Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary (17 page)

PART VII
PART VII

SHAMELESS
SHAMELESS

Shameless, shamelessa

You know what you have done

You are shameless, shameless

You've got me on the run

Shameless, shameless

You're tearin' me apart

You are shameless, shameless

You're a face without a heart

—Judy Collins, “Shameless”

CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 28

THE POTEMKIN CAMPAIGN
THE POTEMKIN CAMPAIGN

It makes zero difference how many questions [Hillary] Clinton has asked average Americans. Like, none. If those people were running for president, then I would be super-interested. . . . But, they aren't. She is.

—
Washington Post
political reporter Chris Cillizza

F
rom the outset of her campaign, Hillary adopted a classic Rose Garden strategy.

That term was first popularized during the election campaign of 1976, when Gerald Ford spent most of his time in the Oval Office, which overlooks the Rose Garden, and limited his travel around the country.
In recent years, the term has come to have a broader meaning: it refers to a candidate who refuses to hold press conferences and engage in question-and-answer sessions with reporters.

Hillary's Rose Garden strategy was aimed at making her more likeable.

“Her aides are planning a different sort of campaign this time around,” wrote the
Wall Street Journal
's Peter Nicholas. “Mrs. Clinton will be meeting with small clusters of voters in diners, coffee shops and private homes. She won't always have a prepared speech in front of her. Her advisers predict voters will see a less scripted, more disarming candidate than was on display eight years ago. . . . ‘She needs to try to humanize herself, because in some ways she's kind of become a cardboard cutout figure,' says Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University.

“These aren't the first set of Hillary Clinton aides to grapple with the likeability factor,” the
Journal
's Nicholas continued. “For a quarter century, Clinton staffers, at one time or another, have cast about for a formula that would broaden Mrs. Clinton's appeal and combat perceptions that she is an unsympathetic figure.”

The failed strategy of the past failed once again.

In the first month of her campaign, Hillary was severely criticized for ducking the media and taking only eight questions from reporters (or thirteen, depending on whom you asked). As Chris Cillizza of the
Washington Post
pointed out,
that came to one question every 3.6 days. And most of her answers weren't answers at all.

Some examples:

          
Q:
You lost Iowa in 2008. How do you win this time? What's your strategy?

          
Hillary:
I'm having a great time. Can't look forward any more than I am.

          
Q:
What about campaign finance reform?

          
Hillary:
We do have a plan. We have a plan for my plan.

          
Q:
How do you respond to criticism that your campaign is too staged?

          
Hillary:
This is exactly what I want to do. I want to hear from people in New Hampshire about what's on their minds.

One of the things reporters wanted to ask Hillary was what would happen to the Clinton Foundation if she were elected president.

“Who would be able to raise money for the Clinton Foundation?” Julie Pace of the Associated Press asked. “Could it begin new projects, both at home and overseas? Is there any way it could operate unburdened by conflicts of interest, real or perceived, while one of its founders sits in the Oval Office?”

On these and all other important issues, Hillary remained silent.

Frustrated in its attempt to get access to the candidate, the
New York Times
posted an item on its
First Draft
blog titled “Questions for Hillary Clinton: Immigration.” Amy Chozick, the
Times
correspondent assigned to cover Hillary, explained:
“This is the first installment of a regular First Draft feature in which The Times will publish questions we would have asked Mrs. Clinton had we had the opportunity.”

The
Washington Post
followed suit.
It posted an online clock that counted the minutes since Hillary had answered a press question.

In her first thirty days, Hillary did not hold a single campaign event in New Hampshire that was open to the general public. She
spent six days on campaign events and seven on fund-raising.
She appeared at sixteen fund-raisers in New York, Washington, D.C., and California, raising about $1.1 million from some of the wealthiest people in America—the same 1 percent she excoriated in her speeches.

Before she started running, Hillary had promised she wouldn't campaign like the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia making a royal progress through the provinces.

But that's exactly what she did. Everywhere she went, her handlers erected a kind of modern-day Potemkin village for the TV cameras. She was televised against artful backgrounds chatting with carefully screened schoolchildren and devoted Hillary enthusiasts.

“The reality is that Clinton's avoidance of the press is a product of weakness, not the result of a shrewd campaign bypassing the media because it can,” wrote Josh Kraushaar, the political editor for
National Journal.
“She may be avoiding short-term pain by sticking to her script, but she's creating an imperial image of herself that's hard to reverse—and one the media has every incentive to reinforce.

“If the real reason Clinton's handlers don't want her to meet the press is out of fear—fear that she'll sound politically tone-deaf or get caught fibbing—that's as much a sign of her campaign's anxiety as it is a savvy strategy,” Kraushaar continued. “The fear of making a mistake extends to her interactions with voters. Most of her appearances so far have been with supporters who have been vetted and prescreened by the campaign.”

At one point during Hillary's visit to Council Bluffs, Iowa, her Secret Service chauffeur pulled her Scooby Doo van into a parking spot reserved for the handicapped. The van remained there while Hillary ducked into a meeting with a group of Democratic activists. Before the meeting began, the participants had to hand over their cameras and cell phones.

Hillary left Council Bluffs without a trace.

At a campaign event in Cedar Falls, which was hosted by billionaire Fred Eychaner, who had given more than $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, a reporter finally managed to put Hillary on the spot. Fox News's Ed Henry asked her if she might speak to the press.

Hillary went into her tough-dude mode and mocked Ed Henry for asking the question.

“Yeah,” she said with a derisive laugh, “maybe when I finish talking to the people here, how about that? I might. I'll have to ponder it, but I will put it on my list for due consideration.”

Her contempt for the press and her consuming fear of exposure reached paranoid personality disorder symptoms during a Fourth of July parade in Gorham, New Hampshire. As she walked down the street, waving to the crowds, her aides kept reporters away from the candidate by herding them behind a fat white rope.

“Spectacle of Clinton as candidate—press being pulled along with a rope,” tweeted the
New York Times
' campaign correspondent Maggie Haberman.

“Hang 'em high, Hillary,” wrote
Politico
's Roger Simon. “Hang those pesky reporters who fly around the country to cover
your every event in order to quote what you say and what people say to you. Hogtie them! String them up. Or, at the very least, rope-a-dope them.”

When Hillary finally agreed to answer questions about her e-mails and the Clinton Foundation, she offered what
New York Post
columnist Michael Goodwin described as “mush.”
To Goodwin's ear, Hillary sounded like the old Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt, who defended “honest graft” and said of his riches, “I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.”

CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 29

ON THE “PRECARIOUS LEFT EDGE”
ON THE “PRECARIOUS LEFT EDGE”

If I don't have this [economic recovery] done in three years, then it's going to be a one-term proposition.

—Barack Obama, February 2009

B
ill Clinton watched the rollout of Hillary's campaign from his pleasure dome in Little Rock.

Hillary's managers had excluded him from their strategy sessions.

He was out of the loop.

“Hillary has kept Bill on the sidelines of the campaign because she's very adamant about him not being seen as running the campaign,” a Clinton confidant said in an interview for this book. “Hillary is very worried about her campaign being seen as a prologue to Bill's third term. She and her campaign managers have agreed on a strategy to keep Bill in the background.

“Naturally, he isn't happy about that,” the source continued. “He wants to be in on everything, and it's been driving him crazy to be kept out of the mix. It's a bigger problem than you might imagine. Their marriage is going through one of its periodic rocky periods as a result, and they're going to have to work it out before the general election.”

Bill had to follow the campaign on television news broadcasts, just the way everybody else did.

And he didn't much like what he saw.

He cringed at the clumsiness of Hillary's remarks on the stump when she said that saving the U.S. economy would require “toppling” the richest 1 percent of Americans, and that Americans had to change their “religious beliefs” in order to make abortion legal everywhere.

Bill told his advisers that Hillary's Scooby Doo van was “amateurish and silly,” and he practically tore out his hair when he heard that the van had been parked in a zone reserved for handicapped people.

When a TV news show ran a grainy surveillance video showing Hillary and Huma Abedin wearing dark sunglasses and stopping for lunch at a Chipotle restaurant in Maumee, Ohio, Bill asked an aide: “What are she and Huma doing? Are they robbing that place?”

But most of all, Bill tried to put a positive light on his status as a virtual nonperson in the campaign. His chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, told reporters that Bill had never intended to hit the campaign trail for Hillary in 2015 or appear with her at fund-raisers.

“If his advice is asked for, he's happy to give it,” Flournoy said.

But he wasn't asked.

Which left Bill no choice but to do what he always did when he was ignored—make a commotion and grab the spotlight.

While Hillary was doing her “Silent Cal” routine in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bill granted interviews to three TV personalities—Christiane Amanpour on CNN, David Letterman on the
Late Show
, and Cynthia McFadden on NBC News.

In the interviews, he came across as cranky, out of sorts, and not at all the master of shuck and jive. But he wasn't beyond making things up as he went along.

“What does [Hillary] want me to do?” he said, wide-eyed with naiveté. “I have no idea.”

In a gross untruth that ranked right up there with “I did not have sexual relations with that woman . . . Miss Lewinsky,” Bill told McFadden about the Clinton Foundation: “There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy.”

“I'm not in politics,” he replied to another McFadden question, apparently forgetting that Charlie Rose had dubbed him “the best political animal that's ever been in American politics.”

“All I'm saying,” Bill insisted, “is the idea that there's one set of rules for us and another set for everybody else is true.”

Bill was so off his game that he didn't recognize that what he said was the opposite of what he intended.

But if Bill was ignored by Hillary's campaign, his ideas were not forgotten.

As we've seen, during a get-together with friends on the eve of the campaign, Bill had listed several items that Hillary had to check off if she hoped to win the White House. She had already staked out positions on many of Bill's must-do items, especially “Feed the base red meat.”

“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” wrote Anne Gearan in the
Washington Post
, “is running as the most liberal Democratic presidential front-runner in decades, with positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party's precarious left edge.”

Indeed, Hillary was running to the left—and away from Obama's record—as fast as she could.

And with good reason.

Obama had presided over the worst recovery from a recession in modern memory. Despite his promise to “heal” America's political wounds, he bore a great deal of responsibility for making our political system more divisive, not less so. On his watch, the world's respect for America had plunged to its lowest level since World War II.

Judged by almost any yardstick, Obama was presiding over a failed presidency. Even George W. Bush, who left office with poll numbers in the basement, now enjoyed higher ratings than Obama.

And the negative verdict on Obama's performance went double for leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, who concluded that Obama was the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.

Here were some of the things Hillary said on the campaign trail to distance herself from Obama:

On stop-and-frisk and mandatory sentencing:
“Black lives matter. . . . It's time to end the era of mass incarceration.”

On amnesty for illegal immigrants:
“If Congress refuses to act [on shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation], as president I will do everything possible under the law to go even further [than Obama].”

On same-sex marriage,
she tweeted: “Every loving couple & family deserves to be recognized & treated equally under the law across our nation.”

On raising the minimum wage,
she tweeted: “Every American deserves a fair shot at success. Fast food & childcare workers shouldn't have to march in streets for living wages.”

On abortion:
“Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

On free speech by political groups:
Hillary said that as president she would apply a litmus test to Supreme Court nominees by making them pledge in advance to overturn the 2010
Citizens United
decision that allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited funds backing candidates for office.

On income inequality:
“The deck is stacked in [wealthy peoples'] favor. My job is to reshuffle the cards.”