Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (28 page)

Through an agreement with President Obama himself, Hillary secured weekly meetings with the big man, giving her direct access to the most powerful person in the world. She also, importantly, had the newly elected president agree to allow her to pick her own staff, a truly unprecedented distinction that Hillary and her staff would insist on in those formative first months. The deal would take the form of a “Memorandum of Understanding,” dated December 12, 2008, signed December 16, and released to the public two days later. The agreement, signed by Bruce Lindsey, representing the Clinton Foundation, and Valerie Jarrett, for Team Obama, committed to “ensur[ing] that the Foundation may continue its important philanthropic activities around the world” but sought “to ensure that the activities of the Foundation, however beneficial, do not create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State.” Hence “a set of protocols”—“mutually agreeable protocols related to the activities of the Foundation during the period in which Senator Hillary Clinton serves in the Obama Administration”—were adopted by all parties. Team Clinton agreed to “publish its contributors,” to ensure that “President Clinton personally will not solicit funds” or seek contributions.
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It was all meant to keep Clinton, Inc. at bay while Hillary served President Obama. In other words, the Clinton enterprise would not trump the Obama administration, as long as Clinton was confirmed by the Senate and served as secretary of state. Those were terms that both ClintonWorld and Team Obama were happy to accept.

The notion of a 2008 Obama-Clinton deal is further undercut by the fact that Bill Clinton kept attacking Obama, in the press and in private, all the way up to his 2012 reelection. After all, as late as 2011, for example, Bill Clinton was reportedly telling friends, “Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works.”
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In the middle of 2012, Clinton further raised eyebrows by praising Mitt Romney. “I think he had a good business career,” Clinton said on Piers Morgan’s CNN program, when the Obama campaign was ratcheting up attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital. “There’s no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”
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A far more popular, and persuasive, version of a potential Clinton-Obama “deal” centers on 2012—when Obama, struggling in the polls against Romney, really needed the Clintons’ help.

Author Ed Klein cites a meeting in 2012 in Chappaqua, where he quotes Bill Clinton as saying, “I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” Klein’s sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!” Recognizing they have a problem with a furious Bill Clinton, Klein contends that “chief political strategist David Axelrod convinced the president that he needed Bill Clinton’s mojo. A deal was struck: Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the convention, and a full-throated endorsement of Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor.”

Over breakfast at a hotel outside Washington, D.C., one former aide to Joe Biden insists to me, “Bill brokered that deal that led to the
60 Minutes
interview.” According to this Democratic strategist, Obama needed to make a deal to cover for his dereliction of duty on the night of 9/11/12, when four Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi. Bill is always looking to make a deal to further the couple’s interests, and to help keep things in order for the 2016 campaign. So the deal was struck: Bill would campaign for Obama, and Obama would help the Clintons out sometime later.

“It was the biggest payoff in political history at the presidential level,” the advisor says. “It was run nakedly in front of the entire country.” Turkey bacon in hand, the former aide adds, “And now the person with the Machiavellian influence in the White House is Bill Clinton.”

Bolstering the case was the unusual, even bizarre turn taken by Clinton’s husband, who all but single-handedly dragged reluctant Democrats and independents back on the Obama bandwagon in 2012.

“ ‘As you can see, I have given my voice in the service of my president,’ Mr. Clinton said, wheezing while introducing President Obama at a late-night set at a Bristow, Virginia, amphitheater on Saturday. He kept coughing, patting his chest and mouthing words that carried only muffled strains in chilly air. Black tea with honey and a steady diet of cough drops between events helped little,” the
New York Times
would report days before the election.
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“They and Michelle had dinner and his numbers were tumbling. Bill Clinton saved his ass,” the Democratic strategist declares.

At the time, many Republicans too seemed to think something sinister was afoot. “I am told that there are some that think this may have a lot to do with 2016 and the president’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” McCain said about Bill Clinton’s sudden change of heart.
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“I suspect that Bill Clinton is collecting IOUs in case Hillary Clinton wants to run in 2016,” said Newt Gingrich.
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A former Clinton associate who knows the former president well but did not work for him in 2012 can envision such a scenario involving his former boss. “If there was a deal cut, it wouldn’t surprise me,” the source tells me, “but Obama himself doesn’t do that.”

Obama is not a wheeler-dealer like many of his predecessors, the source said, and certainly not like Bill Clinton. At events at the Clinton White House, the president so much enjoyed socializing, kibitzing, and plotting that he had to be dragged upstairs so that his guests could go home. Obama, by contrast, is known to spend as little time as possible until he can head upstairs to the residence. “He indulges people,” says one Democrat, “whereas Clinton likes that kind of stuff.” More likely, he suggests, is that a deal of sorts was brokered on his behalf, probably by a man close to both teams.

In some ways, the actual circumstances of the Obama-Hillary arrangement are incidental. What cannot be disputed is that an alliance of some sort is clearly in place, one that began in 2012 and has been augmented with each passing year. There is no other explanation for the litany of senior Obama aides who have signed on, implicitly or explicitly, with Hillary 2016. In the cultlike atmosphere of Obamaland, none of this would happen over the opposition of the boss.

Hillary Clinton likely knew that he would come to see her as the most logical, if improbable, choice. After all, she spent four years in his administration dutifully working him. She didn’t come on too strong. When she was sidelined, she didn’t fight back; she kept her head down. Did her job. Took every chance to chat him up. Was nice to Michelle and the kids. And finally managed to get Bill in line. She lobbied Obama by not lobbying him. And it paid off.

Traditionally, Joe Biden’s position as vice president might pose problems for Hillary. After all, vice presidents, even lackluster ones, tend to win the nominations of their parties—notably Richard Nixon, who served Eisenhower in 1960; LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, in 1968; George H. W. Bush in 1988; Al Gore in 2000. With Biden, however, there is a problem. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Obama increasingly has come to dislike him. (Perhaps the better word for someone like Obama is that he “disdains” him.)

Though many press accounts describe a warm relationship between Obama and his vice president, the truth is that the two men have extremely different personalities. Biden is publicly at least a backslapping, engaging, blue-collar guy with decades of government experience. Obama, by contrast, is not a creature of Washington. Nor is he anyone’s idea of the old-time pol.

Their relationship always has been a little rocky. Biden had always been respectful of Obama in public. Always. Except for that time Biden was caught trying a little too hard. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden told the
New
York
Observer
at the outset of the 2008 campaign, when he too was running for the top spot. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
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When Biden called former black presidential candidate Al Sharpton to apologize, Sharpton told him, “I take a bath every day.”
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Smelling blood in the water, Obama released a statement critical of Biden, saying, “I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”
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Biden made up for that verbal gaffe—an exercise he had lots of experience with over the years—the next day in a conference call by heaping mountains of praise upon the then–junior senator from Illinois, while leaving out any more inelegant exultations about Obama’s cleanliness. “Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” Biden clumsily told reporters on a conference call. “And he’s fresh. He’s new. He’s smart. He’s insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean.’ ”
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Though relations warmed enough that Obama selected Biden as his running mate in 2008, the discomfort between the two has remained a constant. “In private, Biden mocks the president’s people skills and chilliness, and even his ability to curse properly,”
Time
magazine noted. “And he still sees himself as the Washington wise man showing his young ingenue how politics works. When they served together in the Senate, Obama saw Biden as a gasbag, a classic example of the dangers of Senatoritis. During the 2008 campaign, he was infuriated by Biden’s lack of discipline, a mortal sin in Obamaworld. And he’s still a bit bewildered by Biden’s goofy side; like everyone else in Washington, he sometimes rolls his eyes at Joe-being-Joe stories.”
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The
New York Times
, in a story on Biden in 2012, similarly made note of “a sometimes uneasy term, one marked by triumphs and occasional tensions with a boss markedly different in style and temperament.”
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According to sources who have watched the interaction between the president and his vice president and who spoke to me for this book, there’s little indication the president relies on his vice president for much of anything—except for doing tasks that Obama sees as beneath him. Contrary to Biden’s own spin, the vice president has become in effect a “nonperson” within the administration, sources say. Those in close proximity to the vice president see what Biden is oblivious to, by nature or by choice. That Obama, perhaps unfairly, thinks he’s a fool and a blunderer. Someone who can’t be trusted not to fuck something up. Biden in fact has spent an increasing amount of time in Delaware, where a source claims he once had hoped to establish his official vice presidential residence—an early request to the Obama people that fixed in them a perception that he was an oddball.

In particular, there was the time Biden embarrassed Obama by coming out for gay marriage before him—winning accolades from the base of the Democratic Party while making the president look, like, well, Joe Biden—flat-footed and behind the times. It wasn’t that Obama, who was for gay marriage before being against it, didn’t truly believe in gay marriage. He had long wanted to publicly reverse his position on it again—but he was worried about the politics—and wanted to set it up so that he would be greeted as making a clear step toward civil rights.

“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Biden said on NBC’s
Meet the Press
.
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The White House summoned ABC reporter Robin Roberts to the White House. (That Obama knew that Roberts is a lesbian is likely. She would later come out of the closet in 2013.) ABC executives couldn’t immediately find her, because at the very moment the White House was beckoning her to interview the president for his “I-have-evolved” interview, she was being diagnosed with breast cancer.

But being the professional that she is, Roberts made it down to Washington the next morning to talk to the president about how his views on gay marriage had shifted. “I’ve been going through an evolution on this issue,” Obama said in the interview, only days after Biden got out ahead of him. “I’ve just concluded that—for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that—I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
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But he also had to use that interview to apologize for Joe Biden. “I had already made a decision that we were going to probably take this position before the election and before the convention,” Obama insisted. The vice president, he said, “probably got out a little bit over his skis, but out of generosity of spirit.”
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It was a stinging rebuke, a coldhearted comment to make on national TV. Especially considering it was a boss mocking his subordinate.

Even if he liked Biden, Obama would still be a realist. It is hard to imagine how the vice president, who has already suffered from two brain aneurysms that required brain surgery, can be elected to the presidency at the age of seventy-three. And he definitely seems to be trying hard to make it clear to Biden that he should not pursue the option. If he did, he’d only muck things up for Obama’s all-but-obvious candidate of choice.

What’s in it for Obama? Like all second-term presidents, Obama looks to his legacy. With over two years to go in his presidency, he quietly has assigned key staff members to figure out what he should do with his presidential library—where it should go, and how it should be run. This is a man who intends to take his postpresidency seriously.