by David Brock
Then some intrepid Republican researcher dug up a copy of Hillary’s speaking contract, which specified arrangements for flights and hotel rooms, press policies, and other ephemera like staging and backstage accommodations. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was scandalized: “And along with the hummus and crudité[s], they demanded ‘coffee, tea, room temp sparkling and still water, diet ginger ale… and sliced fruit.’” Hummus! The very nerve!
“It reminds us of Van Halen,” Taranto persisted, referring to the hard rock band known the world over for demanding to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms in every dressing room on their tours—with all the brown M&Ms removed. (Actually the band did it in order to make sure producers were paying attention to the contract rider—if a producer missed the M&M clause, perhaps he also missed an important safety check. Hillary’s outrageous request for water, on the other hand, was probably just a matter of hydration.
“We don’t have kings and queens in America, or at least we shouldn’t,” sniffed Jon Ralston, dean of the Nevada press corps, as the controversy about Hillary’s UNLV speech raged pointlessly on. “But when I see the red carpet UNLV is rolling out for Hillary Clinton in two months I start to wonder.”
It was a target-rich environment for the GOP oppo gang at America Rising, which snapped a photo of Hillary entering a tony New York department store. “If Hillary is going to run for President,” snarked its spokesman, “she might be advised to take a lengthy sabbatical from her $200k per pop speaking tour and private shopping sprees at Bergdor’s to try and reconnect with what’s happening back here on Earth.”
What, exactly, are we really talking about here? What had Hillary done—heck, with the exception of Rubin’s blind thrusts, what had she even been accused of doing—that would merit this kind of singularly vicious treatment? Hadn’t other public figures accepted similar speaking fees? Weren’t many of Hillary’s going to charity? Don’t many accomplished people receive invitations to give paid speeches? Doesn’t everybody like hummus?
The answer, as always: Hillary is held to a double standard. And never was that more clear than when, according to her critics, she had what was spun as a Mitt Romney moment while speaking to Diane Sawyer:
SAWYER: You’ve made five million making speeches? The president’s made more than a hundred million dollars?
CLINTON: Well, you have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard and it’s been amazing to me. He’s worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts. You know, you had to make double the money because of, obviously, taxes, and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.
The words “dead broke” set off sirens inside the war rooms of every right-wing group in Washington. “This is outrageous,” tweeted Reince Priebus. “How out of touch is Hillary Clinton when ‘dead broke’ = mansions & massive speaking fees?”
But the truth is, the Clintons were worth between $350,000 and $1 million when they moved into the White House—as close to middle-class as any modern presidential family has ever been. And thanks to the right’s years-long campaign of partisan investigations, they would leave the White House in worse financial shape. When Hillary ran for the Senate in 2000 (a job that, at the time, paid a healthy but not exorbitant $141,300 a year), she had to file a financial disclosure form showing her with assets between $781,000 and $1.8 million—and legal debts as high as $10.6 million.
They really did have to pay off those debts (it took four years). They really did need to find a place to live (here, they leaned on family friend Terry McAuliffe, who put up his own money to personally secure the mortgage that made it possible). They really did have a college-age daughter. And they really did pitch in to help less fortunate members of their family.
Were the Clintons one paycheck away from the poorhouse? No. But Diane Sawyer asked a question about why Hillary and Bill Clinton had chosen to accept paid speaking gigs, and Hillary answered, honestly, that they had made alleviating financial pressure a family priority.
Conservatives, of course, painted this as a moment when Hillary revealed how out of touch she is with everyday Americans—and the media had little trouble accepting the right’s framing of the story. But “dead broke” was really a moment of personal candor. After all the media yammering about how Hillary needed to be less cautious and practiced, here she was, saying something unrehearsed and revealing, and that same media reported it as a huge misstep.
Hillary couldn’t win. If the media had bothered to look beyond how the remark fit into conservatives’ strategy to discredit Hillary, they might have found that it shed some light on the real story of her life.
Unlike Mitt Romney—or, for that matter, Jeb Bush—Hillary Rodham was not born into power and privilege.
“My grandfather,” she told a sold-out crowd at an EMILY’s List event in March 2015, “was a factory worker—started at the age of 11, worked until he was 65, and got to retire. His son, my father, went to college, was a small businessman who worked really hard and made a good life for us. My mother had a terrible, abusive childhood, had to leave at the age of 14 to go work in order to support herself, having been abandoned by both her parents and her paternal grandparents, never got to go to college—but had a spark of resilience that kept her going and gave her the capacity to create a family filled with love and support.”
Hillary was raised middle class in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she attended public school. She worked her entire life, from the age of thirteen on, in a variety of jobs that included supervising a park near her house and, memorably, cleaning salmon in Alaska.
After law school, she eschewed far more lucrative options and chose a path of public service, working for the Children’s Defense Fund. She was the first director of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville’s legal aid clinic. When she and Bill Clinton got married in 1975, the wedding took place in their living room.
In time, as Bill built his public career, she would build a successful legal practice to help support the family, but she never lost her focus on children and families, leading a task force as Arkansas’ First Lady to reform the state’s school system and, when Bill was elected president, championing the cause of children’s health care.
“We know how blessed we are,” she told the Guardian in June 2014. “We were neither of us raised with these kinds of opportunities, and we worked really hard for them…. All one has to do is look at my record going back to my time in college and law school to know not only where my heart is, but where my efforts have been.”
Anyone who knows the Clintons—or has followed their trajectory—knows that for them making money has always taken a backseat to serving others. At every opportunity, they chose to devote their time and energy to improving their community, their country, and their world, repeatedly opting to serve the public rather than cash out. For anyone else, a story like theirs would be part of a stump speech, proof that they not only understand what it was like to grow up middle class—they’d lived it—in Bill’s case, rising from what was truly desperate poverty.
And it’s that admirable and powerful personal story the Republicans seek to erase, even if it means demonizing hard work, merit, and personal achievement—quintessential American values the Republicans usually try to claim as their own—but that the Clintons in fact embody.
In part, the Hillary-as-Mitt strategy is an exercise in inoculation and projection on the part of conservatives contemplating their own presidential field. The early front-runner (and, in my opinion, still the most formidable Republican nominee) is Jeb Bush, whose own ability to relate to voters is a giant question mark.
Bush can be condescending and arrogant, with an air of entitlement, which doesn’t come as a surprise given that he is the son and brother of a president who was q
uickly tapped as the establishment favorite despite not having held office in a decade. Indeed, he carries with him all the baggage his brother brought to the race in 2000: He made his fortune off his family’s name, and his accomplishments would have been impossible had he not been born a Bush. The last Bush on the car lot, he is the definition of a dynastic candidate.
Moreover, unlike George W., Jeb lacks a story of personal redemption that could give him more of a human touch. He’s great in a room of wealthy donors, but conservatives can’t help but have noticed that he lacks the charisma to shine in smaller interactions with ordinary people. Reporters took note that when a crew of his supporters showed up to showcase their enthusiasm at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC, a major stop on the Republican cattle call circuit, they weren’t dressed like real grassroots activists—more than one compared the scene to the “Brooks Brothers riot” from 2000.
Questionable political instincts, an inability to relate to everyday Americans, a life of privilege, the personality of an aloof plutocrat: That’s the false image Republicans would like us to see when we look at Hillary, but it is also what they must actually see when they take a clear-eyed look at Jeb Bush.
Meanwhile, the “Romney-ization” attack is also designed to reach the left—it’s part of an ongoing GOP effort to drive a wedge between Hillary and her progressive base.
In the early spring of 2015, American Crossroads—Karl Rove’s SuperPAC—released a thirty-second Web ad that neatly squared the circle between the insinuations of shady dealings with foreign governments covered in the last chapter and the attack on Hillary’s populist bona fides.
The audio is a speech by Senator Elizabeth Warren:
Powerful interests have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor. The power of well-funded special interests tilts our democracy away from the people and toward the powerful. Action is required to defend our great democracy against those who would see it perverted into one more rigged game where the rich and the powerful always win.
On screen is grainy footage of Hillary posing with foreign leaders, and a series of chyrons. THE CLINTONS’ FOUNDATION TOOK MILLIONS FROM FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, one warns, taking the Wall Street Journal’s inflammatory headline and putting it to its proper use as a scare quote in an attack ad. We see the names of suspicious-sounding countries like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (a prominent backer of Hamas, the chyron notes) before seeing a couple of critical comments from Democratic county chairs.
The ad ends with a question: “Powerful foreign governments are ready for Hillary. Are we?”
It’s a seemingly perfect ad because, in addition to scaremongering about the Clinton Foundation’s ties to foreign governments, it not so subtly reminds the media of one of its favorite hobbyhorses—the implied conflict between Hillary and Warren.
Appearing at a rally for Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley in October 2014, with Warren at her side, Hillary told the crowd, “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”
To conservatives, this sounded a lot like when President Obama told a Roanoke, Virginia, crowd that, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
The president’s point was that wealthy Americans owed a lot to investments made in the public good: schools, infrastructure, and so on. But conservatives couldn’t resist clipping “you didn’t build that” out of context and framing it as an attack on entrepreneurs.
Similarly, Hillary was making a fairly routine argument against conservative economic policy, but “don’t let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs” was irresistible bait for the right. Within a week, Jeb Bush was waving that quote in front of a conservative audience in Colorado, reveling in the audience’s jeering of Hillary’s supposed disregard of the private sector.
Ripping quotes out of context was nothing new for Republicans, but the story had a deeper meaning for the media. “Hillary Clinton’s gaffe about jobs,” Howard Kurtz opined for Fox News, “is resonating for several reasons—not least because the media have decided she’s no Elizabeth Warren. The media narrative du jour is that Hillary is out of step with the populist mood of the Democratic Party—as embodied by the Wall Street–bashing Massachusetts senator who many pundits are still hoping will challenge her. So they are guaranteed to pounce on any mistake that feeds Hillary’s image as an establishment figure who is struggling to be more like Liz.”
“Clinton’s clumsy language reveals a politician woefully out of sync with her party’s progressive populist base,” wrote Luke Brinker for Salon. “Her awkward attempt to relate to the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party calls to mind Mitt Romney’s cringe-inducing efforts to woo GOP conservatives during his last presidential bid.”
Once again, here is the manufactured image of Hillary as painfully out of touch with the voters she is trying to reach. And Republicans are happy to help this false narrative along, even if it means, in effect, attacking Hillary from the left. A month before, the RNC had put out a video featuring Hillary introducing Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein onstage at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting.
Such a video is unlikely to move Republican voters; it’s more likely intended to sow doubt and undermine Hillary’s support on the left. Some Democrats, such as MSNBC’s Krystal Ball, have piled on, complaining that Hillary “seemingly can’t get enough of hobnobbing with economic elites and cultivating donors.”
Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which frequently hectors Democrats from the left, told the Boston Globe, “There are a lot of unchecked boxes with Hillary Clinton when it comes to economic populism and corporate accountability. There are definitely red flags.”
Harper’s commissioned liberal writer Doug Henwood for an essay titled “Stop Hillary” in which he twisted the facts to argue that Hillary was a corporatist wolf in progressive sheep’s clothing.
And then there are those like the leaders of the online activist group MoveOn who rather cynically see the opportunity to build their e-mail lists and make some money by backing “a more progressive alternative.” MoveOn joined forces with a PAC that was trying to draft Elizabeth Warren for president, despite the fact that she said emphatically she wasn’t interested and even signed a letter with her fellow women senators urging Hillary to run.
It was all part of a misinformed campaign by some on the left, unwittingly serving the interests of the right and enabled at every turn by a press corps that always favors conflict as a good story, to gin up a primary challenge to Hillary.
Even some progressives who don’t necessarily oppose Hillary are eager to see her have a tough primary. Zephyr Teachout, a progressive icon who had just finished an unsuccessful attempt to defeat New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo in a primary, made the case on MSNBC: “Please, we need people to run against Hillary Clinton because if she’s not debating anyone on education policy or on tax policy then we all lose. Not only does she need a challenger from the left, we should have five people—ten people—running for president. If we don’t have a Democratic Party challenger, that is a democratic tragedy.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, made a similar argument, couched as concern for Hillary’s own candidacy. She told Politico: “Even the most ardent Hillary fans should understand that sometimes not only her party and the country—but the candidacy—would be better served if she has competition.”
But is there really a rationale for a challenge from Hillary’s left? In a previous chapter, we looked a
t the phony claim that Hillary would be an unacceptably hawkish president. What are we to make of the claim that she would be a sellout to Wall Street?
This claim, too, is bogus. In her first campaign for the presidency, Hillary sounded many of the same notes that have endeared Elizabeth Warren to the progressive left, beginning with advocating fiercely for Warren’s idea for a Financial Product Safety Commission (which was passed into law in 2010 and now exists as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).
In addition, Hillary’s aggressive plan to hold Wall Street accountable included proposing that financial institutions involved with derivatives be subject to minimum capital requirements, that shareholders get a vote on executive compensation, that the so-called carried interest loophole be closed, and that the Securities and Exchange Commission crack down on short selling.
One columnist estimated that Hillary “might bring the toughest regulatory scrutiny of any president in a generation.”
The truth is that Hillary has been on the side of the middle class long before the “Warren wing” of the Democratic Party existed. In the Senate, she repeatedly introduced legislation to make sure that the federal minimum wage would increase whenever congressional salaries did, and cosponsored bills to increase the minimum wage five different times, a commitment that dates back to her support of minimum wage increases when she was First Lady.
Hillary also worked across the aisle to help out-of-work Americans by extending unemployment benefits. She twice introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act to prevent employer retaliation against workers who claim wage discrimination, and cosponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which expanded workers’ rights to take pay discrimination cases to court.