These two womenâalong with Hillary's attack-dog press secretary Philippe Reines and her chief policy adviser Jake Sullivanâmade up Hillary's praetorian guard at the State Department. They understood that Hillary viewed her term as secretary of state as a stepping stone to the White House, and they did everything in their power to shelter Hillary from controversy.
“Important policy papers that had been worked on for months before Hillary took over and that ran the slightest bit of risk were ignored, gutted, or tossed out without explanation by her staff,” said a longtime Foreign Service officer who was interviewed for this book. “It soon became apparent that Hillary's people were going to turn the place upside down and try to micromanage everything to save Hillary's ass.”
In the past, most secretaries of state presided over large inclusive meetings where major issues were on the table and members of the senior staff were encouraged to express their opinions openly.
Not so Hillary Clinton.
Only Huma, Cheryl, Philippe, and Jake were in on everything. And Hillary outsourced politically risky assignments to special envoys. Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke was in charge of winding down the war in Afghanistan by cobbling together a political settlement with the Taliban. And former U.S. senator George Mitchell was sent to the Middle East to knock heads and make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Both missions failed.
While Hillary was at Foggy Bottom, she usually worked from ten in the morning until ten at night. Like the policy wonk that she was, she often got lost in minutiae. She read every paper down to the last dreary detail and went over and over the most routine memos until she drove her staff to distraction.
“She clearly didn't think the career Foreign Service officers took her seriously,” a diplomat said in an interview for this book. “And that went double for the White House. Hillary had a giant chip on her shoulder and was furious that she wasn't treated fairly by the Obamas.”
Hillary's biggest beef was with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president, and the woman who, after Michelle Obama, had President Obama's ear. Obama would make important foreign policy decisions, and Jarrettâthe real power behind the presidential throneâwould implement them, without bothering to pass them by Hillary or give her a heads-up.
In a typical case, Hillary discovered that the White House was conducting secret back-channel discussions with the Castro brothers in Cuba in an effort to normalize relations with that Communist country. Hillary called Valerie Jarrett and complained that the State Department was once again being left in the dark.
Jarrett wouldn't let Hillary get a word in edgewise. Finally, in frustration, Hillary held the telephone receiver at arm's length so that everyone in the room could hear Jarrett talking. While the
staff listened, Hillary silently mouthed Jarrett's words, mimicking her agitated behavior.
On most nights after work, Hillary would ask an aide to bring her a Michelob Ultra, her favorite low-carb beer. Then she'd put her feet up on her desk, take a swig from the bottle, and start imitating the voices of world leaders.
She was a talented impersonator. Her specialty was the swaggering Vladimir Putin.
And she did a wicked impersonation of Bill Clinton, down to his seductive croak.
Even a paranoid has some real enemies.
âHenry Kissinger
D
espite the best efforts of her praetorian guard, Hillary never felt secure in her role as secretary of state. She suspected that everything she said was leaked to the media. She was convinced that Valerie Jarrett had installed moles in the State Department and that these spies were ratting her out to members of the White House staff, who were still nursing a grudge against Hillary from the bitterly fought days of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.
Her paranoia often got the better of her. She would order high-ranking deputies and undersecretaries to leave the room in the middle of meetings because she suspected them of being spies.
She was tense and irritable most of the time, and there were frequent eruptions of her famous temper, just as there had been when she was a U.S. senator and indulged in shouting matches with Chuck Schumer, her colleague from New York. Loud arguments became the norm at the State Department, not only during Hillary's staff meetings, but while she was walking down the corridors and riding in the elevators. You could hear her coming a mile away.
“I've been at State since the mid-1980s, and I've never seen such acrimony,” said a Foreign Service officer. “I had heard stories about Hillary's problems with anger management, but I didn't believe them until I saw them with my own eyes. After a telephone argument with Valerie Jarrett, Hillary threw a heavy water glass across her office and sent shards flying.
“Another time,” this person continued, “after a telephone argument with President Obama, she took her right arm and cleared off her small working desk, sending pictures, glasses, everything crashing to the floor.
“The two times when she fainted [while boarding a plane in Yemen in 2011 and working in her office in 2012] were periods of stress brought on by furious arguments.
“After the episode with President Obama, I heard her tell Huma, âI don't want Bill to hear anything about this.'”
Before she became secretary of state, Hillary had spent a great deal of time discussing with Bill the pros and cons of
Obama's offer. She was suspicious of Obama's motives and skeptical that he would allow her to put her stamp on foreign policy.
“I don't want to be a pantsuit-wearing globetrotter,” Hillary told Bill in the presence of several friends.
To allay her fears, Bill asked his right-hand man, Doug Band, to negotiate an agreement with the White House. A “memorandum of understanding” was drafted and signed by both Clintons and by the White House counsel. The memorandum stipulated that Hillary would have a free hand to choose her own deputies and run the State Department as she saw fit. In return, Hillary agreed that the Clinton Foundation would not accept contributions from foreign donors as long as she was at Foggy Bottom, and that Bill would seek the Obama administration's approval of all his speeches.
Bill agreed to these stringent conditions because he saw the State Department job as an important station on Hillary's march to the White House. It would allow her to remain in the public eye during Obama's term in office and give her an opportunity to fill in her résumé as a woman who had the grit to deal with the world's toughest male leaders.
Bill had grandiose plans for Hillary: she would make peace between Israel and the Palestinians, open a dialogue with North Korea, bring pressure to bear on Iran, and force the ayatollahs to end their nuclear program.
Who knew? She might even end up with the Nobel Peace Prize.
There was only one problem with Bill's vision for his wife. It turned out that Hillary's paranoia about her enemies in the Obama White House was well founded.
Chief among the enemies were members of the triumvirate that ruled from the Oval OfficeâBarack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Michelle Obama. They never intended to let Hillary run foreign policy.
In her confrontations with Hillary, Jarrett had a formidable army to back her up: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and chief political adviser David Axelrod. Denis McDonough, a foreign policy adviser who ultimately replaced Emanuel as the president's chief of staff, referred to Hillary as “the principle
implementer
” of policy,
not
its architect.
Hillary was forced to assume the
role she had most wanted to avoidâa pantsuit-wearing globetrotter. As one official told
Politico
, Hillary practiced “odometer diplomacy,” with “a focus on globetrotting to bolster America's relationships abroad coupled with attempts to cope with an array of pop-up crises.”
When Caroline Kennedy was appointed ambassador to Japan, she asked Hillary what she could expect when she took up her post in Tokyo.
“Don't expect to get your real marching orders from State,” Hillary told Caroline. “The way the Obama government works, everything important in foreign policy comes from the White House. And Valerie [Jarrett] pretty much runs the show down there. You'll feel Valerie breathing down your neck all the way to Tokyo. She's going to have a lot to say about how
you represent our country in Japan, and believe me, she won't be shy about it.”
Hillary had extracted a promise from Obama that she would be free to choose her own deputies, but that was not how things worked out.
With Obama's approval, Jarrett insisted that Hillary hire James Steinberg as her deputy secretary of state. Although Steinberg had once worked in the Clinton administration, Hillary did not like him. But the White House left her no choice, and she brought Steinberg on board as her deputy.
Hillary and Steinberg often clashed on major issues of policy. He seemed to enjoy thumbing his nose at Hillary. In the end, however, she won the bureaucratic wrestling match. The unhappy Steinberg lasted just two years at Foggy Bottom before he handed in his resignation and became dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
The Steinberg episode was just one in a multitude of humiliations inflicted on Hillary by the White House.
For example, Hillary would be summoned to the White House for a meeting only to discover when she arrived that the meeting had been canceled without anyone bothering to tell her.
“I arrived for the 10:15 mtg and was told there was no mtg,” she e-mailed aides in 2009. “This is the second time this has happened. What's up???”
Other times, she was left in the dark about the timing of cabinet meetings.
“I heard on the radio,” Hillary wrote in an e-mail on June 8, 2009, “that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?”
Old State Department hands said they had to reach far back in their memory to recall a relationship between the White House and State Department that was so one-sided in favor of the president. They concluded that only Richard Nixon's secretary of state, William Pierce Rogers, had been shafted as badly as Hillary.
