by David Brock
Priced at $2.16, Failed Choices wasn’t intended to turn America Rising into the hottest new conservative publishing house. In fact, the American people weren’t the audience at all (although, no doubt, it would have made a great gift for the Fox-watching conservative uncle in your life). This was an attempt to frame the initial coverage of the book’s release, which would also serve as a sort of soft launch to coverage of Hillary’s still-theoretical presidential campaign. Book reviewers would explore whether Hard Choices was a good read, but it was the political reporters who would write about it as, effectively, a campaign document whom America Rising was hoping to sway.
It was no surprise to see America Rising try to pre-but Hillary’s book, a tactic we frequently used ourselves. Nor were we surprised by the content of their screed; for weeks, we had been keeping a careful eye on Republican pundits and politicians, patiently cataloguing the false attacks, putting together responses, and preparing for the battle that her book would spark.
Three weeks before Hard Choices was released, we sent reporters a lengthy memo laying out two dozen Republican attacks on Hillary’s State Department experience, along with the facts about each. And within two hours of Failed Choices leaking online that Sunday night in June, we had blasted a point-by-point debunking of their predictably false claims to reporters, progressive allies, and our growing online audiences—a surprise “pre-bunk” of their “pre-buttal” that succeeded in stealing Rising’s thunder.
The number one claim, of course, was the one we had been fighting for months.
As Failed Choices puts it, “No one would dispute Clinton’s familiarity with landing strips in foreign capitals or the star status with which she was received at many of those outposts, but what remains unclear is what policy benefits Americans gained from all her travels.”
By now, of course, this claim was deeply ingrained in the conservative mind-set. Even John McCain no longer seemed to think Hillary had done a “tremendous job,” taking to MSNBC to sniff, “She visited more countries than any other secretary of state. But what concrete policy, or decision or whatever it is, was she responsible for?… And I think she would have trouble answering that.”
And speaking at a conservative summit in Iowa, fringe Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina complained, “Flying is not an accomplishment. It is an activity.”
America Rising quotes an account by the writer Andrew Sullivan as evidence that even Hillary’s allies (which he was not) can’t explain what, exactly, she has gotten done—not just in Foggy Bottom, but in her entire career:
I was having dinner with a real Clinton fan the other night, and I actually stumped him (and he’s not easily stumped). What have been Hillary Clinton’s major, signature accomplishments in her long career in public life? What did she achieve in her eight years as First Lady exactly? What stamp did she put on national policy in her time as Senator from New York? What were her defining and signature achievements as secretary-of-state?
This echoed the right’s argument that not only had Hillary failed to accomplish anything as Secretary of State, she hadn’t accomplished anything, ever. Newt Gingrich declared that she was just “famous for being famous.” Fox News’ Keith Ablow wondered what qualifications Hillary could possibly be bringing to the job of president, “other,” of course, “than being the wife of the president.”
The reality is that Hillary Clinton has always been a workhorse, not a show horse. As First Lady, Hillary had eschewed the traditional “hostess” role (much to the dismay of conservatives who cast her as ambitious, controlling, and just about every other euphemism to indicate their disapproval when faced with a smart, powerful woman) in favor of taking the lead on health-care policy, helping to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and laying the foundation for the eventual victory on universal health care. And as senator, working effectively in a chamber that for most of her tenure was controlled by the Republicans, she frequently reached across the aisle to achieve tangible victories on behalf of veterans and 9/11 first responders. (We’ll cover her economic policy achievements at greater length in a future chapter.)
The image of Hillary jetting around the world for photo ops—the accusation that she was nothing more than a frequent-flyer diplomat—never rang true, and it fell apart entirely in the face of the actual record of accomplishment we detailed.
Ironically, this attack is also undermined by the right’s opposite assertion—that in between what America Rising smugly demeans as “building relationships by meeting people”—Hillary was responsible for creating every major international crisis our country currently faces.
Conservatives want to point to whatever story happens to lead the international section of the newspaper, and if it’s a story about instability abroad, say it was all Hillary Clinton’s fault.
A perfect example of this blame game was the escalating situation in Ukraine, which presented a dilemma for American policy makers—and offered an opportunity for conservatives to blame Hillary, then out of office for a year, for allowing the crisis to occur, when in fact Hillary had predicted it.
The crux of the Republicans’ argument blames Vladimir Putin’s aggression on the so-called reset—an early Obama administration attempt to rebuild a productive relationship between the United States and Russia. As secretary of state, Hillary had been at the forefront of the policy, working with her counterpart, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, to reestablish stronger ties in the wake of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. She famously offered Lavrov a red plastic Reset button as a token of American hopes for renewed cooperation. (The button made a bit of a translation error, using the Russian word for overcharged where reset should have been.)
With Putin out of presidential office and the more moderate Dmitri Medvedev in his place, the Obama administration clearly felt that progress was possible. And while Republicans have forgotten it, the record shows that progress was indeed made in the early days of the reset. The New START treaty marked an enormous step forward in the cause of nuclear disarmament, an agreement to reduce American and Russian nuclear arsenals to their lowest levels in a half century. Russia agreed to allow American military planes to transport so-called lethal materials over Russian airspace, a major advance in securing Russian cooperation for American antiterror efforts in Afghanistan. And thanks in large part to Hillary’s diplomatic efforts, Russia was convinced to come on board with sanctions against Iran, the toughest in history, which led to a temporary halt in the Iranian nuclear program.
All of this was progress that made the world a safer place. None of it would have been possible without the “reset.” And none of it implied, as conservatives have argued, that Hillary and the Obama administration were taking Vladimir Putin lightly. As early as 2008, Hillary herself had warned publicly that Putin was not to be trusted, pointing to his past as a KGB agent. “By definition,” she said, “he doesn’t have a soul.” And even before she arrived in Foggy Bottom, she had been clear that she viewed relations with Russia as a balancing act, one that required us to find areas of mutual interest without taking our eye off the ball and compromising our position. That, indeed, is how all complicated diplomacy works.
When Putin restored himself to the Russian presidency in 2012, the situation changed, as Hillary would later explain in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “I knew that he would be more difficult to deal with,” she said, adding, “I think that what may have happened is that both the United States and Europe were really hoping for the best from Putin as a returned president. And I think we’ve been quickly, unfortunately, disabused of those hopes.” By late 2012, she was warning that Russia was attempting to re-Sovietize Eastern Europe.
And while Hillary had left office as secretary of state long before the Russian incursion into Ukraine, she continued to publicly voice skepticism about Putin’s intentions and concern about his increasing belligerence in the leadup to the crisis. In February 2014, she warned in a speech, “I believe, and this is j
ust my opinion, if there is an opportunity for him to consolidate the position of Russia in eastern Ukraine, he will look seriously at doing that.”
As the tragic news from Eastern Europe began to dominate the headlines, Republicans didn’t hesitate to politicize the situation. “At best,” claims Failed Choices, the reset “could be described as a hopelessly naïve attempt at diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. At worst, it was a deadly miscalculation that only empowered him to support some of the world’s worst leaders and regimes, trample on the rights of Russians, and weaken American prestige.”
Suddenly, the conservative media was ablaze with the latest talking points about the reset. Conservative pundit S. E. Cupp warned that if Hillary “thinks she’s going to get off the hook for it, she’s sadly mistaken,” adding in an appearance on CNN, “This is going to haunt her for the next two years.” Fox and Friends hosted, I imagine, more foreign policy talk than ever before, blasting a chyron about the FAILED RUSSIAN RESET and making sure to note underneath, “Clinton one of the architects of that policy.”
Meanwhile, under the headline HILLARY CLINTON’S UKRAINE—AND 2016—PROBLEM, Politico noted ominously that Hillary would be “tethered” to her time as secretary of state.
Republican politicians followed suit. “This whole ‘reset policy’ with Hillary Clinton,” mused Mitt Romney on Fox News in August 2014, “I think is one of the most embarrassing incidents in American foreign policy.” Romney couldn’t help but offer some advice to his former staffers at America Rising: “That picture of her with the foreign minister of Russia, smiling ear to ear with that red reset button, I presume that’s going to be an ad.”
All the while, we were working to remind reporters and voters alike that not only had the reset occurred long before Putin’s return to power and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but that it had been a success, leading to tangible advances in U.S.-Russia relations. We circulated an op-ed to this effect from retired U.S. Army general Hugh Shelton, a former Special Forces soldier who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as part of a thirty-eight-year military career.
“Our nation’s approach to Russia,” Shelton explained, “should mirror that of Secretary Clinton’s: clear-eyed and aware of what we are dealing with while working simultaneously to advance America’s interests.”
Indeed, while Republicans were eager to blame Hillary for events that occurred after she had left office, it is hard to argue that the progress made while she was secretary of state wasn’t worth making—and difficult for anyone with any understanding of diplomacy and any integrity when it comes to judging its results to conclude that the reset was in any way responsible for Putin’s behavior years later.
In fact, in a poll taken shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, two-thirds of Americans approved of Hillary’s time as secretary of state.
Meanwhile, America Rising was cynically trying to drive a wedge between Hillary and the left by reminding them of her Iraq War vote—which was politically costly for her during the 2008 primary—and terrifying them with the prospect of a return to Bush-era foreign policy. The right wanted nothing more than to encourage a vigorous primary challenger on Hillary’s left, hoping that she might end up wounded in her own party, or at least pegged as moving too far left for the general.
Rand Paul talked up his libertarian streak by imagining Democrats choosing him over Hillary because, in his words, “we’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war, because she’s so gung-ho.”
It worked on some: Ralph Nader, last seen helping to hand George W. Bush the 2000 election, popped his head up to argue that Hillary “thinks Obama is too weak, he doesn’t kill enough people overseas. So she’s a menace to the United States of America.”
Even Jon Stewart described her as “competent” and “very bright” but “a little hawkish for me.”
But is Hillary really an unreconstructed hawk? Here’s how she described her approach in an August 2014 interview with the Atlantic:
Most Americans think of engagement and go immediately to military engagement. That’s why I use the phrase “smart power.” I did it deliberately because I thought we had to have another way of talking about American engagement, other than unilateralism and the so-called boots on the ground.
And we don’t just have to go by Hillary’s words—we have four years of actions to examine. On the thorny issues of war and peace, Hillary’s tenure at the State Department not only demonstrates what her “smart power” theory looks like in practice, it inoculates her from Republican attempts to shoehorn her into their caricature of Democrats as weak on foreign policy.
A fair reading of Hillary’s record paints her neither as a hawk nor a dove, but rather both a forceful and a measured leader who holds two advantages on foreign policy unrelated to simplistic ideological labels: She’s actually done the job well, and no Republican will ever be able to credibly talk down to her on international issues.
And what of that Iraq War vote? Today, many remember it simply as a vote in favor of the disaster that was the Bush administration’s pursuit of Saddam Hussein—what MSNBC host Steve Kornacki called “a major step in the march to war in Iraq.”
But the Democrats who cast that vote—the majority of Senate Democrats—did so with the hope and belief that it would actually help to slow that march. President Bush had already declared that he could go to war without Congress’s assent—just as his father had a decade earlier. Democrats wanted him to go instead to the United Nations to build an international coalition, and Bush suggested that he would be able to do so if he could show that Congress was standing behind him.
The New York Times reported at the time that Hillary “said she had concluded that bipartisan support would make the president’s success at the United Nations ‘more likely and, therefore, war less likely.’”
If you believed the president, a yes vote was a vote to strengthen the last diplomatic tool in his arsenal—and a no vote was a vote to strip him of that tool.
Hillary has described her yes vote as a “mistake.” But the mistake was simply that she, like many other Democratic senators who couldn’t imagine that a president would actually lie us into war, gave George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt.
Conservatives are, of course, free to continue reminding progressives that Hillary once placed too much trust in the last Republican president, and brother of their likely nominee—who repeatedly flubbed the question of whether he would have supported W.’s war in Iraq and resurrected a number of neocon cheerleaders for that war into his own foreign policy kitchen cabinet.
America Rising’s Failed Choices was intended to ruin Hillary’s book tour, but their effort failed.
While the right never laid a glove on Hillary’s book, credible reviewers widely saw it as making a clear and convincing case for how Hillary’s leadership skills would serve her well as president.
In the Washington Post, Dan Balz wrote, “Through nearly 600 pages, she comes across less a visionary and more a practical-minded problem solver.”
His colleague, David Ignatius, agreed: “The book should reinforce the case of those who believe Clinton is well prepared to be president.”
“For voters who worry about a complex world,” wrote CBS News’s John Dickerson, “Clinton will be the candidate most equipped to show voters that they will not be taking a risk by putting the world in her hands.”
Readers saw in Hard Choices a future commander in chief who will be admired by our friends, feared by our adversaries—and respected by both.
True, there would be more battles to win if Hillary’s leadership was to remain her greatest strength. But the first round had gone to the truth.
Having failed to turn the release of Hard Choices into an opportunity to undermine Hillary’s record of accomplishment in office, Republicans resorted to trying to frame the book’s reception among the public as underwhelming. Going from attacking Hillary’s tenure at State to launching petty arguments
about how many copies the book sold or how many people showed up for a signing was a major step down.
And it’s not like this argument held much more water either: Hard Choices was one of the best-selling political memoirs of the decade, spending three weeks at number one on the New York Times best-seller list and far outpacing similar books authored by other 2016 contenders like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker (whose anemic sales we had researched, and released, anticipating this line of attack). Meanwhile, people lined up for more than seventeen hours for Hillary’s first signing, and large crowds turned out for her appearances everywhere from San Francisco to Edmonton.
Hillary also hit an array of media outlets on the book tour—everything from NPR to Fox News. In all, Hillary sat in the hot seat for almost four hours of television interviews, commenting on everything from trouble spots for U.S. policy makers in every part of the globe to economic challenges facing the nation. But it was only two words in one interview—with ABC’s Diane Sawyer—that got all the media attention.
Michael Kinsley once said that a gaffe is when a politician gets caught saying what he really thinks. In this sense, Hillary did trip herself up when she told Sawyer that her family was “dead broke” on leaving the White House. As we’ll explore at length in chapter ten, the statement was accurate—the Clintons faced a mountain of legal debt from defending themselves against partisan GOP investigations in the ’90s—but it provided an opening the Republicans couldn’t manufacture on their own.
The Republican message machine kicked into high gear, twisting Hillary’s remark into a Mitt Romney–like gaffe, improbably claiming that she was somehow out of touch with a public she had served for more than thirty years. That the right was able to so easily coax the media into trampling on Hillary’s otherwise successful book launch by making “dead broke” into a defining controversy foretold the tough fights ahead.