Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine

by Daniel Halper

  Since Shuster, though a liberal, had once been on the wrong team from the Clintons’ perspective—he had worked at Fox, reported there on the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, and had at the time maintained deep contacts in Ken Starr’s office—the Clintons, Shuster believed, took a special joy in trying to destroy him. Their decision to turn against him was a little like Paddy O’Neill’s decision in Patriot Games to turn against a female fellow member of the Irish Republican Army. “Paddy O’Neill can sleep at night,” says Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan. “In fact he probably enjoys the irony. She’s not Irish; she’s English.”

  By that Friday afternoon, Steve Capus, Phil Griffin, and Jeremy Gaines told Shuster he’d have to accept a two-week suspension. “We need this debate,” said Capus, who was then president of NBC News. “You’re going to be the one who is going to have to jump on the grenade,” added Gaines.

  “If NBC buckles on this,” asked Shuster, once he realized the time had passed for defending himself on the merits, “what kind of message does that send?”

  The response was dismissive: “That’s not your job to worry about.” They weren’t there for a debate. The decision to make Shuster a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Clinton, Inc. had been made before Shuster walked into the room. The best they could do for their reporter was to promise to pay him during the suspension—so long as he kept it a secret.

  Shuster’s colleagues tried to comfort him. Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, and even Clinton confidant Lanny Davis came to his defense—in private. (Davis would call several times to ensure that, regardless of what happened with the Clintons, he’d still have a relationship with Shuster.) And Tim Russert, the most respected reporter in the NBC News empire, candidly told Shuster. “I know what’s going on.” Russert had been through the same sort of games before he grew too powerful for politicos to play games with, and he assured Shuster, “Someday we’re going to have a beer and laugh about this.” (Russert would suddenly pass away before the two ever had a chance to laugh about it over beers.)

  The Clintons, however, weren’t finished. As Chuck Todd had warned, sure enough the exchange of emails between the Clinton campaign and Shuster was leaked by the Clinton campaign to Politico, and organizations like Media Matters, run by Clinton ally David Brock, whipped up liberal fear. The story took a long time to die, because the Clintons didn’t want it to die.

  After two weeks, David Shuster returned to the airwaves, but he felt he never fully recovered from the harm to his standing at the network. Shuster believed he had once been “seen as some sort of straight-shooter, take-no-prisoners” political commentator, but that was before the fights with management and the bad-mouthing by someone of Hillary Clinton’s prestige. After the “pimped out” affair, Shuster believed his bosses thought he “was some kind of a hothead.”

  Whether Shuster could have handled the situation better is debatable. Should he have apologized more enthusiastically on Morning Joe? Probably. Should he have tried harder to more quickly apologize directly to Hillary and Chelsea? Maybe. There was, after all, nothing stopping him from offering his regrets to them over the air. It’s unclear, however, whether anything Shuster could have done would have made a difference, because with the Clintons, one couldn’t be sure whether their outrage was sincere or feigned for political purposes. What is clear is that the Clintons saw a political opportunity and seized it with the desperate tenacity they’d shown countless times when their backs were against the wall. Consider what their character assassination of David Shuster accomplished. In a matter of days, they silenced any criticism of Chelsea’s refusal to answer questions about her role in lobbying superdelegates. More important, they appealed to female voters by making Hillary and Chelsea look like persecuted victims of men. Finally, they sent a message to the media: You may like Obama more than Hillary, but you’d better watch what you say, because we have the power the destroy you.

  To deliver their message, a popular ex-president, the nation’s most famous senator, and their powerful friends bullied a relatively obscure reporter with powerless friends and spineless bosses. While they were at it, the press and public were misled about his attempts to apologize. And Chelsea was used not just to lobby superdelegates, but also to portray themselves as victims of a malicious media and score political points with the public.

  Of course, the biggest way to hit Shuster and MSNBC would have been to actually boycott the MSNBC debate. That would have been, in Godfather terms, the equivalent of “going to the mattresses.” But punishing Shuster wasn’t really the Clintons’ goal. He was just the collateral damage of their opportunism, and because Hillary needed the debates more than her front-running opponent did—and was better at them than he was—a boycott of the debate would have hurt Hillary more than it would help, just as Shuster had told his bosses. As someone who worked at MSNBC at the time says, “Their strategy was so transparent and weak that I think calling it a mafia tactic does a disservice to mafia families.”

  After Shuster’s gaffe, his subsequent apology, and the announcement of his suspension, Hillary Clinton went through eleven state elections and almost a month before she won another state primary. If her attempt had been to win votes at David Shuster’s expense, she had failed.

  As the 2006 midterm election neared, Josh Green, an enterprising reporter who was then with the Atlantic magazine, began to consider 2008. Green pitched his editors a story on the Clintons, and when given approval, he turned to Clinton’s Senate office with the pitch: He was going to study her entire Senate career up to that point (nearly one full term served) and dive in deeper and more comprehensively than any reporter had done until that point.

  The piece was going to be written regardless, and the Clinton team figured that if they cooperated with the story, they would be able to shape it. Besides, politically, Green fits the mold of a liberal journalist, dating back to his time as an editor at left-of-center publication Washington Monthly and as a staff writer at the devoutly liberal American Prospect, where he wrote about “frustrating Republican talking points” and the “nauseating roller coaster ride” of the Bush presidency. It helped, too, that he approached Senator Clinton’s office from the Atlantic, which might not have been as overtly liberal as the other places Green worked but would on its face suggest friendly coverage.

  So Hillary’s Senate staff let Green in. For the most part, they weren’t wrong: It was overall a flattering piece that detailed how Hillary had won over skeptical Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate and became, against all odds going into the job, pretty well liked among her colleagues.

  Clinton, Green uncovered, enthusiastically attended the Senate prayer group, which was dominated by Republican senators who had pretty much all over the years spoken out staunchly against her husband when he was president. Some had even a history of speaking out against Hillary. The piece was filled with great tidbits like that, giving a full picture of how Clinton had been spending her time in the Senate.12

  But not all of it was completely flattering. “Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say,” Green concluded.

  It was this conclusion that infuriated the Clinton camp, and in a retaliatory mode, they’d move to kill his next Clinton story.

  “Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland,” the Virginia-based trade publication Politico would report a few months later. “So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists an
d offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

  “Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said,” reported Ben Smith of Politico.13

  That killed GQ story was written by Josh Green, the same reporter who had cast doubt on Hillary’s tenure in the Senate. It is how the Clintons operate with the media, controlling the narrative and dictating the story.

  Some Clinton apparatchiks did come to the senator’s defense and advocated her candidacy—the always reliable James Carville and the supposedly unaligned website Media Matters for America, among the most prominent.

  One of Carville’s broadsides—“If she gave [Obama] one of her cojones, they’d both have two”—led Obama to rebut the former Clinton spokesman turned CNN commentator directly. “Well, you know, James Carville is well known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about,” Obama replied. “I intend to stay focused on fighting for the American people because what they don’t need is 20 more years of performance art on television.”

  By law, Media Matters for America is a tax-exempt organization that cannot back political candidates. Nonetheless, the David Brock–run operation became an all-but-official supporter of the Clinton campaign, there to “expose” Obama supporters in the press and defend her against controversies of all kinds.

  In December 2007, for example, Media Matters went after MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, as they would throughout the election season, for his apparent preference for Obama over Clinton. So determined was the organization that it examined “every evaluative remark Matthews made on MSNBC’s Hardball during the months of September, October, and November” and concluded that Matthews was “extremely hostile toward Hillary Clinton.” On January 4, 2008, the organization defended Clinton against a panelist’s assertion on Fox News that her “nagging voice” was turning off men. Again, on March 11, 2008, it defended her against accusations that she had implied Obama was a Muslim. (She had denied he was a Muslim during a television interview while slyly adding, “as far as I know.”) “When people suggest that the press employs a separate standard for covering Clinton, this is the kind of episode they’re talking about,” the website complained. “There simply is no other candidate, from either party, who has had their comments, their fragments, dissected so dishonestly the way Clinton’s have been.”

  The conservative-leaning website the Daily Caller would later report that “[f]ormer employees of the liberal messaging organization have told [the Daily Caller] that Brock, a well-known supporter of the former first lady, was often in communication with her presidential campaign during 2008 and was in regular email contact with longtime Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal as recently as 2010. . . . Indeed, from the time that Obama announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, until Edwards dropped out on January 30, 2008, Media Matters ran 1199 posts for Clinton and only 700 for Obama. 378 posts mentioned Edwards.”

  These were the exceptions, however. Much of the media, enamored with Obama’s candidacy and (momentarily) relieved at the prospect of paying back the Clintons for a decade of bullying and rough treatment by their media team, seemed only delighted to pile on. The defections of the media and Senate Democrats hurt the Clintons. But Hillary also had another surprising weakness or, more accurately, the same old vulnerability that had dogged her for more than a decade: a renegade husband.

  6

  Out of Control

  “If she becomes president, Clinton’s fucked. He’s gonna be the guy that got a blow job and was impeached.”

  —senior aide on Bill Clinton’s 2008 “sabotage”

  While Hillary struggled against a surprisingly resilient foe, Bill Clinton was making more disastrous headlines. For one, his complex and largely mysterious financial relationship with Ron Burkle came to a bitter and well-publicized end—news that broke right in the middle of Hillary’s primary fight. The former president was said to be demanding a $20 million payout from Burkle in exchange for ending the relationship. Meanwhile, his ties with Burkle were raising questions about conflicts of interest between the Clintons and scores of foreign entities with which Burkle’s fund did business, such as the government of Dubai.1

  Hillary was having money troubles of her own. She had raised over $100 million for the 2008 race and had spent it all by January, due to a top-heavy campaign organization and an unexpectedly tough Obama challenge.2 By February, she was in the embarrassing position of having to loan her campaign $5 million while Obama continued to rake in record sums from donors.3 Fortunately, her husband had improved their financial standing in the time between leaving the White House and Hillary running for president—for once, she was able to pull from her own coffers.

  Clinton’s narrow, death-defying New Hampshire victory meant a long primary fight against Obama—one that Hillary was certain she had the team and experience to win. Only days later, however, her hopes crashed again. In the most unlikely of places. Wrecked by the most unlikely of people. The smooth-talking Bubba who had improbably been labeled America’s “first black president,” William Jefferson Clinton, suddenly seemed to make it his mission to alienate black voters. In South Carolina, of all places, a state in which as much as half the Democratic electorate was African American.

  As the Los Angeles Times among others reported at the time, the former president had overruled Hillary’s campaign advisors such as Mark Penn, who believed that Obama was almost certain to win South Carolina and who wanted to cede the state to him.4 The New York Times, for one, paraphrased Clinton advisors as saying that Senator Clinton was “pursuing a national campaign strategy that includes South Carolina but that does not elevate the state to the level of critical importance that it usually has in the presidential nominating contest. This reflects the Clinton team’s view that it does not expect to beat Mr. Obama in South Carolina, where he enjoys strong support from black voters, and that it wants to lower expectations there.”5 Never lacking confidence in his own campaign skills, Clinton decided to head there himself, launching what one pundit would describe as “a not-very-charming charm offensive” and what the pundit would describe, quoting an unnamed campaign aide, as “a quixotic ‘one-man mission’ in territory that had already turned fallow.”6 And he didn’t care much if Hillary’s campaign aides liked it.

  Indeed, Bill Clinton, according to aides, thought his wife’s campaign was hopelessly disorganized, run by unworthy cronies who lacked any street smarts. This wasn’t an unorthodox view. Hillary 2008 was, as the Washington Post put it, “a campaign that is universally acknowledged to have been a management catastrophe.”7 Which is why he didn’t listen to their suggestions. At all. The hostility between the Bill and Hillary camps during the campaign was legendary.

  A later autopsy of the 2008 campaign in Vanity Fair discussed the outright war between teams Hillary and Bill—as two rival business partners disagreed on the best way to move their enterprise forward. One Hillary fund-raiser told the magazine that “Bill Clinton was out of control . . . even the night she won in New Hampshire. Even Hillary couldn’t control him.”8 Sidestepping his wife, Bill began to offer his advice directly to figures like Penn and Wolfson. He offered to create his own operation within the Hillary campaign headquarters, until members of the campaign talked him out of it.

  The Vanity Fair piece so infuriated the Clintons that they mounted an effort to identify its sources. One of the “main sources,” according to an insider, was an obscure Clintonista, who, by the way, now works for a Clinton rival.

  As he headed south, the former president did, however, agree to one request from his wife’s campaign team: not to bring along his latest mistress. According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s juicy campaign book, Game Change, rumors of the former president’s affairs involved no fewer than three women—Belinda Stronach, Julie Tauber McMahon, and Gina Gers
hon.

  That the former president was involved romantically with women outside of his marriage while campaigning for his wife’s election to the White House was hardly shocking. Nor, to be fair, was it unique to Mr. Clinton in that election cycle. At least Bill and Hillary maintained a cordial relationship; the same could not be said for the leading candidate on the other side of the aisle, John McCain, and his wife, Cindy, who fought unproven infidelity rumors on both sides of their marital equation. Similarly, unproven infidelity rumors long plagued New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, the former UN ambassador and cabinet secretary, who was waging a long-shot campaign against Hillary in 2008. And then there was of course John Edwards, whose affair with a B-list documentary producer while his wife, Elizabeth, was dying of breast cancer made headlines for months.

  That Bill Clinton was willing to refrain from flaunting his extracurricular activities in front of reporters during his South Carolina trip was seen by Mrs. Clinton’s aides as a (rare) act of discretion. “There were a lot of advisors who told him that was a bad idea,” a former Clinton aide tells me, laughing. Unfortunately for Mrs. Clinton, that act of discretion was his only one.

  The spiral started when a furious Bill Clinton—whose contempt for Barack Obama was already infamous—seemed to castigate his candidacy as mythic. In the midst of a harangue about Obama’s reputation for having good judgment and his positions on the Iraq War, Clinton groused, “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” It seemed pretty clear to many reporters that Clinton was referring not just to Obama’s Iraq vote, but to his entire candidacy.

  In truth, Clinton aides couldn’t believe the good fortune that seemed to follow this Obama guy from the outset. In his first Senate race, he lucked out as his most formidable rival, Jack Ryan, a handsome multimillionaire and Harvard grad who’d given up a high-paying job at Goldman Sachs to teach at a parochial school outside Chicago, imploded after his former wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs, including “a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.”9 The Ryan disaster—involving charges of a kind Bill Clinton would have likely survived—led state Republicans to make the disastrous choice of replacing him with African American iconoclast Alan Keyes, perhaps best known for staging a hunger strike when he was barred from a debate during the 2000 presidential elections. Keyes, who was not even from Illinois, was a gaffe-prone disaster from start to finish, managing only 27 percent of the vote.10