A former high-ranking official in the Clinton administration recently spoke to his friend Biden about Hillary’s 2016 maneuvering.
“You going to step aside for her?” he asked.
“No,” the vice president replied confidently. “Fuck no.”
Traditionally Biden’s stance might pose problems for Hillary. After all, vice presidents tend to win the nominations of their parties. But Biden has a major drawback. He lacks the support, even the quiet support, of the president he serves.
None of this has stopped the vice president from making plans, however. Biden has run for president twice before—in 1988, when he was forced to drop out over plagiarism charges, and again in 2008, when he was barely an asterisk against Obama and Clinton. And he still has the bug, fiercely jealous of the tendency in the press to write him off in favor of endless stories about Hillary’s maneuverings.
“And let me not forget Joe Biden, because he will call me this afternoon and remind me,” Democrat Donna Brazile once half joked during a Sunday talk show appearance where she discussed the Clinton campaign in waiting.2
She isn’t the only one. The vice president or his senior aides at his behest will call reporters, pundits, anyone he feels is not giving his candidacy the credibility it deserves. He wants respect.
Though stranger things have happened in politics—like a one-term senator defeating the Clintons in 2008—few give Biden much chance of a surprise victory. One former Senate colleague says Biden could never be president. “He makes people like him, but lack of discipline is his weakness,” the senator says. “She’s far more disciplined and calculating.”
“If you take a look at every important thing that’s come out of the White House, Biden’s had his finger on it,” says a Clinton aide. “So, people underestimate Biden, and part of being a VP is being derided to a certain extent.” Still, he adds, “He can’t beat Hillary in ’16 because she starts with eighteen million votes. Everyone that voted for her in ’08 wants her to run again.”
Shrum agrees. “I think [Biden] will recognize that reality,” he says.
Allies of the vice president of course disagree with this assessment. Biden also knows there is a chance that the Clintons are bluffing. Signaling that she’s running for president to get attention, speaking fees, book deals, but not really ready to hop in. Biden, too, is gambling on her health.
So are some Republicans. “I must admit I’m completely befuddled,” admits Bush strategist Karl Rove. “My brain says yes, she’s the front-runner. My gut tells me we don’t know everything about the health issue.”
But if Hillary is bluffing, she’s doing an excellent job. Leaving nothing to chance, the undeclared candidate has gone out of her way to take swipes at Biden—something she wouldn’t likely do if her 2016 effort is just a feint. At a private event in Georgia in 2013, for example, she was asked a question about the bin Laden raid. “She took 25 minutes to answer,” a Republican state legislator present at the gathering told the Atlanta newspaper. “Time and time again . . . Clinton mentioned the vice president’s opposition to the raid, while characterizing herself and Leon Panetta, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as the action’s most fierce advocates,” the paper reported.3
Dr. Jill Biden, the vice president’s wife, is said to be actively “counting down the days” until she can return to “normal” life. Some close to the Bidens speculate that she would “kill him if he decided to run for president.” Especially a race she doesn’t think he can win. That appears to be the only thing holding back a potential Biden 2016 run.
Among those not so secretly preparing the ground in case of a Hillary demurral: Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel; and New York governor Andrew Cuomo. But they seem to believe, as one Democratic strategist put it, that “Hillary gets the first right of refusal.”
Observers believe the more potent threat is the little-known but aggressive governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley. O’Malley would be fifty-four years old on Inauguration Day 2017—fifteen years younger than Hillary Clinton. He is a handsome man with impeccable liberal credentials, and “a fucking political animal,” according to Maryland politicos who know him.
Two prominent political consultants in Maryland—both Republicans—said that O’Malley is someone who could do serious damage to Hillary Clinton in the primary. One of them listed his assets in a race against the front-runner: “He is mean. He has long a history of negative campaigning. He’s a good fund-raiser.” In other words, he’s a younger Bill Clinton.
“He’s very Bill Clinton-esque,” the other consultant says. “He’s very good shaking hands and politicking.” He’s even rumored to have women issues like the former president though none have ever been proven.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who might have been expected to support O’Malley in a primary challenge, especially considering his implicit criticisms of the Clintons when Dean ran for president himself in 2004, has fallen under the Clinton sway. The once-maverick liberal firebrand has become increasingly establishment—in fact, he chaired the Democratic National Committee during the Obama-Hillary race. “I will support her against any other foreseeable Democratic candidate,” Dean told me. But he held open at least a little wiggle room. “I like Martin O’Malley a lot.”
Disclosing that he had a recent conversation with O’Malley—“I’m not going to tell you what the conversation was,” he snapped—he adds, “I think O’Malley is very serious” about running for president in 2016.
By setting himself up as Obama’s true heir, O’Malley is poised to run to Hillary’s left. He’s been an enthusiastic backer of Obamacare and vowed to lead the nation in sign-ups for the controversial program. Major Democrats know that he’s going to be a problem for her. So they’re trying to find a way to give him something to do. He’s tested the New Hampshire waters, according to CNN, where he played a video summary of his career starting as mayor of Baltimore, which said, “Martin O’Malley formulated an assault on hopelessness.” And it claimed that he transformed Baltimore while curbing crime and took his good governance to the Maryland State House in Annapolis. It was a three-and-a-half-minute-long campaign “video befitting a national political convention-style rollout,” said CNN. And of course it was released in New Hampshire, traditionally the first state in the nation to hold a primary. As a Maryland Republican says, “He’s running, unless they buy him off.”
The most obvious payoff, of course, would be the vice presidency. A former Clinton aide envisions a scenario in which Hillary offers him the job to keep him out of the race, or to have him run as a “puppet” opposition candidate. “He’s good looking, Irish Catholic, and young,” the aide reasons. “She’s gonna need some youth, so Martin is the logical pick.”
Brian Schweitzer, a former Democratic governor of Montana, is another wild card. He’s positioning himself as an anticorporatist, gun-toting populist who’s not shy about bringing up Hillary’s support for both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. He’s already done that in Iowa, the state to hold the first caucus in the nation—and one where Hillary got tripped up in 2008 when she lost the contest there to Obama.
Antiwar rhetoric is a political weapon that’s previously proven to be lethal on the political left—after all, it’s not at all dissimilar from the public positions that Barack Obama was able to use to undercut the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary.
Schweitzer might not be known yet, but that doesn’t mean he can’t level the primary field just by appearing in many debates (and performing well) before a national broadcast audience.
The same is true for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Her very candidacy would undercut Hillary’s bid to be the first female president and her liberal credentials are superb. Before being a U.S. senator she was the brains in the Obama administration behind the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She is no pragmatist. She is purely an ideologue—which can be
very helpful for riling up the base in a party primary.
Then of course there is the possibility of California governor Jerry Brown, who ran a stronger than expected primary campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992. Brown, a popular and well-known figure on the political left, has refused to rule out a run.4 But at seventy-six, and with a personal life that long has been the subject of a whispering campaign, Brown is an unlikely threat. He most likely seems to be basking in the attention that comes from having his name mentioned.
As for the Republicans, an opposition campaign in waiting already is well under way. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus has said that his party’s major focus for 2016 is the Hillary Clinton record. Republicans hope to replicate the successful Democratic effort against Mitt Romney, who was painted in the press as a real-life Thurston Howell III before he even won his party’s nomination.
“We have to be very aggressive on what she’s done or hasn’t done,” Priebus said. “And the things that she is famous for, like a botched health care rollout in the ’90s, and Benghazi, and the things that she is involved with that are or went obviously pretty badly, we need to focus in on.”5
It reflects a tactic tried previously by the Republican National Committee. Beginning in 2005, right after Bush’s Second Inaugural, a small group began to meet at the RNC’s Capitol Hill headquarters. The mission was simple: Defeat Hillary Clinton and destroy her 2008 presidential run.
“If you looked up inevitable in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of Hillary Clinton,” said one of the members of the team back then. Hillary was going to be the next Democratic nominee, even if the Republican nominee was a long, long way from being picked. In a way the RNC effort was misplaced: Its singular focus on Hillary in 2008 belied the fact that she was vulnerable and a weak candidate. A barely scathed Barack Obama was able to slide past the Republican nominee John McCain and take the presidency. Running the risk that they might face the same eventuality, the RNC has doubled down on its opposition campaign against the once and future “inevitable” Clinton nomination.
In this current effort the RNC chairman has made reference to one of the major super PACs forming against the Clintons, America Rising. The group, run by former RNC opposition research director Matt Rhoades, who also ran the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign, plans a multimillion-dollar effort to research Clinton’s record and redefine her to voters before she does. He’s joined by Joe Pounder, who was research director for the RNC in 2012, and Tim Miller, who was a spokesman for the Republican Party that year, too. They’re a shadow organization. And already they are off to a good start. There may not have been a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against the Clintons when Hillary coined the phrase in 1998, but in 2014, there certainly is something resembling one.
Their grand strategy includes early filing of multiple Freedom of Information Act requests for documents from Hillary’s time at the State Department, as well as having a legal strategy to prepare for the inevitable stonewalling they’re expecting from her successor at the department, John Kerry. Staffers have been assigned to Arkansas to interview former associates and reexamine past scandals. They’ve been combing the archives.
A comprehensive Republican-aligned polling unit of sorts is in place, one that already has picked up an interesting conundrum. Pollsters have found that voters have a reservoir of sympathy for Clinton, one that traces back to the final years of her husband’s administration and his many womanizing scandals. Their impression of Mrs. Clinton improves each time she is seen as a victim of attacks, by Republicans, Democrats, or the media. It’ll shape how Hillary’s attacked.
“Clinton gains popularity as a ‘victim,’ ” one Republican-aligned research firm discovered in an analysis of Clinton’s poll numbers prepared in preparation for the 2016 presidential election—and never before revealed. “Clinton’s personal popularity appears to rise when she is cast in a sympathetic light due to the perception that she is the victim of unfair attacks or being treated unfairly,” the memo notes. “As a result of these attacks, Clinton’s image is softened. Clinton’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal won her high praise from the public. Multiple pollsters noted that voters tended to sympathize, leading to her ratings rise.”
Instead of a targeted assault on Mrs. Clinton’s personal life or ethics directly, Republican strategists hope to revive in the minds of the voters the many financial scandals and improprieties of the first Clinton administration, to reawaken old scandals with new information, in the hope that Democrats and Republicans will remember why they’d tired of the Clinton circus in the first place. There is hope that more might even be mined from the biggest and most visible scandal magnet of them all—William Jefferson Clinton. This is also a chief concern of Team Clinton, who are hypersensitive about anything involving Bill’s presidency or its accompanying scandals.
On July 29, 2013, CNN announced a planned documentary on the life of Hillary Clinton. Charles Ferguson, the Academy Award–winning director, was going to direct the piece. Ferguson was a left-wing filmmaker likely to be sympathetic to the former First Family. Almost simultaneously, NBC announced a four-hour miniseries called Hillary with Diane Lane in the title role.
Both efforts led to a furious reaction from the Clinton camp. Some might say overreaction. (Ironically, Republicans also threw a fit, assuming that any portrayal of Mrs. Clinton in the “lamestream media” would be biased in her favor.)
Nick Merrill, a close aide of Hillary Clinton’s, became involved in what the New York Times labeled a “confrontational” meeting with the director, who had requested access and interviews for the piece. Ferguson reported that he was “interrogated” by Merrill. During a “three-month tug of war,” the director claimed that “Clinton aides had told potential sources not to cooperate with his documentary.”6
Getting attacked from all sides, on the last day of September 2013, CNN announced its decision to cancel the documentary. NBC, facing similar vitriol over its decision to air a Hillary-themed miniseries, followed suit.
In a column for the Huffington Post, a baffled and infuriated Ferguson explained in detail the hostile treatment he’d received from Team Clinton:
The day after the contract was signed, I received a message from Nick Merrill, Hillary Clinton’s press secretary. He already knew about the film, and clearly had a source within CNN. He interrogated me; at first I answered, but eventually I stopped. When I requested an off-the-record, private conversation with Mrs. Clinton, Merrill replied that she was busy writing her book, and not speaking to the media.
Next came Phillipe [sic] Reines, Hillary Clinton’s media fixer, who contacted various people at CNN, interrogated them, and expressed concern about alleged conflicts of interest generated because my film was a for-profit endeavor (as nearly all documentaries and news organizations are). When I contacted him, he declined to speak with me. He then repeated his allegations to Politico, which published them. . . .
CNN and I decided to publicly confirm the film project to clear the air. Immediately afterwards, the chairman of the Republican National Committee announced that the Republicans would boycott CNN with regard to the Republican presidential primary debates in 2016. Shortly afterwards, the entire RNC voted to endorse this position. This did not surprise me. What did surprise me was that, quietly and privately, prominent Democrats made it known both to CNN and to me that they weren’t delighted with the film, either.
Next came David Brock, who published an open letter on his highly partisan Democratic website Media Matters, in which he endorsed the Republican National Committee’s position, repeating Reines’ conflict of interest allegations and suggesting that my documentary would revive old, discredited Clinton scandal stories. Coming from Mr. Brock, this was rather amusing. David Brock began life as an ultraconservative “investigative journalist,” quotation marks very much intended, spreading scandal with little regard for truth. He first attracted attention with The Real Anita Hill, his nasty (and factually wrong) hatche
t job on the woman who, during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings, said that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Years later, he apologized and switched to the Democrats.
When Brock published his letter about my film, I got in touch with several prominent Democrats who knew Hillary Clinton. I told them that this campaign against the film and against CNN was counterproductive. They conveyed this message to Mrs. Clinton personally, along with my request to speak with her. The answer that came back was, basically, over my dead body.7
Asked for a comment on the developments, Merrill emailed a statement to reporters: “Lights, camera, no reaction.” This was a typical response for the Clinton media operation—flippant, seemingly disinterested in the entire issue, and thus highly misleading.
It was easy to understand why the Republicans were making a fuss about the programs. Bashing the liberal media and the Clintons is a sure bet for conservative fund-raising. More confusing was the Clintons’ outsized reaction to a documentary and particularly an NBC miniseries that by almost all accounts seemed relatively innocuous, if not advantageous to them.
Out of curiosity, I emailed a person well connected to the Clinton camp. Why, I asked, did the Clintons care so much about these documentaries? I received a one-word reply.
“Monica.”
The NBC miniseries was to begin with First Lady Hillary Clinton’s discovery of her husband’s affair with a twenty-two-year-old intern in the Oval Office. The stain of the Monica Lewinsky scandal—literal as well as figurative—has not dissolved. At least not in the minds of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was a moment when the Clintons truly hit rock bottom and all was, for a brief moment, nearly lost. For Republicans, and many Democrats, that scandal is where the story of the 2016 campaign really begins. It is also a reminder of how impressive their comeback has actually been, as well as its potential fragility.
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 29