Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary (6 page)

CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 6

“I'VE ALWAYS BEEN A YANKEES FAN”
“I'VE ALWAYS BEEN A YANKEES FAN”

She went to the Yankees so that she could run for senator from New York. It's so obvious. Why is she—doesn't she know she looks like a fraud?

—Chris Matthews,
Hardball

F
or as long as Hillary had been in the public eye, her advisers had been trying to give her a makeover. At times, she cooperated with these Pygmalions, but more often than not she resisted their efforts to transform her into someone more pleasant and likeable.

But whether she chose to cooperate or not, the makeovers never stuck.

During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, his top pollsters, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg, issued a confidential memo identifying “voters' discomfort with Hillary.” Voters admired the strength of the Clinton marriage, they wrote, but “they also fear that only someone too politically ambitious, too
strong, and too ruthless could survive such controversy so well. What voters find slick in Bill, they find ruthless in Hillary.”

What Lake and Greenberg wrote about Hillary almost a quarter of a century ago could just as easily be written about her today:

[Voters] perceive a political ruthlessness in her that is reinforced by their image of Bill Clinton. As one voter put it, “She knows what she wants and will do anything to get it.”

Women have their own contradictions and insecurities about the many roles they fulfill, which heighten their ambivalence about Hillary's life. They wonder whether Hillary shares their values or understands their lives.

In the spring of 1993, four months after Hillary and Bill moved into the White House, the journalist Michael Kelly wrote an article for the
New York Times Magazine
titled “Saint Hillary.” In it, Kelly quoted Hillary as saying that she had grown tired of trying to be like Mother Teresa.

“I know that no matter what I did—if I did nothing, if I spent my entire day totally disengaged from what was going on around me—I'd be criticized for that,” Hillary complained. “I mean, it's a no-win deal, no matter what I do, or try to do.”

Two years later, in 1995, Hillary's press secretary, Lisa Caputo, presented several ideas to make Hillary more appealing, including
a guest shot on a popular television sitcom. “
Home Improvement
is the most popular television show on the air,” Caputo wrote. “They are willing to do a show on women, children and [family] issues or a show on whatever issues Hillary would like.
The outreach would be enormous and it would present Hillary in a very likeable light I believe.”

A year after that, in 1996, when Hillary's polling numbers tanked and she was at the nadir of her term as first lady, she hired Michael Sheehan, Washington's top media-training guru. Sheehan was tasked with helping Hillary with an image makeover and with prepping her for the tour of her upcoming book,
It Takes a Village.

On Thanksgiving Day of that same year, Hillary phoned Diane Blair, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and one of Hillary's closest friends. The two women spoke for nearly an hour. Later, Blair wrote an account in her diary of Hillary's self-pitying rant:

“I'm a proud woman.” “I'm not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press, I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos, I know I should pretend not to have any opinions—but I'm just not going to. I'm used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.” “I know how to compromise, I have compromised, I gave up my name, got contact lenses, but I'm not going to try to pretend to be somebody that I'm not.” I'm a complex person and they're just going to have to live with that.

In 1999, Hillary's staff sent her a memo urging her to be “real.”

In 2000, Hillary turned again to the media-training expert Michael Sheehan. This time he tried to work his magic during her race for the U.S. Senate seat from New York being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But Liz Moynihan, the senator's formidable wife, who managed all of his political campaigns, was less than impressed with Hillary's latest makeover.

“She's duplicitous,” Liz told the author of this book. “She would say or do anything that would forward her ambitions. She can look you straight in the eye and lie, and sort of not know she's lying. Lying isn't a sufficient word; it's distortion—distorting the truth to fit the case.”

Liz Moynihan wasn't alone in calling Hillary a fabulist who concocted dishonest stories. The New York media had a field day when Senate candidate Hillary, who hailed from Chicago and had always rooted for the Chicago Cubs, donned a Yankee baseball cap and declared in a
Today
show interview with Katie Couric: “The fact is, I've always been a Yankees fan.”

Members of the New York press corps weren't the only ones who were on to Hillary.
Female participants in the campaign's focus-group sessions described Hillary as “cunning,” “pushy,” and “cold.” Complained one woman: “We really don't know who Hillary Clinton is.”

Her eight years as a senator only served to solidify Hillary's reputation as a shameless hypocrite. With her eye firmly fixed on the White House, she put aside her left-wing convictions and demonstrated a newfound flair for bipartisanship.
By her third
year in the Senate, she had already sponsored bills with more than thirty-six Republicans.

To avoid being branded a liberal, she Vaselined her image to the point where the old left-wing Hillary was almost unrecognizable. She cosponsored a bill to criminalize flag burning. And, most famously of all, she voted in favor of the Iraq war in 2002 (when it was popular) before she voted against it in 2007 (when it wasn't).

“Hillary told [Obama] that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political,” an appalled Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense, wrote in his memoir,
Duty
.

In 2008, a stiff and charmless Hillary was pitted against a loose and charismatic newcomer named Barack Hussein Obama for their party's presidential nomination. Her epic battle against Obama in Iowa and New Hampshire brought the issue of her unlikeability out of the shadows of confidential campaign memos and closed-door focus groups and to widespread public attention.

CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 7

A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.

—The late congressman Mo Udall

O
prah Winfrey delivered the first blow to Hillary in Iowa.

For as long as anyone could remember, Oprah had been known as the
“Queen of All Media.” But to many of her fans, especially those on the Left, Oprah was more than that. In their eyes, she was the “Queen of Everything”—the doyenne of America's self-absorbed, secular, redistributive, and politically correct culture.

Over the years, Hillary had worked hard to ingratiate herself with this powerful cultural figure. She sent Oprah handwritten notes, birthday greetings, and invitations to special Clinton events. Oprah had never endorsed a political candidate, and in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses of 2008, Hillary expected
that Oprah's support for her would be understated—perhaps a nice spread in
O, the Oprah Magazine
and a couple of well-timed touchy-feely appearances on Oprah's TV show.

But in a dramatic break with precedent, Oprah ditched Hillary and endorsed Barack Obama for president. Her endorsement garnered headlines all over America.

To explain her decision, Oprah appeared on
Larry King Live
. The irrepressible King could hardly wait to ask the Queen if she had put her money where her mouth was.

“Well,” replied Oprah, who was a mega-millionaire, “the truth of the matter is, whether I contribute or not contribute, you are limited to how much you [can] contribute, so my money isn't going to make any difference to him. I think that my value to him, my support of him, is probably worth more than any check.”

That turned out to be the understatement of the election season.
A study by two Maryland economists later concluded that Oprah's endorsement of Obama was worth more than one million votes in the primary race and put him over the top.

It was no secret that Oprah wanted to see an African American in the Oval Office. But her rationale for backing Obama went beyond race. The fact was, Oprah had never forgotten—nor forgiven—how she was dissed when Bill and Hillary were in the White House.

In an interview for this book, a close Oprah friend explained why Oprah still carried a grudge against the Clintons.

On May 7, 1999, two of President Clinton's senior White House advisers, Richard Socarides and Minyon Moore, exchanged
memos about Oprah with the following derogatory subject line: “The fat lady hasn't sung yet.”

The memos were distributed to Elena Kagan, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council and a future justice of the Supreme Court; Neera Tanden, senior policy adviser to First Lady Hillary Clinton; and Bruce Lindsey, deputy counsel to President Clinton.

None of the recipients of the memos thought to object to the slur against Oprah.

Oprah had sources in the Clinton White House who told her about the offending “fat lady” memo.

“People in the Clinton administration desperately wanted Oprah to back certain presidential initiatives and lend her support to legislation, and when she showed a reluctance to do so, they joked ‘the fat lady hasn't sung yet,'” explained one of Oprah's closest friends who was intimately acquainted with her thinking. “It's not that she isn't aware that people make fun of her weight and define her as being a heavy person. She certainly is aware of it and, for the most part, ignores it.

“But it is a different thing to have a slur about her weight written as the subject line of a memo that is circulated in the White House,” the friend continued. “It doesn't matter that Hillary and Bill's fingerprints weren't on the memo. In Oprah's opinion, members of the Clinton administration wouldn't have used phrases like that if they thought the president and first lady would find it offensive.

“That wasn't the only reason Oprah never warmed to Hillary. But it was one of the many slights that distanced her from
Hillary. She thought Hillary was a user and not a particularly trustworthy person. Oprah always kept her at arm's length. I'm sure Hillary will make an approach to get Oprah's support in the 2016 election, but I'm just as sure she won't get it.”

The second blow to fall on Hillary in 2008 came from another sort of royalty—
Hollywood
royalty in the form of the Dream-Works SKG trio of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen.

Everyone in Hollywood was under the impression that the SKGs were FOBs—Friends of Bill. That is, until Geffen, who was worth $6 billion, threw a fund-raiser for Barack Obama in the sprawling ten-acre backyard of his Beverly Hills mansion.

Geffen and his friends raised $1.3 million for Obama.

But that wasn't the worst of it as far as Hillary was concerned.

Afterward, Geffen agreed to sit for a rare on-the-record interview with his homegirl
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd. The interview took place at his home, the fabulous old Jack Warner estate on Angelo Drive.
On display in the 13,600-square-foot mansion were paintings by famous American artists, which were valued at $1.1 billion, making it the most valuable private art collection in the world. The home also featured a curiosity that was tailor-made for a Hollywood mogul—the floor on which Napoleon was standing when he proposed to Josephine.

Normally, Geffen played his cards close to the vest, but he couldn't restrain himself when he started venting about the Clintons.

“It's not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake' on the [Iraq] war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't,” Geffen said. “She's so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”

Most people outside Geffen's inner circle didn't know that he had parted company with Bill and Hillary several years before the Dowd interview.

In the final hours of the Clinton administration, Bill granted 177 presidential pardons. One of them went to bank swindlers Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory. It was later learned that Tony Rodham, Hillary's younger brother, had received a “consultant's fee” to arrange the Gregory pardon.

Another pardon went to the fugitive Marc Rich, an international commodities trader who had fled to Switzerland to avoid being prosecuted on charges of tax evasion. The pardon was viewed in many circles as a flagrant payoff to Rich's former wife, Denise, who had contributed more than $100,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign and $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

At the same time that Bill was letting the Gregorys and Rich go scot-free, Geffen—who was also a major Democratic Party donor—was lobbying the president to grant a pardon to Leonard Peltier. A Native American activist, Peltier was serving two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first-degree murder in the
shooting of two FBI agents. Many in Hollywood and beyond believed that Peltier had been wrongly convicted, and Geffen was joined in his appeal for a pardon by Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama as well as by such smooth operators as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Clinton ignored Geffen's request.

And as anyone in Hollywood could tell you, you didn't cross David Geffen without paying a price.

The Dowd interview was Geffen's payback.

“Marc Rich getting pardon?” Geffen scoffed. “An oil-profiteer expatriate who left the country rather than pay taxes or face justice? Yet another time when the Clintons were unwilling to stand for the things that they genuinely believe in. Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling.”

When that phrase
—“they do it [lie] with such ease, it's troubling”
—appeared in black and white in Dowd's column, it ricocheted from coast to coast and instantly became part of political lore. It was a reminder of William Safire's famous opening sentence about Hillary in a 1996
Times
column:
“Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar.”

By early December 2007, Barack Obama had captured the lead in the Iowa polls, and Oprah Winfrey was drawing record crowds at Obama campaign rallies.

Panic broke out among Hillary's donors. Rumors began flying of a shake-up in her unruly and famously unmanageable staff. Reporters started writing eulogies for Hillary's campaign.

Hillary responded by calling in the cavalry: Bill Clinton.

With the presidential caucuses just two weeks away, she and Bill started making joint appearances at coffee shops and diners all across Iowa. She dropped her objection to using her mother, Dorothy, and daughter, Chelsea, in TV commercials. And just before Christmas, she embarked on what a
New York Times
headline writer with a droll sense of humor described as a “Likability Tour.”

This is how the
Times
played it:
“Mrs. Clinton has embarked this week on a warm-and-fuzzy tour, blitzing full throttle by helicopter across Iowa to present herself as likable and heart-warming, a complement to her ‘strength and experience' message that the campaign felt a female candidate needed first.”

After Hillary lost to Obama in Iowa (she came in third after Obama and John Edwards), she mused about the outcome of the campaign.

“Maybe,” she said, “they just don't like me.”

There was no
maybe
about it.

When Hillary got to New Hampshire, the site of the first primary in the nation, she reverted to form. She was spitting mad over her loss to Obama in Iowa, and she was eager to demonstrate that she wasn't intimidated by Obama's Chicago-style brass-knuckles
politics. As her mother, Dorothy, might have said: “There's no room in this campaign for cowards.”

During their final debate in the Granite State, Hillary came across as defensive and angry—her old default expression when speaking in public.

“Making change is not about what you believe, it's not about a speech you make,” she said, taking a shot at Obama, a first-term U.S. senator who, she believed, was riding on a smile and a shoe-shine and a lot of hot air.

The moderator caught Hillary's negative vibes and asked about her “personality deficit.”

How would she respond to voters who thought Obama was more likeable than she was?

“Well,” she replied, “that hurts my feelings, but I'll try to go on.”

Then she turned to Obama and added, “He's very likeable. I agree with that. I don't think I'm
that
bad.”

But Obama wouldn't let Hillary off the hook.

“You're likeable enough, Hillary,” he said, throwing her some shade.

Hillary's camp complained that Obama had been cruel and insensitive. He wouldn't have used such a patronizing phrase if his opponent were a man. Hillary accused him of being “sexist”—her automatic fallback position whenever someone criticized her.