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

by Daniel Halper

  Hillary also worked to cement her relationship with Obama, which, while never warm—the president was known to have warm relations with almost no one—was cordial, correct, and businesslike. Those were the qualities an aloof leader like Obama prized most highly.

  Hillary’s staff made it very apparent to the press where the two had disagreed. Clinton portrayed herself as more hawkish than her boss. First was in the summer of 2009 in Iran, where a presidential election was stolen by the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an avowed hater of America and our allies. The people took to the streets there to rise up and express their displeasure. The unrest was widespread and sincere. It was a real moment, the first in more than three decades, where it looked like the repressive regime might be able to be challenged.

  Hillary, her aides have maintained, wanted to get the United States involved in playing a role in shaping a post-Khomeini outcome. Even her aides, acting under the unsubstantiated belief that it was a social media revolution, driven by the collective power in social media platforms like Twitter, tried to harness that into something more substantive. It was in part a reaction to losing the election to Obama, who they believed had beaten them using the collective power of the Internet. But Obama viewed the Iranian uprising differently, as a purely internal matter. “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be,” Obama said. So nothing substantive happened and eventually the protests subsided under withering attacks and arrests by pro-regime forces—and that moment to help the Iranian people perhaps topple their repressive regime was lost forever.

  Similarly, in Syria, where an internal civil war turned into a regime crackdown on the uprising, Hillary wanted the United States to come to the aid of the Syrian rebels. She wanted America to do something. President Obama didn’t. These are the sorts of distinctions that are in no way lost on some of Hillary’s staunchest supporters. Likewise, the distinctions bred skepticism throughout the Obama years.

  Obama seemed to give her a pass when she quietly let out word of such disagreements. He still needed her, especially as he approached his 2012 reelection campaign. And he especially needed her renegade husband. Bill would be happy to help out, if there was something in it for him.

  With Obama’s poll numbers sagging by the middle of 2012, and the president seemingly unable to articulate a coherent rationale for his reelection, it increasingly fell to Bill Clinton, of all people, to serve as Obama’s champion. It was not a job the former president came to naturally, or easily.

  “They had moments where it was really ugly,” a senior Clinton and Obama aide says. “I was in the [2008] campaign and I think for whatever reason, the Obama people resented what he did more than what she did, because he said some things that really stick in their craw.”

  Obama looked at the former president with something just short of contempt. Both men found the other grossly overrated. But Obama, a political realist, also knew that Bill Clinton had his uses, which helps explain why top Obama officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, made sure to see that the former president’s views were solicited during the 2009 financial crisis.

  At one point, Geithner himself trudged up to Clinton’s office in Harlem to hear the thoughts of the Democratic Party’s political “genius.” He was disappointed.

  Throughout the conversation the notoriously unfocused Clinton placed a single-minded emphasis on one seemingly irrelevant idea: He urged Obama to create better financial incentives to commercial builders so they could make their buildings more energy efficient. It was a proposal he’d read about in a white paper published by a think tank. If banks could finance a thirty-year mortgage, Clinton argued at one point, why can’t the government find a way to finance a five-year payback on energy efficiency retrofits?

  “We kept wanting to talk about TARP, China, and the financial crisis,” says someone who was in the meeting that day. “He kept coming back to retrofitting skyscrapers. . . . He was weirdly focused on it.”

  Before long, Geithner had had enough of Bill’s “advice.” He was baffled by the performance, as he indicated to aides on his return, but others wondered whether Clinton was being dumb like a fox. Obama had defeated Clinton’s wife. His campaign had called the forty-second president a racist. Why should he give Obama any good ideas to get him out of a mess?

  As late as 2011, Clinton was chastising his wife’s boss. In a book about the economy called Back to Work, Clinton implicitly criticized Obama for class warfare rhetoric that drained support from voters in the top income bracket: “Many of them supported me when I raised their taxes in 1993, because I didn’t attack them for their success.” Clinton also blamed the dismal 2010 midterm elections on the failure of Obama and the Democrats to “counter the national Republican message with one of their own.”

  Then, by the middle of 2012, something clearly changed. Clinton began to campaign for Obama with such gusto and force that many believed his forceful and relentless advocacy helped propel the sitting president to victory. At the same time, Clinton made sure that everyone noticed that he was the popular one in the Democratic Party. He wanted to use the election to unite the party once again around him and his machine.

  Clinton’s golden opportunity to do just that was his 2012 speech at the Democratic National Convention—a tour de force that made Obama’s case for reelection better than Obama ever could, reminded voters that Clinton was the most clever and charismatic leader of the Democratic Party, and brought down the house.

  On the surface, the speech was just another long-winded tribute to Bill Clinton, written by Bill Clinton, and delivered as only Bill Clinton can. While mentioning Obama thirty-three times, Clinton said “I,” “me,” or “myself” more than one hundred times. He talked about (his) working across the aisle, with Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes—while mocking Republicans for bothering to tell voters their candidates “love their families and their children and were grateful they’d been born in America and all that.” He flaunted his mastery of data with more than forty-five statistics, ratios, and numbers. He implored viewers on no fewer than six occasions to listen closely to the vitally important points he was making, with lines like “listen carefully to this; this is really important.”

  What his listeners heard was a romp through almost every issue imaginable, from jobs to taxes, spending, the auto industry, gas standards, energy production, education, student loans, Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, the debt, national security, immigration, and voting rights. By the end of the speech, the audience had cheered after every applause line, laughed at every joke, and made clear that the bond between Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party was the longest, most loyal, and most intense of the Big Dog’s many, many love affairs.

  “The convention speech was enormously helpful in helping them solidify the economic narrative, something that Obama himself hadn’t really done effectively in four years,” says a former Obama aide. “It used to drive me crazy when I was in the administration because I felt like the economic message was very incoherent. Clinton really did a pretty good job creating the synthesis and the narrative around it that they had not done.”

  The former president framed the election as a choice between two narratives, and he did it in a matter of seconds. As Clinton saw it, Republicans were saying, “We left [Obama] a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.” The case for Obama was equally simple and “a lot better. Here it is: He inherited a deeply damaged economy. He put a floor under the crash. He began the long, hard road to recovery and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for innovators.”

  Clinton told the convention that “since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats, 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private sector jobs. So what’s the job score? Republicans, 24 million; Democrats, 42
[million].”

  Clinton also told his audience why Democrats—including, most especially, Clinton himself—were better at creating jobs than Republicans. “It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. (Cheers, applause.) Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. (Cheers, applause.) When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all. (Cheers, applause.) We know that investments in education and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all the rest of us. (Cheers, applause.)”14

  “Clinton got out there and created a new narrative on the economy, which took some of the needles out of Obama,” says Republican strategist Mike Murphy. “It was the biggest single number-moving event in the entire campaign. It was devastatingly important to the Obama guys. And he put him back in business.” (It also helped, Murphy adds, that “the Romney campaign was totally incompetent.”)

  In 2000, Clinton had famously faulted Al Gore for not letting Clinton rally the base in key swing states. It was not a mistake Barack Obama was going to repeat. In addition to his convention speech, Clinton stumped for Obama in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Unlike Gore and his campaign team, “the Obama people, despite whatever hard feelings they had, were pretty dispassionate and not afraid to let him come in and steal the show, if they thought it would be helpful,” says a former Clinton official who worked in the Obama administration. Clinton even starred in a widely seen advertisement for Obama, declaring that “President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up, investing in innovation, education, and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president.”15

  Clinton’s efforts did not escape the notice of Mitt Romney, who understood how effective the former president could be. “Campaigns can be grueling, exhausting,” Romney would joke at the lighthearted Al Smith Dinner in New York City, mere weeks before Election Day 2012. “President Obama and I are each very lucky to have one person who is always in our corner, someone who we can lean on, and someone who is a comforting presence. Without whom we wouldn’t be able to go another day. I have my beautiful wife, Ann. He has Bill Clinton.”16

  The roomful of Catholics laughed uproariously. Everyone knew it was true. Even President Obama, who was seated just a couple of seats from the grinning Romney. It would no doubt make him hate Romney more for saying it out loud.

  Many politicos and reporters watching the fast friendship between Bill and Barack found it curious. Most guessed that Clinton was just being the consummate Democrat, a team player who came onto the field when his party badly needed a home run hitter. That’s how many top Republicans saw it.

  “I see President Clinton as sort of the elder statesman of the Democratic Party,” says Paul Ryan, Romney’s 2012 running mate, in an interview with me. Clinton was, he says, “doing his duty.”

  “Clinton likes being on the stage,” says Karl Rove. “He has suffered every moment since he left the White House by not being in the center of the drama.”

  Others who knew the Clintons better wondered if something else was afoot. Bill Clinton, after all, was never known to be a selfless team player. Never. In other words, what was in it for him? That question, and its answer, would lead to increasing speculation, especially when the Clintons came to Obama’s defense during his biggest election-year crisis—the death of Americans by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, less than two months before a close presidential vote.

  President Obama’s otherwise benign neglect of his secretary of state and her State Department operations left many problems to fester, until they became PR problems. Then under Mills, they were covered up. Indeed, the same kind of accusations that had swirled around Mills at the White House surfaced again during Clinton’s tenure at State. An inspector general’s memo outlined eight State Department cover-ups, including an ambassador’s alleged solicitation of sex from prostitutes and minors. One of the eight cases involved the president’s nominee to be ambassador to Iraq, and it reported that Mills may have “attempted to block an investigation” into allegations he had improperly leaked sensitive foreign affairs intelligence to his girlfriend at the Wall Street Journal. But nobody seemed to have too much interest in that. Especially not the press. That was until a crisis occurred in a place no one had ever heard of. It was called Benghazi.

  Mills’s name returned to the headlines when Benghazi whistle-blower Gregory Hicks testified before the House Oversight Committee. At the Benghazi, Libya, post, Hicks was second in command to the murdered ambassador, Chris Stevens, and in the wake of the terrorist bombing, he defied State Department attempts to silence him. After Hicks ignored orders not to be interviewed by an investigating congressman, Jason Chaffetz, he received an angry and intimidating call. Hicks could not have been surprised that the call came from someone extremely close to Hillary Clinton—the woman the Washington Post once dubbed her guardian angel: Cheryl Mills. “Mills called from the United States and pulled Greg Hicks out of my briefing,” Chaffetz tells me. “[She] chewed him out for allowing this to happen without [a State Department minder] being there present. . . . She is the fixer.”

  The events of that day are by now familiar. On September 11, 2012, the American “consulate” in Benghazi was targeted by suspected al-Qaeda-linked terrorists who killed four Americans, including the ambassador to that country, Chris Stevens.

  The Benghazi terror attack took place less than two months before Obama would face the voters in his reelection bid—a bid, it must be said, in which the Obama campaign ran on the notion that al-Qaeda had been decimated. “Al-Qaeda is on the run,” Obama would say. The strongest point Obama would be able to rely on was that Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden, the longtime al-Qaeda leader, in Pakistan. And on his watch, under his direction. The weakest talking point—which might have made the American public question the official narrative being perpetuated by the campaign—was of course Benghazi. And so it was an inconvenient truth then to find out that al-Qaeda had been behind the terror attack. It was not spurred by some Internet video. It had been a well-planned, coordinated, powerful attack against Americans working in an official capacity abroad.

  The administration’s initial response to the attack was to connect the attack with a YouTube movie that mocked Muslims. According to the initial Obama administration version of the story, Muslims across the globe decided to riot against American embassies to protest the video. Muslims protested in Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere. But in Benghazi, things got a little out of hand. What had been a protest became a mob. The mob got out of control and overwhelmed security at the little compound in Benghazi. The entire scenario was spontaneous—no intelligence service could have anticipated and prevented the attack. And, in the end, and though it was regrettable, four Americans ended up dead.

  Hillary played along with this argument, at least at first. “This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country,” she said in a nationally televised memorial service at Andrews Air Force Base three days after the attack. “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless and it is totally unacceptable.”17

  The coffins wrapped in American flags holding the remains of the four Americans were the backdrop to the speech in the air force hangar. The bodies were escorted by uniformed soldiers from a large cargo airplane in the background, and brought directly into plain view—for all to see around the world.

  It had been the first time in two and a half decades that an ambassador had been murdered in the line of duty. The ambassador, Chris Stevens, by all accounts was particularly special. He was patriotic.
He knew the risks of his line of work, but cared so deeply for the future of America, and the future of America’s future allies (such as Libya), that he happily accepted the post.

  “People loved to work with Chris,” Clinton said. “And as he rose through the ranks, they loved to work for Chris. He was known not only for his courage but for his smile—goofy but contagious—for his sense of fun and that California cool.” Stevens was also gay, a rare distinguishing trait for an American ambassador abroad.

  “When you do these jobs,” Clinton said by way of explanation, “you have to understand at the very beginning that you can’t control everything.” There was only so much she could have done.

  Clinton’s allies and aides agreed. “I think the way she has dealt with this has been admirable,” the reliably loyal Paul Begala later said. “And Republicans are treading awfully close to the tin foil hat.” The State Department’s undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, blamed a lack of funding, claiming that “the best defense is the ability to construct new facilities.” P. J. Crowley, a former assistant secretary of state for public affairs under Hillary Clinton, said, “You’ve gotta look at this in the full picture. It’s a tragedy that happened on her watch, but I don’t think it will diminish what is a very significant record.” Clinton aide Philippe Reines was more concise, telling a reporter asking questions about Benghazi to “Fuck Off.”

  Sensing a rare opportunity to damage Clinton for 2016, Republicans pounced on her role in the attack. “There was a clear disconnect between what security officials on the ground felt they needed and what officials in Washington would approve,” said California congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. He added, “Reports that senior State Department officials told security personnel in Libya to not even make certain security requests are especially troubling.”18 Later, former vice president Dick Cheney summed up what will likely be a common attack on Clinton in any run for the White House: “She clearly wasn’t hands on . . . she’s doing everything she can to avoid responsibility for what clearly fell into her bailiwick.”