Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (10 page)
Read Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas Online
Authors: Edward Klein
“Michelle and Valerie are preparing her legacy as well as Barack’s,” Jarrett’s friend said. “Child health, care of veterans, and the environment are just a start. They would like to have friendly Congress members put her name on bills that would give her a record of legislative achievement to run on. They are pushing for even larger staffs. Barack lets them do whatever they want. He is completely supportive of Michelle’s ambitions. He definitely wants a dynasty. Everybody around them understands that. That’s the goal. They intend to have power for years to come.”
With her eye on the Senate prize in Illinois, Michelle had retained her Chicago residence and had made increasingly frequent trips back to her home state, where Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, was encouraging her to throw her hat into the ring.
Since his departure as White House chief of staff, Emanuel had repaired his relationship with Michelle. He was a member
in good standing of President Obama’s kitchen cabinet. “Barack can now call on Rahm’s political advice and assistance without pissing off Michelle and Valerie,” said someone who had worked closely with Emanuel.
Michelle was far from making a final decision about running for the Senate, according to Valerie Jarrett. Indeed, there was a good chance that Michelle would get cold feet and dismiss the whole idea as a momentary whim. But Jarrett had promised Michelle that, if the first lady gave her the green light, she would quit the White House and run Michelle’s campaign.
“Politicians don’t need the spoken word or a written contract to come to an agreement,” Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and one of the smartest political operatives in the business, told the author of this book. “Politicians intuit things. I don’t hear Bill saying to Barack while they’re playing golf, ‘I’ll do this for you if you are for Hillary in 2016.’ I’d stake every dime I own on that. And certainly, such an explicit agreement is not in Barack’s nature.”
Ed Rendell was right. Neither Clinton nor Obama used the word “deal” or suggested anything resembling a quid pro quo during their four hours on the golf course. However, that didn’t stop Clinton, who was a master at hard and shrewd bargaining, from raising issues he had come prepared to discuss with Obama.
For starters, he wanted Obama to ask his donors and fund-raisers to help Hillary retire the more than $250,000 in debt that was left over from her 2008 campaign for the White House.
David Plouffe had told Obama that Bill Clinton would likely bring up this issue during the golf game. Obama thought the idea was outrageous; he considered it almost a shakedown. But Plouffe convinced him it was the price he’d have to pay for Clinton’s cooperation.
So Obama nodded yes, and the debt was eventually retired.
Then Clinton told Obama that Hillary might accept the vice presidential nomination if Obama decided to dump Joe Biden as his running mate in 2012. Clinton said that by putting Hillary on the ticket, Obama would improve his odds of reelection exponentially.
Both men knew that Clinton wasn’t looking out for Obama; he was teeing up the 2016 nomination for Hillary.
“Bill figured that if Hillary ran with Obama as his vice president, that would automatically put her ahead of the Democratic pack in 2016,” one of Hillary’s confidants said in an interview for this book. “The way Bill saw it, the Clintons wouldn’t have to fight so hard for the presidential nomination. They’d save themselves a great amount of time, money, and organizational effort, and they’d avoid a bruising campaign.
“However, Hillary had been Bill’s co-president for eight years, and she balked at the idea of being someone else’s lapdog,” this source continued. “Still, Bill hadn’t given up hope that he could convince her to take the number-two spot. If Obama personally asked her to be his running mate, Hillary would find it hard to say no.”
The Hillary-Biden switcheroo wasn’t a new idea. As early as the fall of 2010, Bob Woodward had noted during an appearance on CNN that the Obamans were talking about replacing Biden
with Hillary and offering Biden her job at Foggy Bottom as a consolation prize.
Then, in August 2012—just a month before the Obama-Clinton golf game—I reported on Fox Business Channel’s
Lou Dobbs Tonight
that Valerie Jarrett had invited Hillary for lunch in her West Wing office, which had once belonged to Hillary. Over salads, Valerie asked Hillary if she was interested in the VP slot.
“You have a sea of supporters who’ll come out and vote for you,” Valerie said. “You’d be a great asset to the ticket.”
According to my source, Hillary told Jarrett: “Thanks, but no thanks. Been there, done that. It’s not something I’m interested in.”
More than a year after I broke the story of the secret Hillary-Jarrett meeting, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann revealed in their book
Double Down
that “the top echelon of Obamaworld had in fact been discussing the wisdom of replacing Biden with Hillary; that, more than discussing it, they had been exploring it, furtively and obliquely, in the campaign’s polling and focus groups; and that [Chief of Staff Bill] Daley himself had been the most vocal exponent of looking into the merits of the idea.”
When Clinton raised the notion with Obama during their golf game, he was unaware that Bill Daley had been testing the idea with focus groups. He did, of course, know about Hillary’s conversation with Valerie Jarrett, and he naturally assumed that Jarrett wouldn’t have broached the subject of the vice presidency with Hillary unless she had first cleared it with the president and probably with First Lady Michelle Obama as well. As far as Clinton was concerned, the
idea was on the table, and he assumed that one of the reasons Obama invited him to play golf was so they could have a serious discussion about putting Hillary on the ticket.
Instead, when Bill mentioned Hillary’s name, Obama avoided looking him in the eye. Obama pretended that he didn’t know anything about the dump-Biden sentiment inside his campaign or about Jarrett’s conversation with Hillary. He told Clinton, “I like Old Joe.” And he added, “Joe’s got my back.” Then he let the subject drop.
Hillary as his vice presidential running mate was a nonstarter.
Next, Clinton brought up the subject of Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom Obama had appointed chairman of the Democratic National Committee: Did Obama think she was doing a good job? Clinton expressed his deep reservations.
Obama apparently had his reservations too. He had authorized David Axelrod and Jim Messina to offer the job to Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, because they thought Villaraigosa could expand the party’s support among Hispanics.
“I got a call asking me whether I wanted to become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from Messina and Axelrod,” Villaraigosa told the author of this book. “However, in order to do that, I would have had to leave my job in Los Angeles. They wanted me to be in Washington, D.C. It’s always an honor to serve the president. But I wasn’t going to leave this job for the DNC.”
Clinton and the Los Angeles mayor were close, and he was aware of the failed offer to Villaraigosa. He saw that as an opening to discuss the DNC job. If Obama would consider replacing
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Clinton said, he’d like to suggest some names to succeed her. In other words, he wanted Obama to hand over control of the party to him.
Once again, Obama listened and smiled, but didn’t say much. He wasn’t about to turn over the party to one of Bill Clinton’s people.
When at last it appeared that Clinton had exhausted the things on his mind, Obama turned to him and uttered the words that David Plouffe had helped him rehearse:
“I’d like you to campaign for me in 2012,” Obama told Clinton.
A
s far as Bill Clinton was concerned, that was the clincher.
When he arrived back home at Whitehaven later that afternoon, he was beaming. He gave Hillary a complete rundown on what transpired during the golf game. To him, it was as solid a deal as he had ever made with another politician.
According to Hillary’s account, which she passed on to a friend, Bill said, “We shook hands, and I told Obama, ‘I’ll get you reelected.’ I’m going to give him what he needs, and he’s going to owe us big time.”
Hillary was more than pleased. They popped open a bottle of expensive Cristal champagne and drank a toast, which was a rare event for them.
Still, Hillary expressed some reservations. She had come to know Barack, and she had seen him renege on major deals, offering
assignments and promotions in the cabinet and then yanking the rug from under the person. Obama had promised to keep her in the loop on all foreign policy decisions, only to make his own decisions without telling her until it was too late.
“Do you trust him on this?” Hillary asked. “
Can
you trust him?”
“As much as I trust any politician,” Bill replied. “Who else is he going to support for president in 2016? Michelle?”
They had a good laugh about that.
I
n the days following their golf game, Bill Clinton waited anxiously for word from Barack Obama. When, after a month, he had heard nothing but silence from the White House, all of Clinton’s deep-rooted insecurities, which he was normally so adept at hiding, surfaced. He began to fret that Obama was out to humiliate him.
“Why doesn’t he call?” he asked Hillary, according to a friend who was in the room when Clinton voiced his complaint. “Maybe the son of a bitch thinks he doesn’t need me.”
Which was exactly the impression Obama hoped to achieve.
He had reached out to Clinton against his own better judgment, as well as the judgment of his most trusted adviser, Valerie Jarrett, who kept on reminding him that, in her view, the golf game had been a big mistake. Seeking help from Clinton, a man whom
Obama held in high contempt, had wounded his vanity, and he found it next to impossible to go the next step. He didn’t want to appear as a needy supplicant. He didn’t want to give Clinton the opportunity to humiliate him. And so, with Jarrett’s encouragement, Obama kept putting off the critical call to Clinton.
“Let Clinton wait,” Jarrett told Obama every time she thought he was going wobbly and was about to call Clinton.
After several weeks of this gamesmanship, the patience of David Plouffe, the campaign strategist who had devised the Clinton gambit, was stretched to the limit. Indecision wasn’t a workable strategy, he reminded the president. If Obama continued to hang Clinton out to dry, he risked alienating the former president, who could do the Obama campaign a lot of harm with party donors and elected officials.
Obama finally relented. Just before Thanksgiving he sent word to Clinton that he was dispatching four of his top campaign operatives—campaign strategist David Axelrod, campaign manager Jim Messina, pollster Joel Benenson, and Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard—to Clinton’s office in Harlem.
The meeting got off to a shaky start when Axelrod showed up late. Axe’s schlumpy appearance (a rumpled suit and frayed shirt collar) masked a fiercely competitive nature, and his tardy arrival was a typical tactic, aimed at demonstrating that he was more important than the person he made wait. Clinton got the not-so-subtle message and greeted Axe in a sour mood.
The two men had a complicated history. For a while, Axe had been on the Clinton team; he had worked on Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in New York, and the Clintons had helped Axe and his wife, Susan, establish a foundation called Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy to fight the disease suffered by their daughter, Lauren. But then Axe turned against the Clintons and went to work for Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary. Bill Clinton had never forgiven him for his political apostasy.