Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (12 page)

No other living former president—no other contemporary politician for that matter—could match Bill Clinton’s wit and repartee. He could be eloquent on everything from movies to Masai mating rituals.

And this rare talent, which allowed Clinton to reach different kinds of audiences all across America—black and white, young and old, male and female, rich and poor—was on full display when he set out in early 2012 to campaign on behalf of his best enemy, Barack Obama, and make good on his promise to campaign manager Jim Messina to get Obama reelected.

In the first few months of the year, Clinton stumped for the president in several Midwestern battleground states, where he reminded white working-class voters—the very voters Obama had so much trouble reaching—of the strong record of economic growth under the Clinton administration, casting his Democratic mantle over Obama. He made several joint appearances with Obama, including one at the suburban home of Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe, who was planning to run for governor of Virginia. There Clinton addressed critics who attacked Obama’s economic record. Clinton said that it normally takes ten years to recover from a financial crisis caused by a housing collapse and that, measured in those terms, Obama was “beating the clock, not behind it.”

In between campaign stops, Clinton agreed to sit for a seventeen-minute campaign video, directed by Academy Award–winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim, in which he praised Obama’s bravery for authorizing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

“[Obama] took the harder and more honorable path,” Clinton said in the video. “When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, ‘I hope that’s the call I would have made.’”

The Obama team was overjoyed by Clinton’s performance. They used thirty-second snippets from the interview for five straight months leading up to election day.

But as always, nothing was simple and straightforward with Bill Clinton. Even while he was tirelessly campaigning for Obama, he confided to friends that he harbored nagging doubts about his
role as a spokesman for the president and that, in his heart of hearts, he really didn’t want to see Obama win.

“Strategically,” said one of Clinton’s oldest friends, who talked to him frequently during the campaign, “Bill felt it would obviously be better for Hillary to run in 2016 against an incumbent Republican president rather than run after eight years of a tired and bloodied Democrat like Obama. Bill being Bill, however, he was sharpening his skills for Hillary’s campaign either way.”

After Mitt Romney clinched the Republican nomination in May, a number of political observers picked up on this ambivalence in Clinton’s attitude toward the presidential race.

“By some measures,” wrote Ryan Lizza in the
New Yorker
, “a defeat for Obama in November would leave Hillary the undisputed leader of her party and propel her toward the Oval Office that much faster. At least one of [Bill] Clinton’s closest advisers seems to be backing that strategy. According to two people with direct knowledge, [Clinton’s right-hand man] Douglas Band has said that he will vote for Romney.”

If Clinton had been more disciplined, he could have kept his feelings about Obama to himself. But his habit of speaking his mind in a stream of consciousness, which helped him connect so powerfully with audiences, frequently got him in trouble. As a world-class schmoozer, he never knew what was going to come out of his mouth.
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd and others compared Clinton to the self-destructive cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.

During Harvey Weinstein’s interview on
Piers Morgan Live
, he asked Clinton about Donald Trump’s effort to force Obama to produce his birth certificate. This presented Clinton with the opportunity to cast aspersions on Trump and pooh-pooh the whole birther movement. But Clinton didn’t seize the chance. Instead, he sang Trump’s praises and, by implication, lent credence to Trump’s charge that Obama hadn’t been born in the United States.

          
W
EINSTEIN:
How do you put [the birth certificate] out of the minds of the American public?

          
C
LINTON:
I don’t know.

          
W
EINSTEIN:
And doesn’t [Trump] realize how uncool he is?

          
C
LINTON:
I don’t know, you know. Donald Trump has been uncommonly nice to Hillary and me. We’re all New Yorkers.

          
W
EINSTEIN:
Me too.

          
C
LINTON:
And I like him. And I love playing golf with him.

At the time that Clinton appeared with Weinstein on CNN, the Obama campaign, flush with money, had already spent a
king’s ransom on TV commercials—well over $100 million—aimed at demonizing Mitt Romney as an inauthentic flip-flopper, a fool and a liar, an out-of-touch plutocrat, and a foreign policy novice with a nervous trigger finger when it came to foreign entanglements. In particular, Obama’s mudslinging commercials set out to prove that Romney’s record as a private equity executive at Bain Capital disqualified him from being president.

“My opponent,” declared Obama, playing the politics of class resentment, “thinks that someone who makes $20 million a year, like him, should pay a lower [tax] rate than a cop or teacher who makes $50,000.”

In one Obama TV ad, a man characterized Bain Capital as “a vampire” that “sucked the blood out of us.”

Inevitably, the subject of Romney’s qualifications came up during Weinstein’s interview with Clinton. Here was another opportunity for Clinton—this time to validate the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney. This was his chance to use his skills as a communicator to deliver the coup de grâce to Romney’s campaign.

Instead, Bill being Bill, he blew it:

          
W
EINSTEIN:
Now Governor Romney keeps talking about his experience at Bain Capital as a producer of jobs and that he had twenty-five years in the private sector. It seems to play with a certain group, but do you think that really will affect people and think that he can produce jobs that the president can’t?

          
C
LINTON:
I think it will affect some people who relate well to businessmen. And I think he had a good business
career. The . . . there is a lot of controversy about that. But if you go in and you try to save a failing company, and you and I have friends here who invest in companies, you can invest in a company, run up the debt, loot it, sell all the assets, and force all the people to lose their retirement and fire them. Or you can go into a company, have cutbacks, try to make it more productive with the purpose of saving it. And when you try, like anything else you try, you don’t always succeed. Not every movie you made was a smash hit.

          
W
EINSTEIN:
That’s for sure.

          
C
LINTON:
So I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say this is bad work. This is good work. . . . There’s no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and, you know, basically performing the essential functions of the office, the man [Romney] who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WARRING INTERESTS

A
sterling business career!

Obama’s campaign team flew into a rage. Clinton was sabotaging the campaign’s basic strategy of attacking Mitt Romney’s career in private equity.
What the fuck was Clinton up to?

In short order, Clinton apologized to the Obama campaign for misspeaking. He even played the geezer card; his aides explained that Clinton might have made the mistake because he was “sixty-five years old.”

But had he?

According to Politico’s Roger Simon, “When you invite [Bill Clinton], you never know if the Good Bill or the Bad Bill will show up.”

However, others didn’t see it that way.

“Bill knew exactly what he was saying, and he said what he meant,” explained one of Hillary’s closest friends. “He was being very deliberate during that CNN interview. He has an agenda. He thought he had struck a deal with Obama. In return for campaigning for Obama, Obama was supposed to promise to back Hillary in 2016 and turn over the Democratic National Committee to the Clintons along with their list of campaign contributors. But Obama had been waffling on those promises. He wasn’t coming through. Saying that Mitt Romney had a ‘sterling’ business career was Bill’s shot across Obama’s bow.

“And there was another factor in Bill going off message,” this person continued. “You have to know Bill’s psychology. He’s very into being the last Democratic president since FDR to be elected twice. For history’s sake, he’d like to keep it that way. If Obama is reelected, even if he screws up, Barack will still be the head of the party, not Bill. But Bill sees the future as
his
being the head of the party machine and getting Hillary elected.

“From both those points of view,” the friend concluded, “if Barack is reelected, it’s not good news for Bill Clinton.”

At this point, some readers might raise an objection: How was it possible for Bill Clinton to campaign all-out for Barack Obama while wishing to see him lose? How does that make sense?

It only makes sense if we stop to remember that politicians are different from you and me. Relations among politicians are not about sentiment. Politicians resemble nation-states: they don’t
have friends so much as they have permanent interests. In the case of Bill and Hillary, their “nation-state” was the Clinton Brand.