Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (11 page)

And that wasn’t the only bad blood between them.

“The former president never quite got over Axelrod’s statements following the December 2007 assassination of Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto, who was close to both Clintons,” reported Politico. “‘[Hillary] was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq,’ Axelrod said at the time, ‘which we would submit is one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Al Qaeda, who may have been players in the event today. So that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend.’ CNN boiled that down to ‘Did Hillary Clinton kill Benazir Bhutto?’—and so did Bill Clinton.”

A good deal of time had passed since Axe had met face to face with Clinton. Like many people, he clung to an outdated mental image of the forty-second president as a large, beefy man in the flush of life. As a result, Axe was unprepared for the shock of seeing Clinton in the flesh.

Clinton’s right hand shook with a noticeable tremor when he reached out to shake Axe’s hand. His expensive custom-made suit failed to disguise his shrunken physique. His once-thick mop of hair was thinning, revealing glimpses of pink scalp. And his massive head appeared out of proportion to his rawboned body.

During the previous summer’s White House debate on campaign strategy, Axe had lined up against Valerie Jarrett and supported David Plouffe’s recommendation to seek Clinton’s help in the campaign. Now Axe had to wonder whether he had made a mistake about Clinton.

Was this frail and trembling figure the political magician he had imagined would rescue Obama from electoral defeat? Did Bill Clinton even have the strength to engage in a presidential campaign, which was, if nothing else, a test of physical endurance? And what about his critical faculties? Had they atrophied along with his body?

Clinton told friends that he was aware of the impression he made on people; he knew that the alarming change in his appearance had a disquieting effect. At sixty-five, he seemed older than his years, the result of declining health and several brushes with death: emergency quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery in 2004; emergency surgery to remove fluid and scar tissue from his left chest cavity in 2005; and emergency surgery to place two stents in a clogged artery in 2010.

Thin as a rake, almost cadaverous, he appeared to be a man living on borrowed time. He spoke candidly about his efforts to cling to life. Once a voracious consumer of Big Macs and fries, he had adopted a vegan diet of plant-based whole foods. He had lost twenty-four pounds and said that he was back to his high school weight. He practiced Buddhist meditation to reduce stress.
He talked openly about the “little tremor” that he experienced in his hands.

It wasn’t Parkinson’s disease. He had checked that out with his doctors. “I have a condition that sometimes you get with aging,” Clinton said at a golf tournament sponsored by the Clinton Foundation. “You may have noticed it; my hand has a little tremor when I’m tired, and a lot of people do when they’re older.”

This candor about his age and infirmities was Clinton’s ingenious way of turning a political negative into a plus. He wanted people to accept the fact that he was a changed man, that he was no longer the young, naughty, undisciplined, sex-addicted Bubba of the past. He consciously adopted the telltale signs of advanced age—a slower way of moving and a rambling style of speaking. This was his new signature pose: he was an older man, a better man, a wiser man.

All this was part of Clinton’s effort to reinvent himself. In the ten years since he left the White House, he had worked with a single-minded purpose to rewrite his legacy. With that in mind, Clinton had created a vast, multibillion-dollar philanthropy called the Clinton Foundation, whose annual Clinton Global Initiative meetings attracted heads of state, Nobel laureates, leading CEOs, and celebrities. He swathed himself in boundless good works. He traveled constantly in the developing world. In the process, he became the most active and popular former president still living, easily overshadowing the tireless busybody Jimmy Carter.

Once known as Slick Willie (among many other disparaging nicknames), Clinton managed to slip effortlessly into a new persona: The World’s Greatest Living Elder Statesman.

And by and large, the American people bought the package. It was as though they were seized by a collective amnesia and forgot all about Clinton’s past transgressions. They embraced him as their wise old tribal leader and delighted in his off-the-cuff speeches, laughed at his little self-deprecating jokes, responded to his half-truths, and admired his self-justifying political bon mots.

Even some Republicans sang a different tune: they spoke of Clinton’s presidency as a golden age of balanced budgets, domestic reforms, an expanding middle class, and America’s unchallenged preeminence in the world.

It was the Comeback Kid’s most successful comeback. According to the polls, he was more popular now than at any time during the twenty years since his emergence as a presidential candidate. Whether they knew it or not, Axelrod & Company couldn’t have chosen a more powerful advocate for Barack Obama than the pale, trembling, and haggard William Jefferson Clinton.

From his fourteenth-floor office, Clinton had a panoramic view of Harlem, which he proudly showed off to the visiting Obama team. He pointed out that Harlem had experienced a renaissance since he moved his post-presidential office there, and that he was largely responsible for Harlem’s revived economy and gentrification. As he invariably did when giving a tour of his office, he boasted that the Harlem community viewed him as America’s first
black president, a presumptuous statement in view of whom he was talking to—men who worked for the first
real
black president.

“Axelrod and Messina acted appropriately awed by Bill, like they were making a pilgrimage to the Oracle at Delphi,” said a Democrat who was filled in later on the details of Clinton’s meeting with the Obama team. “They oohed and aahed over the view from Clinton’s office. They praised Clinton for his poll numbers, which were in the high sixties, and for his popularity with practically every demographic, especially white, working-class, and Jewish voters. By the time they got through charming him, Clinton was purring.”

Messina then gave a PowerPoint presentation on the evolving Obama campaign strategy. He told Clinton that at this stage of the campaign, the president was going down two tracks, and that he was undecided which track to emphasize and spend his money on. On track one, he’d attack Mitt Romney, the likely Republican candidate, as a flip-flopper who couldn’t be trusted. On track two, he’d attack Romney as an out-of-touch right-wing rich guy who’d screw the middle class.

Axe interrupted Messina and said that he didn’t think the two tracks were mutually exclusive. As far as he was concerned, Romney was vulnerable on
both
scores—as a flip-flopper
and
as an out-of-touch plutocrat.

Clinton disagreed. Whether he took issue with Axe because he was still angry with him or because he thought Axe was wrong on substance was hard to tell. In any case, Clinton was firmly against attacking Romney as a serial flip-flopper.

“They tried to do this to me, the flip-flopper thing,” Clinton said, according to one of the participants. “It just doesn’t work.
I’d go with the right-wing attack. It’s got the added advantage that it’ll help with the fund-raising.”

As the debate between Clinton and Axe went on, the members of the Obama team became ever more alarmed at Clinton’s physical appearance. He seemed frail and unwell. He didn’t seem to have the stamina required of a presidential campaign.

And so, before the group left, Jim Messina turned to Clinton and directly put it to him: How much time and effort could he afford to put into campaigning for Obama?

“I’m all in,” said Clinton. “Don’t worry. I’m going to get your man reelected.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SECRET DOUBTS

I
n late May, Bill Clinton agreed to appear on
Piers Morgan Live
as a favor to his good friend, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was sitting in as guest host on CNN’s nightly chat show.

The exchange between the Hollywood macher and Clinton began with some charming if inconsequential chitchat about movies. But then Weinstein, who was one of Barack Obama’s top fund-raisers, steered the conversation to political substance, providing Clinton with the chance to promote Obama’s candidacy. However, instead of praising Obama and criticizing Mitt Romney, Clinton went completely off message.

Weinstein was dressed for the occasion in his usual Hollywood getup: black suit, white shirt, black tie, and chin stubble. He was a classic Hollywood liberal, with all the self-righteous self-contradiction that that implied. He was an outspoken advocate
of strict gun control laws, but he thought nothing of making millions of dollars producing Quentin Tarantino’s bloody, corpse-laden films. He was a big donor to children’s charities, but he argued that director Roman Polanski shouldn’t be punished for drugging and sodomizing a thirteen-year-old girl. He was the Oscar-winning producer of
Shakespeare in Love
, as well as other critically acclaimed indie films, but he got his kicks out of browbeating movie directors.

The bully was nowhere in sight this night. As Weinstein settled his considerable girth into the host’s chair and stared into the eye of the CNN camera, his voice cracked and he confessed that he was suffering from a case of stage fright.

“You know,” he said to Clinton, who was seated across the desk from him in the TV studio, “you are so comfortable . . . with people. Every time I see you, you’re relaxed. You talk straight ahead at people. You know, I’m a little nervous. So how do you do that?”

“You look them in the eye,” said Clinton, “and you forget about what else is going on.”

“An area that I’m comfortable with is just talking about movies,” Weinstein said. “What is your favorite movie?”

“The first movie I ever saw more than once was
High Noon
. . . and I bet I’ve seen it twenty-five or thirty times,” Clinton replied.

“Later on, did you realize that it was an anti-McCarthy movie?” Weinstein asked.

“Yes, I did later on,” Clinton said. “But I liked it because it wasn’t your standard macho Western. Gary Cooper was scared to death, all alone. He did the right thing anyway.”

“Did you ever feel . . . when you were president, that you also were the sheriff, abandoned, doing as Gary Cooper is, all alone, and that all the townspeople run and hide, and there you are to face the enemy all by your lonesome?”

“Sometimes,” said Clinton. “[The] majority of the people [were] against Bosnia or Kosovo or lots of other things I did. You have to ask yourself, where is it going to come out at the end? When Gary Cooper rode out of town at the end, they were happy. They were glad to be rid of Frank Miller and his gang. It’s the same thing.”

“Now, if I were to make a movie about your life, who would you want . . . to play you, Mr. President?” Weinstein asked. “Brad Pitt? George Clooney?”

“[Brad Pitt’s too] good-looking,” said Clinton. “George Clooney is at least more my size. . . . He’s good-looking, but, you know, you could put bulbous things on his nose and could do makeup with him.”