Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (5 page)

After Monica, according to a multitude of aides and observers, that dynamic changed. Hillary was no longer the one in constant pursuit of Bill’s love and attention. He now needed her in a way he never did before. She and she alone would determine the fate of his presidency. Though determined to save his political fortunes as well as her own, Hillary finally saw her husband for the lout he really was. The scandal liberated Hillary to pursue her own career and her own future. And it put Bill in her eternal debt. As Gail Sheehy, a sympathetic biographer of Mrs. Clinton, once put it, the decision to stay with Bill was “easy.” Perhaps unintentionally evoking references to a business partnership, Sheehy noted, citing a source, simply that Hillary “had an investment in this marriage and his career.”
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Nonetheless Hillary was “legitimately pissed,” a senior Clinton aide says, about Monica. But not for the reasons one might expect. “It wasn’t that he was fucking someone else. It was that he got caught and so rubbed her nose in it. And she had to appear pissed in public in order to save herself.” That was Bill’s (all but) unforgivable sin.

One source widely known to be very close to Bill Clinton said the former president “is paying the price for the rest of his life.” Hillary, like the classic “scorned woman,” is, according to the source, “still sort of pissed off all of the time.” Whether explicit or understood, the First Couple had a new deal, a new spin on their partnership, from then on out. A close friend of the Clintons told biographer Jerry Oppenheimer her attitude when announcing her plans to her husband: “It’s my turn, my day in the sun. You better support me, or else. And by the way, go fuck yourself.”
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(The psychological effect on the daughter who worshipped them both could also prove long-lasting and consequential.)

The stop in Buffalo, where Hillary waxed poetic about the difficulties of marriage, was before the kickoff of a “listening tour” of the state, a savvy ploy to show New Yorkers, especially the often forgotten upstaters, that she was intent on hearing their concerns and that she would be a good proxy in Washington.

Republicans tried to block her run, introducing legislation in the state to prevent her from “carpetbagging.” The law, which was sponsored by Republican assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, would’ve required Hillary to have lived in the state for five years before being able to represent it. “I thought carpetbagging went out in the 1860s,” Calhoun told the
New York Post
. “We have lots of talent in both parties within this state, and certainly our next senator should come from New York.”
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“The word ‘carpetbagger’ has crept into Mr. Giuliani’s speeches as he and Mrs. Clinton crisscross the state, each exploring a run for the same United States Senate seat next year,” the
New York Times
noted.
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But the paper and other Democrats would do their part to mold Mrs. Clinton as the second coming of Robert F. Kennedy, welcoming the celebrity politician as a token of the greatness of New York.

Yet, despite the sympathy Mrs. Clinton was engendering, the Kennedy example proved an apt one for her. Just not in the way she had been expecting. As the
New York Times
noted in a piece in 2000, “For Robert Kennedy in 1964, and for Mrs. Clinton today, the label ‘carpetbagger’ was really shorthand for a general condemnation, expressed in startlingly similar terms: they were, according to their critics, ambitious, opportunistic, ruthless (for Kennedy) and untrustworthy (for Mrs. Clinton).”
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Robert Kennedy Jr. reflected to reporters that year on “The intensity of feeling with my father’s race, and the almost inexplicable intensity of feeling toward Hillary Clinton. People who ought to like Hillary Clinton, but don’t, and can’t really explain why, but just kind of have a visceral reaction to her—that’s the same kind of thing that I remember from my father.”
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For the first time in her life Hillary needed to campaign for herself, and the dirty secret was that she wasn’t good at it, especially when compared to her husband.

“I’ve seen her and him in rooms, and she doesn’t have the whirr,” veteran Democratic campaign consultant Bob Shrum tells me in an interview. “Your eyes aren’t constantly drawn to her the way they are to him.”

Similarly, a former Clinton aide compared Hillary to Al Gore, a policy wonk who could be famously stiff and awkward in public settings and whose campaign style Clinton once compared to Mussolini. “Gore hated Clinton because Clinton was everything that Gore wasn’t,” he told me. At the funeral for Democratic operative Bob Squier, a close Gore friend, the vice president watched with envy and resentment as Clinton, who didn’t know Squier as well, delivered the moving, crowd-pleasing eulogy that Gore knew he could never have managed.

“It’s the same thing with Hillary,” said the aide. “She knows that she’s probably better than him on the intellectual stuff—though not a lot—but he blows her away on the retail.”

A former presidential press aide similarly noted the contrast between the nimble Bill and the more programmed Hillary. “He was constantly improvising speeches right up to the very last second even in the middle of the speech,” he recalled during our interview. “There’s nothing like sitting next to him watching him give a speech, and watching a new speechwriter who’s written this thing just flip through the pages and try to find where he’s talking about. She’s written speeches in advance, pretty much has it committed to memory, and wouldn’t improvise a word, frankly much more like Bush or Obama.”

From the start, she faced stumbles. For one, there was the purchase of her house. New York, as one journalist put it at the time, “had a residency ‘requirement’ so lax that it was more of a suggestion.”
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So it was relatively easy for the First Family to find digs that allowed her to comply with state law in a timely fashion.

They settled on Chappaqua, with a population of less than ten thousand, just north of New York City in Westchester County. The house was listed at $1.7 million in 1999. The trouble was the Clintons were broke—owing a fortune in legal fees from the many investigations into their personal lives. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend known for allegations of questionable business and legal dealings, offered to front them the bulk of the money, $1.3 million. The loan raised questions as to whether the Clintons were evading campaign and gift laws and made for an unneeded reminder of what the
New York Times
in an editorial labeled the “ethical sloppiness of the Clinton White House.”
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The Clintons eventually opted for a conventional mortgage.

For the first time in decades the Clintons were not living in public housing, but their personal taste had not seemed to mature with the times. A former White House press aide remembers the house search with a mix of humor and horror.

“We went to look at these houses, and the houses that they liked had shag rugs and gold walls,” the aide tells me. Everything Bill and Hillary favored seemed like it had come from the 1970s, the last time they were ordinary citizens. “It was horrible and I just remember being with the press pool and thinking, ‘Oh God. Do not say out loud how much you like this house,’ ” the aide says. “I think it just says a lot. Can you imagine living in this bubble for so long and then all of a sudden being let out of it?”

Further troubles came when the First Lady got quickly out of sorts with Jewish voters by sitting and smiling through an anti-Israel diatribe by the wife of Yasser Arafat, Suha Arafat, whom Hillary kissed at the event’s close. She also clumsily announced that “I’ve always been a Yankees fan”—which no one believed of a girl from Chicago, who actually grew up rooting for the Cubs.

Bill Clinton, of course, was an enthusiastic booster of Hillary’s fortunes. In part, this was because he always saw her in public office. It could also have helped alleviate some of his guilt over Monica. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t have any choice. On the day of her Senate campaign announcement, the president did something unusual, if not unprecedented. He sat onstage for forty minutes and never said a word.

Ever the political analyst, the president was all but chomping at the bit for Hillary to face off against Rudy Giuliani. When Lazio signaled early on that in deference to Giuliani he wasn’t going to join the race, Clinton pulled him aside during an encounter in the Oval Office.

As Lazio recalls in our interview, the president engaged in his usual practice with potential adversaries—flattery. Clinton’s ability for “charm offensives” has long been considered a strategic asset to the Clinton brand.

“You know what the very best day in Hillary’s campaign has been?” Lazio recalls Clinton asking him. “The day you decided to pull out of the race.”

Clearly studying polls of the race, the president assessed Giuliani as polarizing and unlikable. (This was the pre-9/11 Rudy, who as mayor could be an abrasive combatant with his many enemies in the city.) “Giuliani is an easy person to run against,” Clinton told Lazio. “He’s got a lot of negatives.” Lazio, by contrast, was forty-two years old, an attractive and likable Roman Catholic who had built a reputation in Washington as a moderate who won elections by wide margins in his Long Island district.

Lazio thinks back on that encounter and concedes, “Maybe he was just being Clinton and just being charming. I don’t know. Maybe that, in fact, was the way they were thinking. The moderate who was well liked and wasn’t easy to shoot at, there wasn’t much negative that they could say about me. Of course they did end up trying to morph me into Newt Gingrich, relying on media ads and thinking people don’t know that much. Actually, I thought the ads were very cynical but very effective.”

Indeed, once Giuliani dropped out of the Senate race and Lazio announced a Senate bid, the Clinton team went after him with ruthlessness and relish. “They were the first to go negative and went negative hard,” Lazio recalls, and the president was quick to use his position to help Mrs. Clinton make her moves. President Clinton held up legislation until after the election and made the White House photography office an arm of the Hillary Senate campaign.

“I had gone over to Israel as part of a congressional delegation—two House members, two Senate members, and the president, and Hillary. One of the lunches that we were at was with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority,” Lazio recalls. Hillary “at the time was totally effusive with Arafat and his wife, [but] an official White House photographer had gotten a picture of, on the reception line, of me shaking the hand of Yasser Arafat and smiling. Her campaign got that, got access to that, and used that . . . certainly the media never called her out on that.”

To the contrary, the media, in Lazio’s retelling, played right along, making it an issue that Lazio had been photographed with a top terrorist and enemy of the Jewish state. In all, it was an “absolutely ruthless campaign operation,” remembers Lazio.

Leading the charge for Hillary was her communications director, Howard Wolfson. Many Democrats have questioned his loyalty to their president, their party, and their principles—Wolfson would later go on to serve as chief spokesman for Republican-turned-independent New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg—but no one on either side of the aisle has ever questioned his loyalty to Hillary Clinton. An intense, neurotic, and foul-mouthed workaholic, Wolfson was a natural commander of the rapid-response Clinton campaign operation. His cutthroat operatives ran opposition research, fought back against criticisms, and tracked almost every word written or spoken about the campaign, searching for opportunities to exploit. Wolfson was the living, breathing embodiment of the
Untouchables
-inspired line he told his team: “If he uses a fist, you use a bat. If he uses a knife, you use a gun.”
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Wolfson is loud and aggressive at work, but can be quiet and extremely shy in social settings. He’s part of the establishment, but loves indie rock (and writes about it frequently). He’s polished and professional in his rhetoric, but Spartan in his dress and personal tastes. Throughout the 2000 Senate campaign, Wolfson’s living room had a single piece of furniture (a couch); his bedroom had only a bed; and his television sat on the cardboard box it came in. When Clinton’s Secret Service detail gave him identification pins, the agent said, “I’m giving you two—one for each of your suits.”
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The ferocity of the attack on Lazio was necessary. Hillary Clinton was not going over as well with New Yorkers as she had hoped. In an eerie precursor of her 2008 primary campaign, she was statistically tied in the polls with a legislator who was relatively unknown outside his congressional district.

Hillary Clinton might well have lost that Senate race—and dashed her presidential hopes—had she not gotten a bit of good luck and an assist from the media. A turning point came during a highly anticipated television debate with moderator Tim Russert, the respected NBC News bureau chief, former Moynihan aide, and host of
Meet the Press
.

During Clinton’s debate preparations, her dear friend Bob Barnett, the Washington lawyer and book agent, portrayed Lazio. But nothing in those practice sessions had prepared Hillary for the shock of being onstage with a baby-faced, little-known congressman who considered himself her equal. “She had a completely offended look on her face,” recalls Lazio. “I didn’t believe it because of my particular point of view. I think it was the mere idea that it was the first time anybody had really publicly challenged her.”

Russert, too, turned out to be an aggressive questioner of Clinton, which the Democrat did not appreciate.

“Hillary appeared offended at times that she was being challenged,” says her opponent. “When I pressed her and challenged her on different things, different policy issues, she looked at me like how dare you even question me on these things.”

It was in that debate, where Hillary, wearing a classic teal pantsuit, met the telegenic Lazio, who was amped up for a fight. She had never herself debated in an election setting. And here she was, being challenged on taking allegedly dirty campaign money and being asked to sign a pledge not to take so-called soft money.