Unlikeable (14 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
Vengeance, oh, vengeance
Is a pleasure reserved to the wise.
To forget a shame or an outrage
Is always base and cowardly.
âWolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
“La Vendetta,” Act I of
Le Nozze di Figaro
WHISPERING CAMPAIGN
WHISPERING CAMPAIGN
After we win this election, it's our turn. Payback time.
âValerie Jarrett
D
uring the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, Valerie Jarrett heard that a whispering campaign against Barack Obama was making the rounds of Democratic politicians, donors, consultants, and operatives.
The whisperers were saying that Obama was an albatross around the neck of the party, and that if Democrats running for office knew what was good for them, they wouldn't be seen campaigning with the unpopular president.
The message: Stay away from Obama. He's toxic.
In many parts of the country, especially in the great conservative expanses between the two liberal-leaning coasts, Obama and
his policies were generally viewed as harmful. As a result, a lot of Democratic candidates were refusing to accept the president's offer of help.
Jarrett was furious. She refused to trust the findings of the most recent opinion polls, which showed that Obama's popularity was near its all-time low. She said that she detected an element of racism in the polls' results.
“Val told me that the polls were rigged,” said a source who was close to Jarrett and spoke to her frequently. “She said the polls counted more Republicans than Democrats, and more whites than blacks. She saw a lot of componentsâthe pundits and the press and racists trying to wrestle control of the party away from Obama. She saw the whole thing as a conspiracy to weaken the president.
“She told Michelle what she had learned, and the two of them took the information to Obama,” the source continued. “They told him it was time he grew a pair of balls and got out there and campaigned and talked about hope and the future.
“When Val comes to the Oval with Michelle, Obama knows he's in for it. All of his staff immediately check their smartphones and suddenly remember they're late for an important meeting. The office clears out. Obama sits alone on the couch facing Val and Michelle.
“Michelle usually starts out calm, but her voice can rise when she doesn't seem to be having the effect she wants. The meetings can get very heated. Sometimes they descend into shouting matches. Michelle paces the floor, practically talking to herself.
“It's like they can't wake him up. Val and Michelle don't understand why they can't spark Obama into action and get him
to attack the Clintons. They can't even make the man angry. Val said they'd never seen Obama so listless and lacking in fire. He hits a switch, orders a couple of beers, and laughs it off.”
Who was behind the whispering campaign?
Was it Bill Clinton, who didn't make any secret of his feelings about Obama?
Obama's failure to act in Syria, a reporter quoted Bill as saying, could end up making him look like a
“total fool” and a “wuss.”
Or was it Hillary, who was eager to detach herself from Obama's policies on the environment, immigration, and foreign affairs?
In an interview with the
Atlantic
, Hillary criticized Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East, suggesting that it had led to the rise of the Islamic State.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were originators of the protests against Assadâthere were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middleâthe failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” she said.
Asked by the
Atlantic
's Jeffrey Goldberg what she thought of the slogan President Obama used to describe his foreign policy doctrineâ“Don't do stupid shit”âHillary replied:
“Great nations need organizing principles, and âDon't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle.”
Valerie Jarrett was stunned when she was told of Hillary's remarks. But her immediate reaction was to blame Bill.
“This has Bill Clinton's fingerprints all over it,” she said.
She was right. Bill was trying to marginalize Obama and wrest control of the Democratic Party from the sitting president. As a first step, he won over the support of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairman of the party, who transferred her loyalty from the Obamas to the Clintons without so much as a by-your-leave.
As part of Bill's strategy, the Clintons strip-mined the Obama administration of key personnel. Among the Obama advisers who were lured over to Hillary's camp were Joel Benenson, as her chief strategist; Jim Margolis, as her media consultant; Jennifer Palmieri, as her communications director; Buffy Wicks, as a senior coordinator; and Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, as her field directors.
The Clintons replaced Hillary's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants with what the
Washington Post
called a
“frat house” full of former Obama operatives.
These veterans of the Obama political wars were a cold-blooded lot. In pursuit of the nomination and the White House, they were prepared to write off large swaths of independent voters and white working-class Clinton Republicans in favor of a strategy focused on mobilizing the Democratic base. In addition, they were ruthless in their treatment of Hillary's opponents for the nomination. According to a confidential memo that was
leaked to me from inside one of the opponent's campaigns, Hillary's frat boys were trying to kneecap the opposition. Here's an excerpt from the memo:
[Hillary's people] are planning to hold off deciding on the rules and regulations for ballot access in party primaries and caucuses until the last minute when we will have little chance to meet the requirements. . . . This is the Sopranos rigging the system. And they have enlisted FDR's grandson, James Roosevelt III, as cover in his role as co-chair of the [Democratic National Committee] Rules and Bylaws Committee to steer whatever changes they plan.
And the irony is while accusing the GOP of limiting [voter] access in the general election, they're pursuing just the opposite path for the nomination race, seeking to remove restrictions in the general election while imposing restrictions on primaries and party debates.
The person who leaked that confidential memo was scathing in his description of Hillary's strong-arm methods.
“The Clintons are consciously going out and hiring every person who could possibly work in another campaign,” he said. “They're offering them big bucks so that no one else can hire them. They're also shutting off the valve of campaign contributions from potential donors. I've talked to people who want to support another candidate, and they tell me that they're afraid of the Clintons and what the Clintons will do to them if it becomes
known that they've given money to someone other than the Clintons. It's a strategy of fear, making people afraid, and it's a strategy that works.”
The struggle for control of the Democratic Party was at the heart of the blood feud between the Clintons and the Obamas.
When I published
Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas
in 2014, some mainstream reporters refused to accept the evidence of such a feud. Others acted as though I had never written
Blood Feud
. For instance, Nicolle Wallace, cohost of
The View
, said that
if reporting were done
on the schism between the Clintons and the Obamas, it could sink Hillary's chances to become president.
“[Hillary] and the Obama White House really, really hated each other,” Wallace said, as though she were discovering something new. If that came out, she continued, “I think that would confound a lot of Democrats.”
However, by the spring of 2015, a cover story in the
New York Times Magazine
titled “The Great Democratic Crack-Up of 2016”
linked the words “blood feud” directly to the “Democratic Party” in the opening sentence.
The author of the article, Robert Draper, acknowledged the “identity struggle” and “intraparty disagreements that have been decades in the making . . . a striking development for a party that has largely kept its internal skirmishes under wraps.”
The feud was both ideological and personal.
Ideologically, it pitted so-called “Elizabeth Warren Democrats” against what the
Times Magazine
called “moderates [who] believe the only remedy is for Democrats to refashion themselves as pragmatists who care more about achieving results than ideological purity.”
Obama was clearly aligned with the first group, the Warrenites.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, were long associated with moderate elements in the partyâpeople like Robert Rubin, Bill's business-friendly, free-trade former Treasury secretary. Hillary had a reputation as a foreign policy hawk; she once threatened to “obliterate” Iran if it should attack Israel.
The blood feud also reflected the deep and abiding animosity that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton felt for each other. Obama resented the fact that Bill Clinton continued to behave as though
he
should still be president,
not
Obama. Obama bristled when he heard that Bill frequently phoned cabinet secretaries and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate and told them what
he
thought they should do. Obama saw Clinton's efforts to exert influence over the party as more than an encroachment on his prerogatives.
It was personal, not business.
In addition, Obama did not want to see the Clintons return to power, because it would undo plans he had for his post-presidency. After he left office in January 2017, he intended to keep his coalition together and stay active in the real-life political Game of Thrones. A presidential victory by Hillary in 2016 would make that all but impossible.
“Mrs. Clinton's political operation could dominate the Democratic Party for the next decade, controlling the flow of commissions, consulting work and political appointments,” noted the
New York Times
.
But was Obama being realistic? After he left the White House, could he continue to have influence over the Democratic Party and push America in the direction of a European-style socialist state?
“It seems highly unlikely,” said Henry Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist, in an interview with the author of this book. “Other than Clinton, there hasn't been a president who's been able to have real influence over his party after he left the White House. Truman couldn't do it. Ike didn't. The Kennedys couldn't. Lyndon Johnson retired as a recluse. Jimmy Carter has had no influence domestically. Perhaps only Ronald Reagan, if he hadn't developed Alzheimer's, might have been able to maintain a position of power.”
But Obama had other plansâand so, maybe even more important, did Valerie Jarrett.
