Once elected, Obama offered hopeful, if empty, rhetoric that was inexplicably and uncritically embraced by much of the Washington media. His star, more like a supernova, was so bright, Obama didn’t even bother to stand for reelection before seeking out the White House. “Everybody else is waiting in line,” one Senate colleague recalls, “and he’s like ‘fuck it.’ ” Obama never had to work for it. It all seemed to fall into his lap. And he was winning the adulation within the Democratic Party that had once belonged to Bill. That more than anything pissed Bill Clinton off.
The former president further exacerbated the problem when he dismissed Obama’s imminent victory in South Carolina by comparing him to another African American candidate—one who had no hope of winning the nomination. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said, adding that “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”11
Clinton was furious with reporters covering the campaign. His legendary charm was gone. “Shame on you!” he yelled at reporters at one point on the trail, a clip replayed endlessly on television and YouTube. He accused Obama of playing the “race card on me.”12
The racial controversy Clinton touched off infuriated African American officeholders, who rallied around Obama and sent Mrs. Clinton’s numbers even further south. Suddenly the Clintons had a race problem. The campaign seemed snakebit on the question. Even when former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young endorsed Hillary, he unhelpfully noted in a live television interview that “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”13
Only Doug Band was there to lend support. Just as he’d always been over much of the past decade. When Clinton was about to go into his heart bypass surgery, Band was beside him. When Clinton met with Kim Jong Il to bring home two American women imprisoned in North Korea, Band was standing behind him. When Clinton and President Obama played golf, Band was in the foursome. And when a finger-wagging Clinton lost his cool with a Nevada television reporter during the 2008 caucuses—“Get on your television station and say, ‘I don’t care about the home mortgage crisis. All I care about is making sure that some voters have it easier than others, and that when they do vote . . . their vote should count five times as much as others.’ That is your position!”—a balding Doug Band was in the camera shot, with a worried look on his aging face, standing behind the only employer he’d ever known.14 Band was also in South Carolina, where he reportedly was furious over the media’s attack on his boss and the implication he was a racist.
In that, Clinton also received sympathy from an unexpected quarter. One senior Bush aide remembers hearing the president say that he made a point of calling Clinton “on the days that nobody else would call him,” like the day that he was called a racist by the Obama team in South Carolina. On the phone, Bush apparently told Clinton that he knew he wasn’t a racist and that he was still his friend. Bush said, “Those are the days when you need friends to call you, but sometimes they never do.”
By the time Bill was finished, the damage sustained by his wife’s campaign was mortal. “What killed us was South Carolina,” a former Clinton official told Vanity Fair.15 In a CBS News poll, 58 percent of South Carolina voters “said Bill Clinton’s involvement was important to their decision and most of them voted for Obama. Seventy percent believed Hillary Clinton had unfairly attacked Obama. As a warning to Clinton, just 77 percent said they would be satisfied with her as the nominee.”16
From then on, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seemed to meander from one controversy to another—some of her making. Many of her misstatements on the trail awakened the image of Hillary the Liar, an image she’d tried to extinguish after a decade of senatorial work. She had, for example, claimed for years to have been named after explorer Sir Edmund Hillary—until it was learned that she wasn’t. She claimed to have been opposed to the 2003 Iraq War from the start—like Obama. Only in Obama’s case was that true. One prominent TV reporter remembers hearing word that Hillary claimed she once arrived in Bosnia under sniper fire. “That couldn’t be the same trip I was on,” she thought, but it was. The one in which Hillary was accompanied by Chelsea and was greeted at the airport. There was, of course, no sniper fire at all. Even when she tried to speak the truth and say what was on her mind, Clinton found trouble, such as when she made a reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy to justify staying in the race against Obama, which led to furious outcries that she was rooting for his death—and to the long-standing wrath of Michelle Obama.
Hillary was not expected to be a flawless stage performer like Bill. Yet many of the bafflingly tone-deaf missteps in 2008 were made by her husband. At one point, Senator Obama, to his obvious delight, noted that he wasn’t sure which Clinton he was running against. And yet Bill Clinton’s irate harangues continued, stunning veteran reporters and campaign operatives who’d long admired his ability to charm audiences. Months later, he was still angrily defending his comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, declaring, “You gotta really go some to play the race card with me. My office is in Harlem, and Harlem voted for Hillary by the way.” With his temper rising, he ranted, “I have 1.4 million people around the world, mostly people of color, in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and elsewhere on the world’s least expensive AIDS drugs,” and the quote about Jesse Jackson “was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere.”17
The once sympathetic CBS News website published a column titled “Bill Clinton’s Lost Legacy.” In it, the author noted that Clinton’s former labor secretary, Robert Reich, had accused Clinton of spearheading a “smear campaign against Obama” and quoted former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle describing Bill Clinton as “not presidential.”18
To close observers, Bill Clinton’s lead-footedness seemed increasingly puzzling. It certainly was to his wife. Hillary often marveled about how her future husband managed to talk his way into a closed museum while they were dating at Yale Law School. How he could have handled things so badly now was a subject of speculation and amateur psychoanalysis.
Some aides wondered if Clinton’s heart surgeries—in 2004 and 2005—had left him a step off his game. Still others, including close and longtime Clinton associates, thought a more sinister motivation might be at work.
I discussed the subject with one of Clinton’s friends, a man who has golfed with him, worked with him in the West Wing, and who, like most former Clinton aides, spoke to me only on condition of anonymity. He knows the penalty for talking out of school—exile, humiliation.
Referring to the South Carolina disaster, he volunteers a thought. “[Hillary] knows better than anybody that whatever [Bill] does is intentional. So part of her has to be, when she’s lying in bed at night, going ‘was that real, did he make a mistake, or was it on purpose?’ ”
This clearly was something that had been on the former aide’s own mind for a while. “Want to go conspiracy theorist?” he continues. “How does Mark Penn, who’s her chief strategist, not know that the [primary] states aren’t winner-take-all, but proportionate? How does he, the guy that’s been at it forever, he’s her chief strategist, doesn’t have a brief—and Harold Ickes is there, too—on delegates and how they get amassed? You have to. How do these guys from the Obama campaign, they know the delegates and Hillary Clinton doesn’t? That doesn’t make sense. . . . It’s either unbelievable arrogance, or it’s sabotage.”
Penn, who had built up a share of enemies within the Clinton orbit, was an early scapegoat for Hillary’s disaster. “A lot of people would like . . . to see him go,” a senior Clinton advisor told reporters. “I think about all camps think it’s Mark’s fault,” a source described as a “Clinton White House veteran close to the campaign” told the Washington Post. “I don’t think there is a Mark camp.” On April 6, 2008, after several more stories pointed the finger at his management, Penn stepped down as chief strategist, and was rewarded with more blind quotes from his many en
emies.
“The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination,” stated reporters Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut in the Washington Post exposé. Baker and Kornblut cited Howard Wolfson, James Carville, Harold Ickes, Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta, Paul Begala, and advertising consultant Mandy Grunwald as among Penn’s many enemies. They also would be long-term survivors in the Clinton orbit. Penn, however, would not. A 2013 Washington Post article still branded him in Clinton circles as the man who “has been tagged as the egocentric villain of the campaign who sowed seeds of dissent.” The Clinton team let it be known that Penn would not be back for another Hillary Clinton run.
The same could not be said, obviously, for another person many blamed for Hillary’s travails. Speaking about Bill Clinton, Bob Shrum tells me, “I think he’s a very, very good strategist for himself. I don’t think he’s always a good strategist for other people.”
One explanation for Bill’s 2008 behavior is of course the obvious one. Bill was, and remains, deeply conflicted over the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. The former commander in chief worries about what that would mean to his place in history. “If she becomes president, Clinton’s fucked,” says a former senior advisor. She’ll be the first woman president, and “he’s gonna be the guy that got a blow job and was impeached.” Other senior Clinton aides, those who know him extremely well, share that view. That secretly the former president “dreaded” the idea of a White House return, where as one aide put it he would be “trapped”—kept out of decision making but also unable to fly around the world and do whatever he wanted. In other words, his bizarre behavior in South Carolina and elsewhere demonstrated an internal conflict between a guilt-ridden need to help his wife and his own self-interest.
Bill wasn’t the only person who cost Hillary Clinton dearly. By the time she was to enter the 2008 presidential election, it was not the Republicans who would give her the most trouble. They had been pacified by her well-crafted plan and in some cases even applauded her tough, resolute effort to battle Obama down to the wire in race after race. No, her problem was that the liberal, antiwar wing of her own party mistrusted her. Clinton tried to pacify them in 2007 at a hearing with General David Petraeus, saying the Iraq commander’s testimony required a “suspension of disbelief” and in effect calling the man with his generation’s most admired military mind a liar. But for Clinton, it was too little, too late.
As potential 2008 candidates emerged, many Democrats took a shine to Barack Obama. Obama wasn’t really doing much of anything in the Senate, except giving well-received speeches. But he contrasted well with Hillary.
“He wasn’t in the conferences trying to tell them what to do,” one senator says. “Hillary may have felt like she had the ability to tell him what political strategy to use, or we should push this legislation, we should agree to this and fight this.” Many Democrats were jealous of her, resentful, in a way that for whatever reason they weren’t of the far less experienced Obama.
“We all saw Obama as a fresh, clean candidate and not part of the Clinton crowd and mess,” one Democratic senator told a Republican colleague in explaining his support. That tension was going to sting Hillary Clinton soon, when she least expected it.
The new controversies emerging from Senator Clinton’s office only reminded Democrats again of the trouble-plagued administration of her husband. Says one Republican U.S. senator, “They got tired of defending them.”
Shortly after Mrs. Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, her Senate colleagues seemed eager to crush her momentum. The Obama campaign released endorsements from people who knew the Clintons well—Senators Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and John Kerry of Massachusetts. (Kerry is said by colleagues to still be afraid of Hillary over his apostasy.) Chuck Schumer, Hillary’s New York frenemy, offered private encouragement to Obama, as did Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, despite official pledges of neutrality.
“They were unbelievably jealous,” one Clinton aide tells me, in reference to the “treacherous” Democrats. “There were people in the Democratic Party who said, ‘Let’s get rid of this fuck.’ Right now if you poll governors and senators—anyone who’s in statewide elected office, eighty percent of them will tell you that they should be president, that they have what it takes to be president. Right? You don’t think Kennedy would resent Clinton? All these guys who took a pass [on running for president themselves] did.”
By far the most infamous endorsement for Obama that year came from former Clintonite Bill Richardson, who dropped out of the 2008 contest in January.
Richardson had been close to the Clintons for decades, and the former president lobbied him vigorously. The Clintons understood that the endorsement of Obama by someone so well connected to the Clinton inner circle would be a monumental embarrassment, especially with so many Senate Democrats turning against them. Clinton also seemed to consider Richardson an easy get, one susceptible to the former president’s charm and attention. Clinton flew to New Mexico to watch the Super Bowl with his former cabinet secretary, pressing him during the game not to endorse Obama or to at least stay neutral.19 Richardson would not commit—he joked that he would have endorsed Bill Clinton over Obama in an instant, but not Hillary, who he felt was more qualified for the job than Richardson was.
Leaving New Mexico empty-handed, Clinton then sent another former cabinet secretary, Henry Cisneros, a fellow Latino, to press the case.
“He thought I could deliver you,” Cisneros told Richardson.
“Why?” Richardson asked.
“I guess he thought we spoke the same language.”
“Politics?”
“Spanish.”
In the end, Richardson went with Obama. He did so, according to sources close to him, because he shared the views of many prominent Democrats. He believed Obama was special—a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Second, he didn’t want the old Clinton crowd back—a chaotic, backstabbing, drama-filled mess.
A Clinton aide later told the New York Times that the former president was “more philosophical than angry” about the endorsement. That, of course, was untrue. Clinton was heard to tell aides and associates that he would never forgive Richardson’s betrayal.
Richardson would be spared no invective from the Clinton team, particularly acidic comments in public and private from two of Clinton’s primary financial beneficiaries, Terry McAuliffe and James Carville. “Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Carville, in typical bombast, told reporters.20 Sources sympathetic to Richardson tell me a Clinton loyalist repeatedly bad-mouthed Richardson to reporters and fellow Democrats and spread rumors about his private life. Richardson took such a furious fusillade from the Clinton operation—they wanted their treatment of him to deter other would-be betrayers—that he seems to this day not to have gotten over it.
Despite the fury and invective, Richardson’s endorsement was not the biggest blow to the Clintons’ efforts. That one came from the heirs to that magical Democratic land called Camelot.
First JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, offered a stirring endorsement of Obama, evoking memories of her father. Then came her uncle. The so-called Lion of the Senate, an ailing Edward M. Kennedy came out for Obama despite a desperate months-long effort by the Clintons to keep him neutral.
Hillary had worked hard in the Senate to court the senior senator from Massachusetts. The families had socialized together on Cape Cod. Bill called Senator Kennedy repeatedly on the phone, pressing for an endorsement or, as a fallback, a pledge of neutrality.21
But Bill Clinton’s once-vaunted charm offensive somehow failed again. In fact, it backfired. Kennedy would let reporters know that he made his d
ecision to endorse Obama after he took umbrage at a remark Bill Clinton made to him, that “a few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been carrying our bags.”22 That was only an excuse. The Kennedy family finally had a chance to excise its thinly concealed resentments of the “white trash” Clintons.
In a speech in Washington, D.C., at American University on January 28, Kennedy offered some early, obligatory praise of his colleague Senator Clinton. The rest of his speech, however, was filled with thinly veiled potshots at Obama’s rival and her husband.
“I feel change in the air,” Kennedy said. “From the beginning, he opposed the war in Iraq. And let no one deny that truth.” This was seen, as the Associated Press put it, as “an obvious reference to former President Clinton’s statement that Obama’s early anti-war stance was a ‘fairy tale.’ ”23
Kennedy too offered a poke at the Clintons’ long record of scandal and attack-style politics. “With Barack Obama,” he said, “we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion.”24
Al Gore, who enjoyed his moment to stick it to Bill, waited out the contentious primary contest without endorsing Hillary, whom he had come to know very well at the White House, before finally endorsing Obama. “This election matters more than ever because America needs change more than ever,” Gore would say at an event announcing his support.25
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 18