Obama took this one. “You know, the—it didn’t take as long as I think people would perceive it. As I said, once the primary was over, Hillary worked very hard for me. Bill worked very hard for me. So we were interacting on a fairly regular basis. I think it was harder for the staffs, which is understandable,” said the president in an unusually soft tone.
But the really interesting question was the simple one asked of Hillary earlier. “What did he promise you? And has he kept the promises?” It was a question many had asked. And the two seemed to have trouble answering it, stumbling in the interview.
“It was going to be hard. But, you know—” Clinton started, before being gently cut off by the man by her side. “And I kept that promise,” Obama said.
“Welcome to hard times,” Clinton continued, leaning her right elbow on the arm of her wooden chair. “I mean, because the one thing he did mention was he basically said, ‘You know, we’ve got this major economic crisis that may push us into a depression. I’m not going to be able to do a lot to satisfy the built-up expectations for our role around the world. So you’re going to have to get out there and, you know, really represent us while I deal with, you know, the economic catastrophe I inherited.’ But, you know, we’re both gluttons for punishment. And, you know, my assessment was, ‘Look, we are in a terrible fix.’ And, you know, I felt like this president was going to get us out of it, but it wasn’t going to be easy. And it was going to need everybody, you know, pulling together.”
By sidling up to Hillary, Obama had dissed his own man, his own choice as running mate, on national television. “The president and his outgoing secretary of state were so laudatory of each other on the CBS news program that they were practically cuddling,” the Daily Beast would observe.3 And for all the world to see. A Gawker headline screamed, “BFFs Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Say Giddy Goodbye on 60 Minutes.”4
Whether intended or not, and it’s hard to believe the overly cautious Obama did many things without careful consideration, various media outlets thought the president was sending a fairly obvious signal. “Obama and Clinton chuckled as they described their partnership and stoked speculation that Obama may prefer Clinton to succeed him in the White House after the 2016 election,” noted the Associated Press, which also noted that the appearance “teetered on an endorsement of a 2016 presidential bid.”5 “Hillary Clinton 2016: Obama Basically Endorses Clinton for President on ‘60 Minutes’ ” was the headline on one blog.6 “Obama Delivered a Not Too Subtle Hillary 2016 Endorsement in 60 Minutes Interview,” wrote another.7 Few seemed to think much of what this meant for Joe Biden, though Politico was one exception. “Jiltin’ Joe?” it asked in a headline, noting that “it is also the first sit-down television interview that Obama has given with anyone other than first lady Michelle Obama.”8 As Gawker reported, “Clinton refused to speculate on a possible 2016 run—‘You guys in the press are incorrigible,’ Obama said when Kroft asked—but it was hard not to look at the appearance as a kind of pre-pre-pre-endorsement.” The Examiner website also chimed in: “After Obama made a statement of support for Hillary Clinton in her job as Secretary of State, the interview invited speculation that Obama might be favoring Hillary for President in 2016.”9
In other words, media outlets across the political spectrum were in effect asking variations of the same question: Considering their once-notorious rivalry, what gives?
In the more than two dozen years since Bill and Hillary Clinton came onto the national scene, conspiracy hung on their every action. As Mrs. Clinton left office, a new conspiracy made the list: that Barack and Hillary had made a secret deal—the Clintons’ support for his presidency in return for his support for theirs. Like so many activities surrounding the former first lady, it can be difficult to support the speculation from facts, myth from reality. What is clear is that President Obama, contrary to his public and occasionally private assertions, has clearly expressed a preference for Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States.
As for the conspiracies, some are more persuasive than others. Perhaps the least persuasive of the arguments is that a deal was struck in the aftermath of the 2008 campaign—that Hillary would support Obama if Obama would support her eight years down the road. For one thing, Obama was in a powerful position—at the height of his power, beloved by his base. He didn’t need to make such an overt arrangement—one that would be radioactive if the news ever leaked—with a family he did not trust.
Still, some observers wonder what motivated her to have a change of heart in 2009, when she already had drafted a press release dropping out of consideration for the position of secretary of state. “I spoke this morning with President-Elect Obama to convey my deepest appreciation for having been considered for a post in his administration,” the draft stated. “[I]n the end, this was a decision for me about where I can best serve President-Elect Obama, my constituents, and our country, and as I told President-Elect Obama, my place is in the Senate, which is where I believe I can make the biggest difference right now as we confront so many unprecedented challenges at home and around the world.”10 According to this version of events, in a midnight phone call, President-elect Obama had said something to change Mrs. Clinton’s mind. What else, one wonders, would explain Mrs. Clinton’s sudden, eleventh-hour reversal of her decision to serve? Obama had wooed his former rival for weeks, even flying her to Chicago for a full-court press. Nothing seemed to work. Did Obama offer to clear the field for her in 2016 if she decided to join the team?
“I’ve never heard, never seen anything in print that suggested there was any pledge of support if she were to run for president,” Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia professor who has been a well-connected observer of presidential politics for thirty years, says in an interview. Then he adds, “I’ve always wondered. It would be the only thing that you would think of politically that would matter to her. The arguments to me were always stronger for her to stay in the Senate. She had her own independent base from a major state right in the heart of media-dom. She could have run a parallel administration, and gotten in a position to run either in 2012 or, if she’d prefer, 2016 on her own terms. And instead, she basically gave up her independence and signed on to his record, whatever it might turn out to be. And she had said, I think she believed it, in 2008 in the primary campaign, that [Obama] would not be a successful president for the reasons she outlined.”
In fact, there were many reasons for Senator Clinton to take the State Department job, without an explicit “deal” with Barack Obama. By many accounts, Hillary was done with the U.S. Senate by 2008. She sure as hell didn’t want to go back to a Democratic caucus that embarrassed and betrayed her, to be one of the crowd rubber-stamping Obama initiatives lest she look like a bad sport.
The State Department job offered Hillary credentials she lacked for another presidential run—foreign policy gravitas, the chance to be photographed with important foreign leaders, an opportunity to look above partisan politics. The job also offered Hillary the possibility of being a constant thorn in Obama’s side.
For a moment, she dwelled on the chance of primary-ing Obama in 2012. Even to Bill Clinton, that notion seemed insane. “Bill’s the one that told her you got to be crazy, you’re not going to run against him,” an observer says. He urged her to take the job as the best possible option. “Everyone’s going to look to [Obama],” he said. “You’ll be nothing.”
“Look, serving as secretary of state is a much more important job than simply being one of a hundred in the Senate,” Karl Rove said in an interview for this book. “And look, it’s hard to go back to the Senate after you’ve run for president, I mean if you’ve, you know, it’s hard for anybody to go back to doing what they were doing before when they thought they had a chance at moving up in the scheme of things.”
“She enhanced her political position significantly,” John McCain tells me. “I think it catapulted her from probably the favorite for 2016 to an overwhelming favorite for
2016.”
Of additional note, the negotiations that led to Clinton’s acceptance of the job were, according to sources, “adversarial” rather than cordial. They were negotiated on the Obama side by John Podesta, the former Clinton aide. The Obama team demanded what one participant described as “chickenshit small-ball” concessions, such as releasing the list of donors to the Clinton Foundation. Team Obama’s demands were all but laughable to the far more calculating Clintons. In exchange, Mrs. Clinton got exactly what she wanted.
Through an agreement with President Obama himself, Hillary secured weekly meetings with the big man, giving her direct access to the most powerful person in the world. She also, importantly, had the newly elected president agree to allow her to pick her own staff, a truly unprecedented distinction that Hillary and her staff would insist on in those formative first months. The deal would take the form of a “Memorandum of Understanding,” dated December 12, 2008, signed December 16, and released to the public two days later. The agreement, signed by Bruce Lindsey, representing the Clinton Foundation, and Valerie Jarrett, for Team Obama, committed to “ensur[ing] that the Foundation may continue its important philanthropic activities around the world” but sought “to ensure that the activities of the Foundation, however beneficial, do not create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State.” Hence “a set of protocols”—“mutually agreeable protocols related to the activities of the Foundation during the period in which Senator Hillary Clinton serves in the Obama Administration”—were adopted by all parties. Team Clinton agreed to “publish its contributors,” to ensure that “President Clinton personally will not solicit funds” or seek contributions.11 It was all meant to keep Clinton, Inc. at bay while Hillary served President Obama. In other words, the Clinton enterprise would not trump the Obama administration, as long as Clinton was confirmed by the Senate and served as secretary of state. Those were terms that both ClintonWorld and Team Obama were happy to accept.
The notion of a 2008 Obama-Clinton deal is further undercut by the fact that Bill Clinton kept attacking Obama, in the press and in private, all the way up to his 2012 reelection. After all, as late as 2011, for example, Bill Clinton was reportedly telling friends, “Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works.”12 In the middle of 2012, Clinton further raised eyebrows by praising Mitt Romney. “I think he had a good business career,” Clinton said on Piers Morgan’s CNN program, when the Obama campaign was ratcheting up attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital. “There’s no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”13
A far more popular, and persuasive, version of a potential Clinton-Obama “deal” centers on 2012—when Obama, struggling in the polls against Romney, really needed the Clintons’ help.
Author Ed Klein cites a meeting in 2012 in Chappaqua, where he quotes Bill Clinton as saying, “I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” Klein’s sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!” Recognizing they have a problem with a furious Bill Clinton, Klein contends that “chief political strategist David Axelrod convinced the president that he needed Bill Clinton’s mojo. A deal was struck: Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the convention, and a full-throated endorsement of Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor.”
Over breakfast at a hotel outside Washington, D.C., one former aide to Joe Biden insists to me, “Bill brokered that deal that led to the 60 Minutes interview.” According to this Democratic strategist, Obama needed to make a deal to cover for his dereliction of duty on the night of 9/11/12, when four Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi. Bill is always looking to make a deal to further the couple’s interests, and to help keep things in order for the 2016 campaign. So the deal was struck: Bill would campaign for Obama, and Obama would help the Clintons out sometime later.
“It was the biggest payoff in political history at the presidential level,” the advisor says. “It was run nakedly in front of the entire country.” Turkey bacon in hand, the former aide adds, “And now the person with the Machiavellian influence in the White House is Bill Clinton.”
Bolstering the case was the unusual, even bizarre turn taken by Clinton’s husband, who all but single-handedly dragged reluctant Democrats and independents back on the Obama bandwagon in 2012.
“ ‘As you can see, I have given my voice in the service of my president,’ Mr. Clinton said, wheezing while introducing President Obama at a late-night set at a Bristow, Virginia, amphitheater on Saturday. He kept coughing, patting his chest and mouthing words that carried only muffled strains in chilly air. Black tea with honey and a steady diet of cough drops between events helped little,” the New York Times would report days before the election.14
“They and Michelle had dinner and his numbers were tumbling. Bill Clinton saved his ass,” the Democratic strategist declares.
At the time, many Republicans too seemed to think something sinister was afoot. “I am told that there are some that think this may have a lot to do with 2016 and the president’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” McCain said about Bill Clinton’s sudden change of heart.15 “I suspect that Bill Clinton is collecting IOUs in case Hillary Clinton wants to run in 2016,” said Newt Gingrich.16
A former Clinton associate who knows the former president well but did not work for him in 2012 can envision such a scenario involving his former boss. “If there was a deal cut, it wouldn’t surprise me,” the source tells me, “but Obama himself doesn’t do that.”
Obama is not a wheeler-dealer like many of his predecessors, the source said, and certainly not like Bill Clinton. At events at the Clinton White House, the president so much enjoyed socializing, kibitzing, and plotting that he had to be dragged upstairs so that his guests could go home. Obama, by contrast, is known to spend as little time as possible until he can head upstairs to the residence. “He indulges people,” says one Democrat, “whereas Clinton likes that kind of stuff.” More likely, he suggests, is that a deal of sorts was brokered on his behalf, probably by a man close to both teams.
In some ways, the actual circumstances of the Obama-Hillary arrangement are incidental. What cannot be disputed is that an alliance of some sort is clearly in place, one that began in 2012 and has been augmented with each passing year. There is no other explanation for the litany of senior Obama aides who have signed on, implicitly or explicitly, with Hillary 2016. In the cultlike atmosphere of Obamaland, none of this would happen over the opposition of the boss.
Hillary Clinton likely knew that he would come to see her as the most logical, if improbable, choice. After all, she spent four years in his administration dutifully working him. She didn’t come on too strong. When she was sidelined, she didn’t fight back; she kept her head down. Did her job. Took every chance to chat him up. Was nice to Michelle and the kids. And finally managed to get Bill in line. She lobbied Obama by not lobbying him. And it paid off.
Traditionally, Joe Biden’s position as vice president might pose problems for Hillary. After all, vice presidents, even lackluster ones, tend to win the nominations of their parties—notably Richard Nixon, who served Eisenhower in 1960; LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, in 1968; George H. W. Bush in 1988; Al Gore in 2000. With Biden, however, there is a problem. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Obama increasingly has come to dislike him. (Perhaps the better word for someone like Obama is that he “disdains” him.)
Though many press accounts describe a warm relationship between Obama and his vice president, the truth is that the two men have extremely different personalities. Biden is publicly at least a backslapp
ing, engaging, blue-collar guy with decades of government experience. Obama, by contrast, is not a creature of Washington. Nor is he anyone’s idea of the old-time pol.
Their relationship always has been a little rocky. Biden had always been respectful of Obama in public. Always. Except for that time Biden was caught trying a little too hard. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden told the New York Observer at the outset of the 2008 campaign, when he too was running for the top spot. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”17 When Biden called former black presidential candidate Al Sharpton to apologize, Sharpton told him, “I take a bath every day.”18
Smelling blood in the water, Obama released a statement critical of Biden, saying, “I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”19
Biden made up for that verbal gaffe—an exercise he had lots of experience with over the years—the next day in a conference call by heaping mountains of praise upon the then–junior senator from Illinois, while leaving out any more inelegant exultations about Obama’s cleanliness. “Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” Biden clumsily told reporters on a conference call. “And he’s fresh. He’s new. He’s smart. He’s insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean.’ ”20
Though relations warmed enough that Obama selected Biden as his running mate in 2008, the discomfort between the two has remained a constant. “In private, Biden mocks the president’s people skills and chilliness, and even his ability to curse properly,” Time magazine noted. “And he still sees himself as the Washington wise man showing his young ingenue how politics works. When they served together in the Senate, Obama saw Biden as a gasbag, a classic example of the dangers of Senatoritis. During the 2008 campaign, he was infuriated by Biden’s lack of discipline, a mortal sin in Obamaworld. And he’s still a bit bewildered by Biden’s goofy side; like everyone else in Washington, he sometimes rolls his eyes at Joe-being-Joe stories.”21
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 24
