Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary (12 page)

CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 18

THE SMOLDERING GUN?
THE SMOLDERING GUN?

The smoking gun. Whoo! That sounded dramatic.

—Raymond “Red” Reddington in the NBC series
The Blacklist

E
ven the most partisan skeptics on the Left agreed that Hillary's chances of becoming president would be radically reduced if a smoking gun could be found.

But what constituted a smoking gun?

And what if the only thing that could be found was a
smoldering
gun?

In an attempt to answer those questions, in this chapter I offer interviews with three people who had firsthand knowledge of Hillary's involvement with the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.

Each of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity. But as witnesses, they corroborate each other's stories.

INTERVIEW ONE

“I worked for Hillary and saw a lot of what was going on,” a college student who interned at Foggy Bottom during Hillary's last year there said in an interview for this book. “One of my jobs was to go into the conference room that's adjacent to the secretary's office and gather up papers that were used by Hillary, Cheryl, Huma, and others during their meetings. It was like I was the invisible man. Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn't think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn't make an effort to hide anything from me.

“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos,” the intern continued. “The foundation's logo is an open circle of stars surrounding the words Clinton Foundation. The Global Initiative's logo is similar, but the stars are gold and they're intersected by four curved lines like parenthesis marks. Often, when I went into the secretary of state's conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table.

“While I was organizing the papers into neat piles, I couldn't resist taking a look. They were fund-raising papers with the names and dates of contacts on them. There was no mistaking the fact that Hillary and her closest advisers at State were working on foundation and Global Initiative business.

“I mostly recall snippets of conversation that I overheard when I delivered papers from the conference room to Huma and Cheryl and to Hillary's secretaries.

“I remember one time when Hillary came back from Russia. It must have been the fall of 2012, toward the end of her run at
State, and Hillary came into the office wearing one of those Russian fur hats. That was the day I overheard her talking on her cell phone, discussing a contribution to the foundation from a Russian guy. I knew he was Russian because she turned to Huma and said, ‘The fucking translator is so goddamn slow with the Russian.'

“Another time, I delivered a bunch of papers to Cheryl, who was waiting for them in Hillary's office. The papers were for Hillary to initial and sign. Hillary was in a really crappy mood that day. It looked to me like she was conducting several phone calls on different phones at the same time. The one thing I heard her say was, ‘Bill, I won't do that. I won't say that.
You
tell the president you don't want to see him, if that's how you feel.'

“I was shocked. Here I was, in the secretary's inner office, overhearing her talk to the former president, and I shouldn't have been there, and for a moment I was so scared I couldn't move my legs.

“Huma came in and saw me and shoved me toward the door. And the last thing I heard was Hillary saying, ‘Oh, fuck off, Bill!' and then she threw the cell phone on the floor and it bounced off the rug.”

INTERVIEW TWO

“During her last year at the State Department, Hillary's priorities took on a different character,” a Foreign Service officer with more than two decades of experience said in an interview. “In 2012, her priorities were first, raising money for her presidential run; second, raising money for the Clinton Foundation; and third, tending to the business of foreign policy.

“She obviously had a busy schedule and had to meet with foreign ministers and other dignitaries, but those meetings seemed rushed and pro forma,” the diplomat continued. “Her real passions were the Clinton Foundation and talking to political strategists like John Podesta, James Carville, Paul Begala, and others. She met in her seventh-floor office with political bundlers, and she had long conversations on strategy with Bill.

“In my time at State, I never saw a secretary so disconnected from her job. She seemed to consider the running of U.S. foreign policy a side job. She was focused on getting the
big
job—the White House. Everything was about keeping information about her campaign plans from leaking back to the Obama White House. She didn't trust anybody but her small inner circle. She was completely paranoid, whispering, covering her mouth in case somebody could read lips.”

INTERVIEW THREE

“When she flew on her Air Force C-32,” said another veteran Foreign Service officer, “Hillary took along stacks of papers in manila folders that were marked ‘CF' and ‘CGO'—the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global initiative. They had dividers labeled ‘Donations,' ‘Fund Raising,' ‘AIDS/HIV,' ‘Haiti,' and so forth.

“She didn't try to cover up her involvement with the foundation,” this person continued. “One time, after she returned from a grueling trip to Asia that included numerous stops at various capitals, she gave a cocktail party for her staff in a room near her
office. It was summertime, a hot, humid day in July, and Hillary talked about the Clinton Foundation and how well fund-raising was going for Haiti and HIV work. She talked about Bill's accomplishments in lowering the price of AIDS drugs. She was beaming with pride.

“Hillary made it clear to those of us who came within her orbit that she kept up with the work of the foundation and the Global Initiative at the same time that she ran the State Department. She said she had no qualms, because the work she did at State and the work at the foundation and the Global Initiative were related and complemented each other.

“In her mind, there was no conflict of interest. She was doing good work, solving the most daunting problems, and making the United States look like the good guy around the world. She always said her work was twice as hard because she was constantly cleaning up the messes George W. Bush left behind.

“I remember a conversation she had with Bill. I believe it was late in the summer of 2012, because the presidential election campaign was just beginning to heat up. We were on her plane, refueling at some Air Force base in Germany, and I was sitting behind her while she spoke on a phone. All I could hear was her side of the conversation. She was berating Bill. She told him that he had given her rotten advice on dealing with Putin. She should have been tougher with the Russians. She said, ‘Bill, you are so up their asses your judgment sucks.'

“Then she gave him hell about having his picture taken with two hookers. The photos were circulating all over the Internet,
and it made him look like a laughingstock for the umpteenth time. There was a long silence while she listened to him, and then all of a sudden she said, ‘Bill, I am fucking hanging up! Good-bye!'”

PART V
PART V

PICKING UP THE PIECES
PICKING UP THE PIECES

This puzzle I've been keeping

Has been in hiding creeping out the closet door

Spilling out onto the floor

How long will I be picking up pieces

How long will I be picking up my heart

—Blue October, “Picking Up Pieces”

CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 19

THE POLITICAL ANIMAL
THE POLITICAL ANIMAL

What happened in 2008 was that Hillary's candidacy got out in front of any rationale for it, and the danger is that that's happening again.

—David Axelrod

O
ver the course of many months, Bill Clinton had been charting a course that he believed would lead Hillary to the White House.

He took great pride in his reputation as
“the best political animal that's ever been in American politics,” as Charlie Rose once described him. Yet in typical Bill Clinton fashion, his grand plan for Hillary was a random collection of ideas—some of them workable, some of them not so workable, some of them zany, and some of them calculated to piss off Hillary.

For instance, one of his ideas called for Hillary to get rid of her pantsuits.

He had never liked that look on her.

“Toss them all in the fireplace,” he said, according to a close Clinton source.

But the more Bill complained about her pantsuits, the more Hillary was determined to wear them.

She always had a thing about men trying to force women to wear what
men
wanted. Like high heels and lingerie. It was a pet peeve since her college days.

She and Bill frequently clashed on the subject.

He made his “suggestions” about her wardrobe.

And she did the opposite.

Bill was also on Hillary's case about her looks. She couldn't do anything about the calendar—she'd be sixty-nine years old in 2016—but she could do something about the lines and sagging skin on her face. He wanted her to get a facelift.

But once again, Hillary had her own ideas.

She had no intention of going to a clinic, where she would be recognized and almost certainly photographed by someone with a smartphone. The media would jump all over the photos—and so would her political opponents.

Instead,
Hillary asked a well-known New York plastic surgeon to come to her home in Chappaqua. After several consultations, she and the doctor agreed on a course of action. She cleared the house of servants and gave instructions to her Secret Service detail not to let anyone pass beyond the driveway gate. The plastic surgeon and his team then set up a mini–operating room in her home with the latest medical equipment.

“She had her cheeks lifted, and her wrinkles and lines Botoxed,” said one of Hillary's friends in an interview for this
book. “She had work done on her eyes as well as on her neck and forehead. She took it gradually and didn't have anything drastic done, because she wanted to evaluate the changes as she proceeded. If it had started to make her look weird, she would have stopped it immediately. It was a pretty big deal and required multiple visits. It worked out well. You can see the subtle differences in her photographs.”

“To be really good at [politics] you've gotta like people,” Bill Clinton said. “You've gotta like policy. And you've gotta like politics. You've gotta have a pain threshold. You have to understand there's a reason this is a contact sport.”

Hillary wasn't good at politics because (1) she didn't like people, and (2) a lot of people—nearly half the voting-age population of America—didn't like her.

Her unlikeability manifested itself in several ways.

At the height of her book tour for
Hard Choices
, the editors of
People
put Hillary on the cover of their magazine. They expected to sell a million copies or more of the magazine; instead, the Hillary cover turned out to be
People
's worst-selling issue of 2014.

Simon & Schuster paid Hillary a $14 million advance for
Hard Choices
. According to book industry sources, one way for the publisher to avoid taking a write-off, or “a bath,” would have been for it to sell 2,700,000 hardcover copies over two years. Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 80 percent of hardcover sales,
reported that
Hard Choices
sold fewer than three hundred thousand copies. What's more, her memoir was knocked off its short-lived perch atop the
New York Times
bestseller list by my book
Blood Feud
, which compounded her humiliation.

A WMUR Granite State poll from the University of New Hampshire, which was conducted a year before that state's primary contest, showed that Hillary had started losing ground the moment she announced her candidacy; she trailed three of her potential Republican challengers—Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio.
Another University of New Hampshire poll revealed that just three in ten voters thought Hillary was the most likeable of the potential Democratic candidates.

She gave the other seven voters ample reason to find her unlikeable.

Her maladroit press conference at the United Nations, in which she defended her use of private e-mails, didn't win her any converts. The consensus of opinion was that she came across as sanctimonious and hypocritical—not exactly attributes designed to win the hearts and minds of voters.

That press conference, reported
New York
magazine, “served to remind [people] of something many had forgotten: what an abominable candidate she can be.”

Many political consultants to whom the author spoke agreed with that judgment. They pointed out that Hillary's two electoral victories—for a U.S. Senate seat from New York in 2000 and 2006—were earned in a solid blue state against weak and underfunded opponents, Rick Lazio and John Spencer.
When she had some real competition—from Obama in 2008—she lost.

The conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan opined that, unlike John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Hillary was not a natural “political athlete.”

“She's like Pete Rose, who has to grind out every hit,” said Buchanan.

Hillary was prone to unforced errors, as she proved with her famous whoppers.

On Benghazi:
“What difference at this point does it make?”

On her sky-high speaking fees:
“We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt.”

On whether Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl deserted or was captured by the Taliban:
“It doesn't matter.”

On job growth:
“Don't let anybody tell you that it's corporations and businesses that create jobs.”

She also displayed a political tin ear.

At a Georgetown University speech, Hillary declared that Americans needed to “show respect for our enemies” and “empathize with their perspective and point of view.”

During the ensuing flap over her remark, Secretary of State John Kerry explained that Hillary wasn't referring to enemies like the Islamic State, but “only” to adversaries like Russia. But Kerry, like Hillary, missed the point. Showing “respect” for Russia was what led Vladimir Putin to believe that America was in retreat; it encouraged him to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea.

It didn't help Hillary's likeability quotient when it became known that she not only demanded $250,000 to $300,000 per speech from cash-strapped universities and colleges, but she also demanded that they provide her with a spread of hummus and crudité in the green room backstage.

“Hillary still obsesses about money,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “a narrative thread that has existed since she was thwarted in her desire to build a pool at the governor's mansion in poor Arkansas and left the White House with a doggie bag full of sofas, rugs, lamps, TVs and china, some of which the Clintons later had to pay for or return.”

As a campaigner, said Dee Dee Myers, who served as Bill's press secretary, Hillary made the mistake of
telling
audiences what she felt rather than
showing
them.

“The presidency,” said Meyers, “isn't all that powerful, except as the bully pulpit. It comes down to your ability to get people to follow you, to inspire. You have to lead. Can [Hillary] get people to come together, or does she remain such a polarizing figure?”

For an answer to that question, all you had to do was ask half the voters in the United States, who didn't like Hillary.

In total contrast to Hillary, Bill was brilliant at politics because (1) he liked people, (2) they liked him, and (3) he treated all politics—even presidential politics—like
local
politics.

“He'll show up at your birthday party in suburban Cleveland if he thinks you can be useful to him down the pike,” said one of
his closest advisers. “Can you imagine the impact that has—his showing up at a middle-class home out of nowhere? You never forget it, and you tell everybody you know about it.

“These other guys in politics don't get the power of that kind of thing,” his adviser continued. “The ripple effect it has politically over the long term. Bill does. He's been doing that since he was in high school.”

Bill's staff at the Clinton Library kept a massive computerized list of political operatives from the highest level to the precinct level all across the country. The list included people in solid red states, which Bill refused to cede to the Republicans. Along with their names, telephone numbers, and snail-mail and e-mail addresses were the names of their spouses and children. Bill made sure that a personal note with his signature went out on birthdays and anniversaries. And if the person who was celebrating was important enough, Bill thought nothing of getting on his plane and making a personal appearance.

There was a Yiddish word for Bill.

He was
haymish
—someone you could feel comfortable with.

And there was a Yiddish word for Hillary.

When it came to politics, she was a klutz.