Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (58 page)

Nearly a week before Knopf officially released
Back to Work
on November 8, the Associated Press previewed its contents in a story that led with the book’s
criticism, implied or stated, of Barack Obama. It noted Clinton’s complaint that a summer-long struggle between the president and the Republican Congress over the nation’s debt ceiling had made America look “weak and confused,” and questions he raised over White House strategy in that fight.

“While he generally praises Obama for taking steps to mitigate the financial crisis and deep recession,” the AP reported, “he also gently dings the president for poor communication and strategic misfires.” Specifically, Clinton expressed the dissatisfaction he had felt for well over a year with the president and other Democratic leaders for failing to fight back against the Tea Party—and make a strong positive case for Obama, as Clinton’s book finally did.

Reviews of
Back to Work
were more balanced and largely positive, focusing on the dozens of ideas that Clinton had gleaned from many hours studying economic issues, whether in the business press, journal articles, or obscure government reports. He offered concrete ideas for reducing government waste, for creating millions of jobs, for conserving vast amounts of energy and moving toward clean power, and for rebuilding the country’s decrepit infrastructure.

While many of these ideas weren’t new, as Clinton forthrightly acknowledged, they were almost certainly new to most Americans.

Even Michiko Kakutani, the antagonistic
New York Times
daily book critic, found much to like, although she didn’t entirely resist the urge to snark in her review. Within the slender volume, she wrote, readers would find “a lucid one-man rebuttal of the Tea Party’s anti-government agenda. A series of shrewd talking points for Democrats trying to hold on to the White House . . . . . . A self-serving reminder of the prosperity the country enjoyed during Mr. Clinton’s tenure in the White House, meant to burnish his legacy. And a practical set of proposals—some borrowed and some new, some innovative and some highly sketchy—for restoring economic growth and creating jobs.”

Within two weeks, the book made its bestseller debut at #4 on the
Times
nonfiction list.

While the initial reports of Clinton’s mild censure irritated the president and his staff, they quickly adjusted to make the best of it. The popular ex-president had weighed in heavily on behalf of Obama. Besides, they could scarcely have been surprised by his comments on the
debt ceiling, since Clinton had openly disagreed with Obama’s strategy in a July interview that had made headlines on nearly every news outlet. He had told
The National Memo
that as president, unlike Obama, he would have invoked “the constitutional option” by raising the debt unilaterally—and challenged congressional Republicans to try to stop him in court.

After the book was published, Clinton corrected himself on one important issue. Having written that Obama and the Democrats should have raised the debt ceiling when their party controlled Congress, he subsequently discovered that had not been possible. “Everybody was talking about why didn’t we do it, why didn’t we do it, including members of Congress,” he recalled. “I assumed, wrongly, that it wasn’t subject to the filibuster, but it was. They did try to raise it, but [Kentucky senator Mitch] McConnell”—then the minority leader—“told them he was going to filibuster it.”

None of that mattered to Obama and his advisers anymore. Indeed, the president would admit eventually that Clinton was right about his failure to consistently and persuasively “tell the story” of his policies to the American people (as he said in an interview on CBS with Charlie Rose). By November, a year before facing reelection against what looked like long odds, they were working with the former president on a much broader agenda.

The process of enfolding Clinton into Obama-Biden 2012 had begun while he was finishing his book in August. Patrick Gaspard, an Obama political aide from New York, called Band to ask whether the former president might do the White House a favor. Would he go down to Florida to visit a few senior citizen homes, as a “preemptive” campaign swing?

Flabbergasted, Band told Gaspard bluntly that the relationship needed additional attention before anything could be asked of his boss. He thought golf would be the best way to bring the two presidents together in a private setting. The following day, Obama called Clinton personally to invite him for a round at Andrews Air Force Base, where they played on September 24. Their foursome included Band and White House chief of staff Bill Daley. The golf outing was awkward, with conversation lagging sometimes. After the show of presidential respect, however, the ice was again broken.

Six weeks later, on the day after Clinton’s book came out, Obama’s top political operatives traveled from Chicago and Washington to converge on Harlem, in a second phase of the charm offensive. The president’s chief campaign adviser David Axelrod, campaign manager and former deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina, pollster Joel Benenson, and Gaspard, working out of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, met for more than two hours with Clinton to review their outlook and strategy. Band and Cooper were also present.

Messina brought a PowerPoint display on his laptop to give a sense of how the Obama camp foresaw their campaign unfolding. Working on the assumption that the Republicans were likely to nominate Mitt Romney, he explained that they were considering two approaches. One was to portray the former Massachusetts governor, who had adopted sharply contrasting positions over the years on abortion, taxes, gun controls, gay rights, and health care, among other salient issues, as a “flip-flopper.” The alternative was to paint him as a right-wing zealot who would attempt to repeal a century of progressive reforms, including Medicare and Social Security.

They went over polling numbers, looked at swing states, and told Clinton that they needed his advice.

Clinton urged them to take the more ideological approach, which would mobilize Democratic voters—and motivate liberal donors. “They tried to do the flip-flopper thing to me,” he recalled. “It doesn’t work.” More important than Clinton’s specific advice, however, was the meeting’s symbolism. From that point forward, until Election Day 2012, he would be closely integrated into the campaign.

To bring Clinton inside was not a painless process for anyone, including Obama himself. The former president was no longer at the peak of his powers, as they had observed in 2008, and now he was four years older, remote from the daily scuffle and technological advances of national politics. But they couldn’t risk leaving him outside, either—especially when they were already running slightly behind Romney in national polls, with the odds-makers betting against them.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Less than five months after launching Teneo in June 2011, Doug Band and his new firm were sideswiped by the humiliating crash of a formerly venerable Wall Street trading house. On the morning of Halloween, MF Global filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection when its management, led by former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, could no longer avoid the crushing burden of its long position in Eurozone debt, which had gone very sour. It was the biggest bank failure since the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

The news of MF Global’s demise swept through financial and political circles with smashing force, not only because Corzine was a former leading Democrat, who had served in the U.S. Senate as well as the statehouse, but because he was also a former managing partner of Goldman Sachs. The son of an Illinois farm family, Corzine was a completely self-made figure who had endured more than one defeat, first when he was forced out of Goldman by Hank Paulson in 1999, and then when he lost a bid for reelection ten years later to Republican Chris Christie.

Corzine’s mismanagement of MF Global meant the end of his remarkable Horatio Alger career—and, as the story of his ruinous investment in Eurobonds unfolded, hints of something worse than a bad bet emerged. Ominous reports in the financial press warned that more than $1.5 billion in client funds had gone missing in the firm’s final hours of frantic trading.

Unfortunately for Band and his partners, a senior Teneo executive—who formerly worked as Corzine’s chief of staff in the Senate and the statehouse—had signed MF Global as one of the new firm’s first clients, billing as much as $125,000 per month for public relations counseling. On December 6, the
New York Post
revealed the relationship in a brief but sensational story headlined “Jon-Bubba Twist: MF Global Hired Clinton’s Group.” The story was picked up by wire services.

The
Post
story suggested wrongly that Teneo somehow shared culpability for the ill-fated Euro-trades, while highlighting both Bill Clinton’s role as chairman of Teneo’s advisory board and Corzine’s long-standing political connection with both Bill and Hillary Clinton. “MF is now bankrupt and is the subject of investigations by federal prosecutors and regulators,” it noted gravely.

The
Post
exposé was strictly an example of guilt by association, with no evidence of actual wrongdoing by anyone at Teneo. Ultimately, investigators would find that MF Global or its management had committed no fraud or crime of any kind. Its dissolution would proceed in an orderly way, with customers getting almost all of their money back and creditors getting about 40 percent of their bills paid. (Ironically, the Eurobonds held by MF Global never defaulted.)

Under pressure from both Hillary and Chelsea, Clinton decided to resign his position with Teneo, and return almost all of the $2 million the firm had paid him on signing.

With Chelsea Clinton’s ascendancy in the foundation, Band’s tight relationship with her father began to unwind. Clinton was well aware of what Band had done for him and the foundation, expanding his global influence and prestige and, in the process, helping to raise tens of millions of dollars for his projects. Band had continued to raise money for the foundation even after moving to Teneo, encouraging the firm’s clients to join CGI and donate.

Over the years that followed, many articles would implicate Band in “conflicts of interest,” although the accusations were almost always vague. What the conflicts might be was never spelled out in any specific way. The same articles would claim that Band had acted as a gatekeeper who, in creating Teneo, had built a kind of corporate tollbooth, charging big fees to business leaders for access to the former president.

Certainly, Band had tried to manage Clinton’s schedule while protecting his time and reputation. He had said no to many people and yes to others, and made some enemies as well as friends. But to anyone who understood how the world actually works, the tollbooth metaphor was plainly false. What Band had done, with considerable reluctance and distaste, was to shoulder much of the fundraising burden at times when nobody else around Clinton could or would do so.

The chairman of Coca-Cola or Dow Chemical or any of the major
corporations that hired Teneo didn’t need to pay Band or Kelly in order to meet with Bill Clinton. They could gain access to him through his speakers’ bureau, through the foundation, or simply by calling his office. Some of them had his personal cell phone number. (This became still more obvious after Band severed his ties with the foundation, when all of the same business leaders nonetheless maintained their support of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton himself. They also continued to retain Teneo, despite the fact that Band spent little time with Clinton and played no part in his schedule or decisions.)

Meanwhile, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett had completed its “corporate review” of the foundation’s operations, after an investigation that included thirty-eight interviews of senior staff and others, asking them questions about its efficiency, governance, budget, and employment practices, as well as “potential conflicts of interest.” But the white-shoe law firm’s brief report identified no actual conflicts.

Those who were interviewed “uniformly praised the effectiveness of the Foundation and its affiliates, noting the enormous amount they have accomplished over a ten-year period, including building the Presidential Library in Little Rock, the number of people receiving life-saving drugs through CHAI, the agreements negotiated by the Alliance [for a Healthier Generation] with the beverage companies, and the commitments made through CGI.”

The report offered a series of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the foundation’s board of directors and, in general, to instill “best practices” appropriate to a large and complex organization—such as hiring a full-time foundation president. While the report clearly implied that more rigorous administration was needed in some areas, it was difficult to understand why this anodyne document was so closely held for nearly two years.

In news reports that winter, led by coverage in the
New York Post
, Clinton was depicted as seeking distance from Band and Teneo because of the imputed conflicts. Whatever others thought, however, Clinton didn’t seem to view Band’s role in a negative light. In a foundation-wide conference call, he had defended his longtime aide vigorously, telling the staff that they all owed their jobs largely to his efforts.

Finally in March 2012, Clinton issued a public statement that served as his response to negative media coverage of Band and the foundation:

In 2011, the Clinton Foundation marked ten years of rapid growth and significant achievements. From the start, the foundation has operated with a lean, flat management structure and a high level of operational independence for its ongoing projects. Two of our largest efforts, CGI and CHAl, our health access initiative, have independent boards. . . .

The foundation’s rapid growth, the management strains caused by our work in Haiti—following similar efforts in the Gulf after Katrina and in Southeast Asia after the tsunami—and the fact that our Chairman Bruce Lindsey and I aren’t getting any younger, convinced me to undertake a management review to clarify what we needed to do as an organization to assure another decade of success.