Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine

by Daniel Halper

  This infuriated the senator even more, probably because it was true. Obama was the beneficiary of the long if subterranean sense of grievance that Democrats felt toward both Clintons, her husband in particular. A grievance that did not dissipate during her years in the Senate or his time out on the hustings, campaigning for Democrat after Democrat. Many senior Democrats had felt used, lied to, embarrassed, and resentful from the first Clinton era. They were tired of the intimidation tactics of hatchet men like James Carville and Terry McAuliffe, who would cut them in public or in private if they ever violated the Clinton omertà. They resented the cavalier treatment toward allies who were no longer of use to them. Stephanopoulos, for example, was now a nonperson to the Clintons. As was Al Gore, who’d served Bill Clinton loyally for eight years, but who’d challenged him over the Lewinsky scandal and his ethics in an explosive fight that, according to multiple aides and published reporting, left both fuming.

  Most members of the political press were tired of the Clintons, too. They long had been victims of rough treatment and sharp elbows from the First Family’s media handlers—and the ever-looming threat of being frozen out by the Clintons, and their careers stunted, if they deviated too far from what the Clintonistas felt was fair game. A prime example of this tendency involved the commentator David Shuster, who dared to raise questions about the crown jewel of the Clinton family—their beloved and sheltered daughter, Chelsea. Shuster’s brush with the Clintons has never before been fully reported, but the story offers a textbook example of the Clintons’ willingness to manipulate and punish disfavored reporters.

  As the 2008 campaign turned into a delegate-by-delegate dogfight all the way to the Denver convention, the Clinton campaign had pulled out a secret weapon to try to kick things back into gear: the heretofore reclusive Chelsea Clinton. She of course had grown up in the White House, but had long been sheltered by an off-limits rule to which the press and other Washington fixtures by and large strictly adhered. Few forgot the kerfuffle that resulted when John McCain, in one of his famously acerbic moments, joked at a private fund-raiser, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Her father is Janet Reno.”11 The senator quickly apologized.

  The hands-off policy had now been managed to such an extreme that most reporters even extended it to a time when a now-grown-up Chelsea inserted herself into the political spotlight. In 2008, for example, her mission was to pressure so-called superdelegates—unpledged delegates to the Democratic convention who could, in theory, sway the outcome of the nominating process—of primary states into supporting her mother.

  “Hey, don’t commit yet, we want you to wait,” Chelsea would tell the superdelegates, who were surprised and startled to hear from the former first child.

  Shuster was a fill-in host and political commentator for MSNBC. A telegenic forty-one-year-old, he’d been in broadcasting for nearly two decades. Shuster wanted to do a story for the liberal cable news network on Chelsea’s involvement in the campaign. It was novel, after all, and more than anything he just thought there was news value in figuring out what exactly she was telling these superdelegates in these phone calls.

  So he asked her himself. At a South Carolina campaign event, Shuster got his moment and pulled Chelsea aside.

  “Hey, do you want to chat?” Shuster asked her. “Can I ask you a couple of questions about what you’re doing with the superdelegates?”

  Unsurprisingly, Chelsea declined. “Nah, I really don’t want to talk about it.” This was the kind of rejection a veteran reporter like Shuster is used to—news subjects, especially political ones, prefer to manage the press by bringing them the story. They don’t usually like being asked cold what they themselves are up to.

  The encounter was seconds-long, perfunctory, and otherwise meaningless. At least to Shuster. But the next day, Shuster received a phone call from the Clinton campaign.

  “Stay away from Chelsea,” warned a gruff Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.

  “What?” Shuster asked.

  “She is off-limits,” Wolfson replied. “She is not, you know—you are not allowed to just go up and talk to her.”

  By now most reporters covering the Clinton campaign were prepared for Wolfson, a tough Clinton loyalist who could play hardball. Having worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 election to the U.S. Senate and her 2006 reelection, Wolfson returned in 2008 to direct communications on her White House campaign. For the first part of the election, Wolfson played a fairly conventional role in a fairly conventional campaign. But as Clinton’s losses to Obama started to pile up in early 2008, Wolfson’s style appeared increasingly desperate. In April, he raised questions about Obama’s relationship with the American terrorist Bill Ayers. He was ferocious in his defense of Chelsea Clinton.

  “Look,” Shuster recalls telling Wolfson, “she’s perfectly capable of defending herself and saying, ‘No,’ politely, as she did. And that’s fine. If she didn’t want to comment that’s fine, but you guys are sort of jumping down my throat. . . . She’s twenty-seven years old.”

  “Well, she’s the president’s daughter. You need to be respectful,” Wolfson said, ending the call as quickly and bizarrely as it began.

  Looking back on the encounter years later, Shuster still remembers what he thought: “Wow!” Never before had he been warned so harshly to steer clear of a campaign surrogate—of someone who was on the campaign trail publicly making the case for a candidate.

  But Shuster was a busy guy, and campaigns are busy times, so he carried on. The importance of that phone call and the implicit warning not to talk about Chelsea was missed.

  A couple of days later, February 7, 2008, Shuster found himself filling in for host Tucker Carlson’s short-lived show, Tucker. Before the program, as Shuster was going over some segments, an MSNBC executive nonchalantly asked, “Well, how was your trip? What’s going on?”

  “Oh, the trip was fine,” Shuster responded. “But I got the most bizarre reaction from the Clinton campaign when I tried to talk to Chelsea, just to see if she would be willing to talk about her phone calls to superdelegates.”

  “What do you mean?” replied the MSNBC suit.

  “Well, you know, Chelsea said calmly ‘No,’ she wasn’t going to talk and the next day I got this irate Clinton campaign staffer telling me to get the hell away from her. She’s off-limits.”

  The executive offered a quick retort, “Oh, so it’s like they’re pimping her out.”

  “That’s a great way to explain it,” Shuster said. They put her out there, making those phone calls, making her almost impenetrable in terms of media access. And by doing so they don’t have to explain anything that’s going on—it’s all upside, with nothing on the downside. The phrase stuck in his head.

  That night, Shuster’s guests included radio talk show host Bill Press and the former CNN reporter Bob Franken. Shuster opened a segment about Chelsea’s efforts to woo the superdelegates and, addressing Press, said, “Bill, there’s just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea’s out there calling up celebrities, saying support my mom, and apparently she’s also calling these superdelegates.”

  “Hey, she’s working for her mom,” Press said. “What’s unseemly about that? During the last campaign, the Bush twins were out working for their dad. I think it’s great. I think she’s grown up in a political family, she’s got politics in her blood, she loves her mom, she thinks she’d make a great president—”

  “But doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Shuster asked, stealing the line the MSNBC suit had offered up earlier.

  Press said no and defended Chelsea’s choice. Off camera, Bob Franken could be heard loudly laughing.

  It was, in short, a typical cable TV news show: Nonsense uttered, nonsense replied. Except to the Clinton campaign. Throughout the evening, Shuster started to receive emails from Clinton campaign officials. “Did you really accuse Chelsea Clinton of being pimped out?” some of the emails
asked. Shuster engaged in quick and rough email exchanges with Wolfson and Philippe Reines, Hillary’s spokesman and personal bulldog.

  Chuck Todd, the ever-savvy NBC political analyst, observed the back-and-forth and offered a friendly warning. Like every other D.C. reporter, he knew the Clintons’ media operation well. He knew the stories and had felt the occasional sharp elbow. “Be careful,” he advised, “because they’re going to use this against you.”

  The next morning, preparing for a previously scheduled appearance on the morning show on MSNBC, Morning Joe, Shuster was greeted by the president of the network. The visit, needless to say, was unusual.

  “I’m starting to get a lot of these, you know, a lot of rumble about something you said about Chelsea,” Phil Griffin told Shuster.

  Shuster couldn’t believe it. Sure, maybe the phrase “pimped out” sounded a little coarse to an older generation, but no one—at least no one under forty—could possibly think he was saying that Chelsea Clinton’s parents had literally pushed her into prostitution. Shuster was sure they knew exactly what he was saying.

  “Can you just do an apology on Morning Joe?” asked Griffin, referring to the cable network’s morning talk program. It wasn’t really a question. “Just do an apology now to take care of it.”

  At the end of Shuster’s appearance on Morning Joe, Shuster had his moment. “Can I take care of a housekeeping matter?” Shuster asked. “So you know how yesterday we ran this clip of women from The View. Chelsea Clinton had called them. Well, last night on Tucker’s show we ran the same clip, and then out of that I said a lot of wonderful things about Chelsea.”

  It was a lead-up to an apology, and the lead-up took some time. He noted that the previous night he had said that we should all be “proud” of Chelsea, that Mike Huckabee praised the way the Clintons raised her, and that “everybody, all of us, love Chelsea Clinton.”

  At this point, Morning Joe’s viewers could have been forgiven for wondering why David Shuster was going to such lengths to sing the praises of Chelsea Clinton. If they hadn’t heard his “pimped out” comment the night before, they surely would have thought Shuster’s morning tribute to the Clintons’ daughter was completely out of the blue. But then, finally, Shuster got to the point.

  “But we also talked about the fact that Chelsea Clinton, as the campaign has acknowledged, she’s making calls to these superdelegates.” Still inclined to defend the substance of his comments from the night before, Shuster added that Chelsea’s calls “can be the unseemly side of politics.”

  Finally, the apology came. Sort of. “Well, last night, I used a phrase, some slang about her efforts. I didn’t think that people would take it literally, but some people have, and to the extent that people feel I was being pejorative about the actions of Chelsea Clinton making these phone calls, to the extent that people feel I was being pejorative, I apologize for that. I should have seen people would, might, view it that way. And for that, I’m sorry.”

  As apologies went, it was not exactly full-throated. Shuster put his “pimped out” comment in the context of his prior praise of Chelsea. He defended the substance of his underlying criticism. And then he finally got around to a sorry-if-anyone’s-been-offended-by-my-comments type of apology.

  It was shortly after the appearance that Shuster received a memorable call from a friend on the Clinton campaign. “I’m going to give you a heads-up. The Clinton campaign is about to roll you.” Far too late, Shuster was being warned that this was a fight the Clinton campaign wanted—indeed, they believed this was a fight they needed.

  Throughout the campaign, the problem the Clinton campaign kept coming up against was simple: The liberal base was more excited about Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton. The new guy showed more promise, showed more ability to carry out the liberal dream than the old-timer—Hillary Clinton. And the deep-seated liberal disappointment was given a powerful voice at the liberal network, MSNBC. “The Clinton campaign was pissed-off at MSNBC over coverage that they had thought had been unfair,” says someone who worked at MSNBC at that time. A prime source of ire was directed toward Chris Matthews, the loquacious host of Hardball, who’d been known to wax eloquent over Barack Obama on-air and make sexist comments about Hillary Clinton—“she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” “Madame Defarge,” “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” were just a few of the choice phrases Matthews used to assail her.

  An MSNBC employee believed the Clinton team went so far as to orchestrate a letter-writing campaign against Matthews, especially after he said what many people long believed: “The reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a frontrunner, is that her husband messed around.” But Matthews was a little harder to roll because he was a far more entrenched figure, one of the low-rated network’s only marquee names.

  “Chris got in some trouble internally,” a former employee says, “but I think MSNBC wouldn’t dare to take away Chris’s show.”

  The morning of the Shuster apology, the Clinton campaign sent a nasty letter to Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. There was a presidential primary debate scheduled for February 26. MSNBC, part of the NBC News group, was the sponsor. And according to the letter Capus received, Hillary was considering pulling out of the next debate in protest over Shuster’s comment.

  The entire network began to panic. “Keep in mind the financial situation,” says a source close to the situation at the time. MSNBC struggles for ratings, and it’s almost always a losing struggle—except on debate nights. “Debates make millions for the networks,” says the source. “They boost their ratings in a huge way.” If Hillary pulled out of the debate, there would be no debate. And “MSNBC couldn’t afford financially to lose a debate.”

  Moments later, Shuster got called into a meeting with Phil Griffin, Steve Capus, and several other people, including the vice president for communications at MSNBC, Jeremy Gaines. The consensus from the corporate executives was “We’ve got to do something about this.” As one MSNBC employee puts it, people were “going apeshit.”

  Shuster tried to push back. “Don’t you guys get the politics in this?” he asked the corporate bigwigs. “The Clinton campaign is trying to appeal to women, and trying to make Hillary a sympathetic figure.” They wanted to make it look like men, such as David Shuster, were beating up on the woman who could be the first female president of the United States.

  Griffin, Capus, and company may have understood the politics of the situation, but it was irrelevant. This wasn’t a fight being waged on the merits. All that mattered was the February 26 debate.

  So Shuster tried again, this time explaining to his bosses that Hillary was bluffing. “They need this debate more than Barack Obama does,” he pleaded. Obama was the front-runner and weaker debater, and Hillary’s debate performances were her best chance at snatching the momentum from him. “There’s no way Hillary is pulling out of this debate.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” one executive responded. “I mean, we can’t even afford the possibility that they are not going to participate in this debate.”

  Shuster disagreed, but by then he knew he was alone. Looking for a way out, he asked, “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to apologize directly to Hillary? To Chelsea?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you do that,” one MSNBC suit said. “That would be a good start.”

  Shuster got right on it. “Howard,” he said in a phone call to Howard Wolfson, “sorry about all the confusion over everything. I’d like to apologize directly to Hillary Clinton. Can you patch me through to Huma, on the campaign trail, so I can call and apologize directly to Mrs. Clinton?” Huma—the wife of then-congressman Anthony Weiner—was Hillary’s personal aide, a constant presence at the presidential candidate’s side.

  “We’re not going to let you do that,” Wolfson replied.

  “Okay. Um, all right,” Shuster said. “Can I send a note of apology?”

  Wolfson relented, but only slightly. “
If you want to email Huma, here’s her email.”

  Moments later Shuster sent Huma an apology, hoping it would get directly to Hillary, who had supposedly cried, according to her aides, when she heard Shuster’s remarks about Chelsea. Shuster was hoping the direct apology would be the beginning of his rehabilitation.

  It wasn’t.

  In fact, it wasn’t even acknowledged. An hour later, Howard Wolfson held a press call with reporters. “The worst part of this,” he said, misleadingly, is that Shuster “has not apologized to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.”

  “Fucker!” Shuster thought when he got wind of Wolfson’s call. “He wouldn’t let me apologize!”

  Shuster wasn’t on the call, but he found out about it when the Associated Press called him up for a reaction. “Howard Wolfson just went off on you for not apologizing,” the AP reporter told Shuster.

  “This is crazy!” said Shuster. Wolfson’s statement on the press call was of course technically true, but only because Wolfson had personally blocked all attempts at a direct apology. Like a laundry list of Clinton targets and scapegoats, from Paula Jones to Ken Starr, Shuster was seeing the lengths to which the Clintons have always gone to destroy inconvenient obstacles to their power, and he felt like a helpless pedestrian watching a speeding bus (driven by the Clintons) plow straight at him.

  Meanwhile, as someone who worked at MSNBC at the time explains, “NBC is freaked out. The Clinton campaign is, like, ratcheting this up.” According to a source close to the situation, the Clintons called people on the board of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, to say, “Well, this is outrageous, how NBC News and MSNBC are handling this, and we need to do something about it.” Before long, GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, was on the phone with Jeff Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal at the time, and Steve Capus asking, “What the hell is going on over there? Why are my board members talking about the reporter, and why is your reporter referring to Chelsea as a prostitute?”