Bill Clinton
Page 15
So proceeded the turbulent launch of the most controversial ex-presidency in recent or maybe all of American history. The gravity of these early missteps was intensified by the financial pressure both Clintons were feeling, having left the White House with $11 million in legal bills. Hillary, as a senator, was proscribed from earning more than her Senate salary, owing to stricter new ethics guidelines, although she had made sure to sign a book deal before beginning her term, for a reported $8 million. (The Senate Ethics Committee gave its approval.) Bill stood to make plenty of money from speeches and a memoir of his own. But after the successive waves of scorching press coverage, many groups that had invited him to speak were canceling left and right. The Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock still needed to raise tens of millions of dollars to get off the ground—and donors to that enterprise were now getting calls from FBI investigators, asking why exactly they had donated and if they were seeking a favor in return. Clinton was damaged goods, more so than he had ever been as president, when he had a vast support network of staff and activists willing to go to the mat for him, and when he was, after all, the leader of the free world.
Now, without millions of Americans rising to his defense, and with the country having moved on, he sat at home in Chappaqua, alone more often than he preferred, figuring out this new TiVo device his friend Steven Spielberg had given him as a gift, catching up on the television shows of the 1990s that he’d been too busy to watch.
* * *
As noted in chapter 1, the assessments of Bill Clinton’s legacy as president by historians and political scientists have generally been kind—and increasingly so over the years. No doubt the prosperous Clinton economy has had a lot to do with that, especially given what has happened in the years since (wage stagnation, growing inequality, the 2008 financial crisis, and more). His conduct of foreign policy, too, came to look quite good in retrospect. Also embroidered within those assessments, perhaps, was a collective view that whatever his flaws, he faced an opposition more relentless than any president before him had been forced to do battle with, and that the impeachment was partisan and unjustified by the facts.
But Clinton’s legacy cannot be limited to those eight years, for two main reasons. First, he chose an unusually public path after leaving the White House, in the way he built and ran his foundation, and in earning such enormous sums of money from the speeches he delivered to various groups, businesses, and organizations. In contrast, his successor, George W. Bush, rarely gave speeches, never commented on public affairs, and sat at home painting his canvases. But Clinton decided to make himself a very public figure, which naturally invited more scrutiny from a press corps always on the lookout for a Clinton scandal story to write. And second, of course, his wife remained active in politics and was the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2016.
The William J. Clinton Foundation (later renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation) was originally perceived in modest terms. It was established in 1997 to raise funds for Clinton’s presidential library, but as Clinton settled into his new Harlem office, events began to suggest to him that the foundation could operate on a much grander scale. A horrible earthquake in the Gujarat province of India in late January 2001 afforded him his first post-presidential opportunity to do urgent humanitarian work. Residents and business people in Harlem, upon learning that he and his staff would be headquartered in their famous but impoverished neighborhood, flooded him with requests for philanthropic assistance. And, of course, he knew people. All over the world. Heads of state, potentates, and really, really, really rich people. And if he had one great, innate skill in life, going back to those high school days when he couldn’t get good citizenship marks because he wouldn’t stop talking, it was schmoozing people.
Thus did the foundation became an enormous, sprawling venture. In early 2002 Clinton decided, with the help of Ira Magaziner, who’d worked with the Clintons on health care reform, that the main focus would be fighting the spread of AIDS in Africa. This, too, grew from an early post-presidential experience, an April 2001 AIDS conference that Clinton attended in Abuja, Nigeria. There was no consensus in 2002 that the incidence of AIDS in the less-developed world even could be arrested; initially, most public health experts in the West whose cooperation Clinton sought turned him down cold, notes Conason. But Clinton didn’t accept this bleak reality and felt that it could be changed if pharmaceutical companies could be persuaded to provide anti-AIDS drugs at lower prices, and if Western governments would finance health care infrastructure in developing nations.
And so, with Magaziner attending to much of the detail, the foundation announced a deal in October 2003 under which generic drug manufacturers agreed to slash the price of antiretroviral medicine while also laying out plans for massive investments in health care facilities in developing nations. It was a groundbreaking agreement whose terms expanded over the years, and experts attest that it surely saved millions of lives. The foundation’s work would later extend into a broad range of areas: fighting childhood obesity in the United States, helping farmers in the developing world, launching initiatives designed to combat the effects of global warming, and more.
For a time, the foundation got positive press. A lot of it. The Clinton HIV-AIDS Initiative benefited Clinton greatly in reputational terms at first, helping him crawl out of the Marc Rich–Carnegie Tower ditch that he’d been in since early 2001. He took more hits from the right after September 11, when the right-wing media decided to blame him for the attacks on New York and Washington, partly because he hadn’t killed or captured bin Laden during his time in office, but mostly as a way to deflect any blame that might be placed on President Bush. But those attacks didn’t really take hold among the general populace. Through the mid-2000s, with Hillary serving diligently in the Senate, and Bill publishing his autobiography My Life, for which he was paid a reported $15 million—and with the first stories of his heart problems rendering him a more sympathetic figure (he would eventually require quadruple bypass surgery)—he was doing all right in terms of his public image.
But the worm began to turn in January 2008, when the New York Times published a long story suggesting that Clinton had pulled strings to help a wealthy foundation donor secure a mining deal in Kazakhstan. It was revealed over time that some of the story’s particulars were aggressively challenged by other journalists. But the damage was done. The foundation’s reputation began to corrode inside political circles; critics now cast what was once seen as a benign and noble philanthropic endeavor as an enterprise that existed chiefly for the purpose of allowing Bill Clinton to jet around the world in the private planes of multimillionaires. Around this same time, the former president was acquitting himself poorly in his wife’s first presidential run, when he launched attacks on Senator Barack Obama that seemed out of character for him—jumping on Obama’s lack of experience and at one point comparing his candidacy to Jesse Jackson’s, which some African American Democratic leaders said relegated Obama to being a protest candidate. Then, after Obama’s victory in the 2008 general election, Hillary became secretary of state, which meant that Bill was jetting around the globe raising money from foreign governments, sometimes from dictators, while she was trying to conduct diplomacy. By the time Hillary was gearing up for another presidential run, in 2014 and early 2015, the foundation was seen by most Washington insiders as a clear political liability.
In philanthropic journals, one could find many positive articles about the Clinton Foundation’s continuing good deeds. But who read those? In the mainstream press, the foundation was just another vehicle the Clintons had found for enriching themselves, and a huge looming conflict of interest for Hillary, should she win.
The “enriching themselves” story line had legs because of the paid speeches both Clintons gave for many years for anywhere from $100,000 to as much as $500,000 a speech. The Clintons’ overall net worth as of this writing is a matter of dispute but is generally pegged at something in the neig
hborhood of $60 million or more. Even some of their supporters questioned the zealousness of this pursuit. Certainly they were entitled to earn that $11 million to cover their legal fees, incurred through the ferocity of their political opponents. And certainly they were entitled to live on Easy Street, if that’s what they wanted. But did they really need $60 million? It reeked of cashing in on the presidency. Bill Clinton did enormous good through his foundation, but the good was tarnished by mistakes that he could so easily have avoided.
* * *
All of those errors were supposed to be wiped from the slate in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton finally completed her long march to the presidency. Her victory, which seemed assured up to the moment the polls closed on Election Day, was supposed to write the next chapter of Clintonism.
It didn’t happen. Her shocking loss to Donald J. Trump was a rebuke to her first and foremost. The rebuke had many causes. Some were her fault, others were not; and certainly some people were lying to pollsters about their true feelings about the candidates—either not being willing to admit to another human being that they planned on voting for Trump or not acknowledging that they were uncomfortable voting for a woman. But it was hard to avoid the verdict, on the morning after, that a lot of Americans simply didn’t trust or like her. A quarter century spent as a walking Rorschach test of America’s attitudes about feminism had taken its toll.
The campaign and its result also constituted a repudiation of Bill Clinton. In the years since the economic meltdown, sentiment within portions of the rank and file of the Democratic Party, pushed in the primaries by independent voters, moved to the left on various matters, most notably trade and other issues relating to the deindustrialization of many parts of America that Trump exploited. Hillary tried to head this off and took positions at odds with her husband’s stances in 1992 and 1996, on race and criminal justice, banking, regulation, and especially trade, in an effort to blunt the criticisms that came from the left in the form of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her opponent in the Democratic primaries, and his followers, and from the right in the form of the populist Donald Trump.
In fairness to Bill Clinton, he was elected by a very different America than the one that existed in 2016. On the issue of crime, for instance, as he took office in January 1993 he was looking at sky-high crime rates and a strongly held perception among white Americans that the Democratic Party was virtually on the side of the criminals. And Clinton had shown courage in these areas, for example in passing the assault weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act. But all this was of no interest to the younger racial-justice activists of 2016. The fact that more than two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus had supported the 1994 crime bill—as had then-congressman Bernie Sanders—did not impress them or give them pause. They became convinced that Bill Clinton had locked up a generation of innocent black men. And so in July 2015, as Hillary’s campaign was grappling with this reassessment of her husband’s legacy, Bill was forced to address his role in mass incarceration, saying, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse and I want to admit it.” Hillary Clinton endorsed a softening of the 1994 bill’s sentencing guidelines.
She tried, within her zone of comfort, to re-tailor Clintonism to these different times, but she failed. Results are results, and the very first verdicts after the election about how the defeat would affect Bill Clinton’s legacy were harsh. The first charge in this indictment of Bill Clinton invariably centered on free trade and the effects of globalization on the white working-class voters who flocked to Trump. NAFTA became the symbolic bogeyman here, and to a lesser extent the law Clinton signed in the final months of his presidency normalizing trade relations with China (to a lesser extent in terms of public debate, although most experts agree that over the years the China trade bill has had a more dramatic impact on American jobs than NAFTA). Hillary took a beating on the issue from both Sanders and Trump, such that she repudiated President Obama’s signature trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she had helped negotiate as secretary of state.
Trump and Sanders both railed against the global elites who’d thrown the American worker into these rough seas. The Clintons were members of this elite, no doubt, and to the extent that this elite collectively failed blue-collar workers in the developed world, they deserved to be held to account. At the same time, assigning blame to something as huge and amorphous as “the global elites” is demagogic. A more nuanced view would note that American workers’ incomes went up substantially during Bill Clinton’s presidency and that much of the manufacturing decline in the United States has simply been a consequence of automation. Beyond that, Bill Clinton was known to be telling Hillary and her advisers that she had to speak more directly to white working-class voters on the campaign trail, advice that wasn’t heeded to the extent it clearly should have been. The political result was a disaster for Democrats—not only did Trump win the presidency, but so many states that Bill Clinton had flipped to the Democratic column, states that had seemed secure for more than two decades, fell to the Republicans.
Thus did the Clinton era, and Clintonism more broadly, come to an abrupt and horrifying close. Agreeing that “the Clinton project in national governance has seemingly come to an end,” Ed Kilgore, a journalist for New York magazine who had worked in Democratic politics and had been a devout New Democrat in the 1990s, pinpointed the specific assumption at the center of Clintonism that events had rendered inoperative:
Central to the entire Clintonian New Democratic movement (of which I was a loyal foot soldier for a long time) was the belief that the best way to achieve progressive policy goals was by harnessing and redirecting the wealth that a less-regulated and more-innovative private sector alone could generate. That seemed to work during the late 1990s and sporadically even later. But the economic collapse at the end of the Bush administration and the struggle to head off growing inequality throughout the Obama administration has made the create-then-redistribute model for Democratic economic policy less and less satisfying, while creating a backlash among those who view any Democratic cheerleading for the private sector—especially the financial community—as a de facto act of betrayal signaling a high probability of personal corruption.
Of course, Clinton isn’t responsible for the economic decisions of his successor, decisions he regularly denounced. History always outraces politics, and events frequently change our perceptions of historical eras and presidential tenures. In time, when the Democrats have regained power, the sting of the incomprehensible 2016 defeat will soften, and the part where Bill Clinton rescued the Democratic Party from possible permanent minority status will get a new hearing. But Kilgore’s assessment captured a crisis of the Democratic Party that was every bit as real as the one that led to Bill Clinton’s rise to the presidency in 1992—a humbling irony of our time.
Notes
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1. A YOUNG FELLOW IN A HURRY
“Soon he caught me and knocked my legs out”: Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 22.
“I could take a hard hit”: Ibid.
Clinton consistently ranked as America’s most popular recent ex-president: See, for example, a June 2014 Gallup survey rating Clinton the most popular ex-president with a 64–33 favorable-to-unfavorable rating, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/171794/clinton-elder-bush-positively-rated-living-presidents.aspx.
he’d jumped up several notches: A February 2015 assessment by the American Political Science Association ranked Clinton the eighth best president. See, for example, “Bill Clinton Ranks High in New Historical Presidents Study,” National Constitution Center, February 17, 2015, http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2015/02/bill-clinton-ranks-high-in-new-historical-presidents-study/.
“everything in the house revolved around the go
lden son”: David Maraniss, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 41.
“I loved music and thought I could be very good”: Clinton, My Life, p. 63.
“I briefly flirted with the idea of dropping out of school”: Ibid., p. 104.
the delay was a function of ROTC rules: Ibid., p. 155.
surely the army would have valued him more for his brains than his brawn: It’s true that Yale graduate John Kerry saw frontline action, but he requested—nay, demanded—it.
“Then one day, when I was sitting in the back of Professor Emerson’s class”: Clinton, My Life, p. 181.
It’s a story that has been elaborately, and inaccurately, adorned over the years: The most comical high-drama version of all this was offered by Gail Sheehy in her book Hillary’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 110. In Sheehy’s telling, Clinton and her friend Sarah Ehrman, who drove down with her to Arkansas from Washington, arrived in Fayetteville to the horror of seeing a bunch of redneck college students emitting “the high-pitched sound of pigs in heat,” chanting “Woo pig suey!” in anticipation of that weekend’s Arkansas-Texas football game. Ehrman’s shock at this scene is used to drive home the point that Clinton had made a dubious choice. But the Arkansas-Texas game was played October 19 that year, which would have meant that Rodham and Ehrman spent three months driving from Washington to Fayetteville. And besides, the game was played in Texas that year.