American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read online

  “She’s more effective than pretty much anybody but her husband,” gushed council member Jack Weiss. “She’s just got it.” Maine State Representative Lisa Tessier Marrache echoed the sentiments of many party rank-and-file members. “I wish she would run,” Marrache said. “She’s very charismatic.”

  Hillary’s give-’em-hell speech was especially audacious, since she had gladly accepted large contributions from such corporate train wrecks as ImClone’s Sam Waksal, Martha Stewart, WorldCom, Enron, and the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen. “That,” she explained, “was in the past….”

  Hillary now actively encouraged her fellow Democrats to fire away at Bush’s integrity; in closed-door meetings she urged party operatives to dredge up Bush’s sale of Harken Energy stock in 1990. Back then, the Securities and Exchange Commission had looked into the transaction—which was executed shortly before Harken’s stock took a nosedive—and Bush’s failure to file the proper paperwork. The SEC ruled at the time that the case merited no further action. Hillary, apparently giving little thought to her own precarious position and that of her friend Martha, felt Bush was particularly “vulnerable” in the current anti-big-business climate.

  That summer, Hillary also had to deal with the news that her husband was in the midst of negotiations with NBC and CBS for his own syndicated daytime talk show. Their old Hollywood pal Harry Thomason was handling talks with network executives, demanding that the former President be paid $100 million to host the show for two years. After NBC backed out, Bill reportedly dropped his price to around $30 million a year.

  There was the inevitable spate of headlines when news of Clinton’s talk-show negotiations were leaked to the press:VIEWERS WOULD SNUBBA BUBBA, BOOB-TUBE BUBBA, and BUST-SEE TV: BILL SHOW A DUMB IDEA. “You were leader of the Free World!” Rosie O’Donnell protested. “Don’t do a talk show, you moron! If he really does a talk show, I’m becoming a Republican. I swear to you—fully Republican. You’re going to see me all over the country campaigning for the Bushes. If it is true, I want to see if I can get any money I donated to him back!”

  Bill’s wife was mortified. “Hillary was just really pissed off,” said a friend from Little Rock who had served in the Clinton administration. “Here she is running around the country trying to mobilize the party, and Bill is acting like he wants to be the next Jerry Springer. Hillary thought it was beneath him and it made her look bad, so she told him to knock it off.” Eventually, he would, but only because no network was willing to match his nine-figure asking price.

  On Capitol Hill, Hillary continued to placate the Senate’s entrenched male leadership. At their regular Tuesday caucus meetings, said Louisiana Democrat John B. Breaux, “the thing that has most impressed me is sitting down and watching her get up to get coffee and ask the other senators whether she could bring them back some coffee. She aggressively avoids the spotlight and intentionally holds back, while most of us try to do the opposite.”

  On the stump, however, Hillary was once again the frequently ferocious partisan. “The stakes are so high in this election,” she said in late October, “I just have to impress upon you how critical this is. If we were to lose the Senate, there would be nothing standing between the Republican leadership and confirming the most extremist judges, in rolling back environmental regulations. And certainly, you might as well say goodbye to fiscal responsibility.”

  At private fund-raisers, Hillary’s attacks on Bush and the Republicans were described by one New York Times reporter as far more “brutal and alarmist” than what she was willing to say in public. “We’re the party of the people, and they’re the party of the rich and the special interests—it’s really that simple,” she declared at one small gathering. At another, she said W was “much worse than his father, because he owes his soul to the far right.” She was also convinced that Vice President Dick Cheney, for whom she had long had a visceral dislike, was “really running the show.”

  As the chances of a Democratic sweep began to fade, it became clear that Hillary—still one of the most polarizing figures in American politics—may have done as much for the Republicans as she had for her own party. In numerous contests across the country, the GOP ran television campaigns trying to link Hillary to various Democratic candidates.

  In many cases, the ploy worked. So, too, did George W. Bush’s own campaign blitz across the country on behalf of Republican candidates. When the dust had settled, Democrats had suffered a stunning off-year defeat as Republicans regained control of the Senate and extended their lead in the House. Fortunately for Senator Clinton, the historic GOP victory was chalked up to George W. Bush’s continuing popularity, and not to an anti-Hillary backlash.

  Undaunted, Hillary now focused her attention on 2004, and how that election might affect her own planned run for office in 2008. On Meet the Press, she repeated her assertions that she was “110 percent certain” she would not run for President during the next election. But when asked about 2008, she followed her husband’s example and parsed her words carefully. While not ruling it out explicitly, she said she had “no plans” to run in 2008.

  “Hillary will be sixty-one in 2008, and even if she waits until 2012, she’ll only be sixty-five,” said one Democratic strategist. “Reagan was seventy when he was elected, and half the country will be baby boomers around her age anyway. So she has time.” By the end of the year, it appeared that Hillary’s denials had fallen on deaf ears. A CNN/Time magazine poll indicated that 30 percent of registered Democrats would vote for her for President, compared to just 13 percent each for John Kerry and Joe Lieberman.

  One Democrat who had removed himself from the running, Al Gore, had done so in part because Hillary had made it clear she would not endorse him—at least not before the primaries. “If I had a really, really good friend—as you’ve described Al Gore to me,” Chris Matthews asked Hillary on WNBC’s Hardball, “a really, really good friend, and he was telling me I think I’m going to run for president…”

  “He hasn’t said that to me,” Hillary replied.

  When Matthews suggested that a real friend wouldn’t have to be asked, that she would say “I’m with you, buddy, all the way” beforehand, Hillary shrugged.

  “He hasn’t talked to me about it…. No, you know, Chris, I don’t endorse in Democratic primaries.”

  “Al Gore got the message loud and clear,” said a former member of the ex–vice president’s staff. “You know, it’s really a case of ‘with friends like that.’ Hillary is the most influential person in the party right now, and she was letting everyone know she had no faith in him.”

  When John Kerry stepped down as chair of the key Senate Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee to run for President, it was Hillary who was tapped to take his place. The little-known committee was charged with putting out the party message to officials all over the country as well as approving appointments to Senate committees. Then she was given a seat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. This gave Hillary a pulpit from which to expound on Bush’s foreign policy as he prepared to wage war on Iraq.

  Senator Clinton shrugged when it was pointed out that both jobs perfectly positioned her to expand her power base and influence for a run in 2008—if not sooner. “I just want,” she said, “to be effective.”

  Hillary went back on the attack in January 2003, now charging that Bush’s Homeland Security plan was a “myth” and that Americans were more vulnerable to terrorism than ever. “Our vigilance has faded at the top, in the corridors of power in Washington,” she said, “where leaders are supposed to lead.” Once again, the senator said Bush put the interests of the wealthy above the security of ordinary citizens. “Will ending the dividend tax keep a dirty bomb out of New York harbor?” Hillary also accused the President of turning a blind eye to the nuclear threats in Iran and North Korea, and of being “fiscally irresponsible” by cutting taxes.

  Nonetheless, Hillary voted with the majority of Democrats and Republicans to grant the Presiden
t congressional authority to wage war on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “It was the hardest decision,” she said, “I’ve ever had to make.” The U.S.-led offensive to oust Hussein got under way on March 19, 2003, and for the next several weeks, while American troops pressed toward Baghdad, Hillary remained uncharacteristically silent.

  By April, however, Hillary and Bill seemed to be everywhere—speaking at seminars and luncheons, doing television and radio interviews, schmoozing with the party faithful at countless events from coast to coast, and making the kinds of remarks that were certain to keep them center stage. Asked if his wife was going to run for President, Bill started tongues wagging by suggesting that she’d “make a better vice-presidential candidate” in 2004.

  This was no accident. The Clintons’ former adviser Dick Morris claimed there was a “conscious effort going on by the Clintons to distract attention from the current field of candidates. They do not want a Democrat to win in ’04.” Indeed, as part of their effort to “trivialize” the other candidates, the Clintons had refrained from giving money to any of them.

  Susan Estrich, a longtime Democratic Party strategist and close ally of the Clintons, conceded Bill and Hillary “suck up every bit of the available air. Nothing is left for anyone else. They are big, too big. That’s the problem…. The 2004 candidates need a chance to get some attention. Could somebody please tell the Clintons to shut up?”

  Estrich and the rest of the party would be swept away in a tide of Hillarymania with the June 2003 release of her $8 million memoir, Living History. Completed on schedule (this time with the help of six ghostwriters), the book landed Hillary on the cover of Time, on front pages everywhere, alongside Barbara Walters on ABC, and at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

  Much of Living History was devoted to Hillary’s midwestern upbringing, her involvement in Bill’s campaigns, her social causes (health care, children’s rights, welfare reform), and her travels abroad. Yet what really captured the public’s attention was Hillary’s mind-boggling claim that she, too, was shocked when her husband confessed about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

  For the most part, Hillary’s autobiography had less to do with living history than with rewriting it. Still lashing out at the “vast right-wing conspiracy” supposedly aimed at bringing down the Clintons, Hillary defended her husband even as she vividly described his “stinging betrayal” of their marriage.

  Critics, for the most part, were incredulous. “Living History is neither living nor history,” wrote the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd. “But like Hillary Rodham Clinton, the book is relentless, a phenomenon that’s impossible to ignore and impossible to explain.”

  Whatever its literary merits, Living History proved to be a potent political tool. By stressing her domestic and foreign policy credentials, and portraying herself once again as the wounded but loyal wife, the only First Lady to win elective office was offering up what amounted to a presidential résumé. “What she has done,” said New York–based Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, “is create a national constituency for a newly defined Hillary Clinton.” Concurred journalist Joe Klein: “This is the memoir of an active—and very ambitious—politician. The Senator is looking to augment her political viability.”

  The result was that Hillary, still proclaiming her desire to see some other Democrat elected to the White House in 2004, remained with her feet planted squarely center stage. “She has commanded more attention,” said another Democratic strategist, Philip Friedman, “than the nine Democratic presidential candidates combined, she has given her version of a scandal that involved her family, and she has begun to move on to a posture as a national leader in the party.” Another Democratic consultant added that the candidates “must be going out of their minds today! They can’t even get on Page A27, but Hillary’s on the front page of newspapers all over the country.”

  Then there was the money. Tucker Carlson, the conservative half of CNN’s Crossfire, had vowed to eat his shoes if Hillary’s book sold a million copies. When it did after just one month, Hillary showed up on the Crossfire set with a chocolate cake in the shape of a shoe. “It’s a right-wing wingtip,” she announced.

  While promoting the British edition of the book (Living History reached number one in England, France, and Germany), Hillary uttered the same line over and over to describe the Lewinsky affair: “Well, it should have remained private and personal but it was forced into the public for partisan political purposes which I found deplorable…these people were willing to destroy anyone in order to end my husband’s presidency.” She also repeatedly denied that she had any plans to run for President. “What about 2008?” one interviewer asked. Hillary smiled and answered that “2008 is an eternity in American politics.” However, she added, “You never know what might happen.” She also volunteered that if she were to be elected President, she wanted her husband to be called “First Mate.”

  By late August 2003, there were strong indications that the book had gone a long way toward rehabilitating Hillary’s image. Before its publication, someone had pointed out to Hillary that she remained unpopular in large parts of the country. At the time, Hillary grinned broadly and replied, “That’s because they don’t know me!” Now, in the wake of her nationwide blitz to promote Living History, a Gallup poll showed that Hillary’s favorable rating had gone from 43 percent to 53 percent.

  To maintain momentum—and keep her fellow Democrats in a perpetual state of bewilderment regarding her intentions—Hillary instructed aides to keep posting e-mails on her official Web site from fans exhorting her to toss her hat into the ring. Asked why she was allowing hundreds of such “Hillary for President” e-mails to be posted, Hillary answered matter-of-factly, “Freedom of speech, I guess.”

  No politician made more efficient use of the Internet, in fact. “Have you picked up the paper lately or clicked on a cable channel to find someone saying the most outrageous things about Hillary Rodham Clinton?” asked the FriendsofHillary.com home page. “We have! It really steams us that some people would twist the truth or use such hateful language to attack a Senator who is working hard to make life better for the people of New York and the nation. The right wing is even angrier because they’ve been unable to stop Hillary with their vicious personal attacks. We’re fighting back! Become a HILLRAISER today!”

  Another FOH-sponsored site belongs to “Hill’s Angels,” which zeros in on fund-raising. “While Hillary is fighting for the values and policies we care about,” reads the introduction to the Web site, “the right wing is waging a personal attack against her.” Hillary personally signed off on the copy, hence the many references to her “right wing” critics. Meanwhile, Hillary received an endorsement that, given the rocky state of Franco-American relations during the Iraqi War, she might just have well done without. Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, said on French television that “a lot of women hope that one day she will run for the presidency of the United States and that she’ll win.”

  Buoyed by her rising poll numbers—numbers that still showed her twenty points ahead of any declared candidate—Hillary went back on the offensive. This time, she charged that the White House had pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to downplay the fact that toxins were swirling in the air after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. “I don’t think any of us ever expect to find out,” she said, “that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe….” She then called for Senate hearings to investigate what she was now calling a “cover-up.” Hillary said she could “see no other way to get the administration’s attention.”

  Later, the senator would up the ante by threatening to block the confirmation of outgoing Utah Governor Mike Leavitt as the new head of the EPA. In a statement that revealed more about the way the Clintons operated than Hillary may have intended, she said, “I know a little bit about how White Houses work. I know somebody picked up a phone, somebody got on a computer, som
ebody sent an e-mail, somebody called for a meeting, somebody in that White House probably under instructions from somebody further up the chain told the EPA, ‘Don’t tell the people of New York the truth.’ And I want to know who that is.”

  Hillary would keep hammering away at Bush’s record, confident that not one of the Democrats lining up for the nomination had any chance of beating him. Six months after American troops entered Iraq, support for the war was hovering around 63 percent. Polls also showed that, for the time being, Bush would easily recapture the White House, leaving the field wide open to Hillary in 2008.

  The Clintons continued to ignore Susan Estrich and other party operatives who begged them not to hog the limelight. When CNN’s Judy Woodruff asked if Hillary wasn’t guilty of distracting attention from her fellow Democrats, Hillary shrugged. “Well,” she said, “I don’t see that at all.” Then she argued that the party’s best hope was to keep reminding Americans of “the Clinton Administration and the difference it made in the lives of so many Americans.”

  Her hollow denials notwithstanding, Hillary kept dangling the possibility in front of the party faithful that she would jump into the race at any minute. Bill was her co-conspirator in this ongoing effort to keep the rest of the field off balance. On a Sunday in early September, the Clintons hosted a dinner for 150 major donors—people who had contributed $100,000 or more to the Clintons over the past twelve months—at their home in Chappaqua. At one point over cocktails, Bill said the Democrats had only “two stars”—his wife and General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander both he and Hillary had secretly approached to enter the fray. Later, Hillary told her dinner partner, Gristedes supermarket chain CEO John Catsimatidis, that “we might have another candidate or two jumping into the race.” Said Catsimatidis, “I didn’t get the impression she had pulled the trigger in her mind about whether or not to run.” He was “left with the impression that there’s always a possibility.”