Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (2 page)

The transformation was so striking that one of her classmates alluded to it when she spoke later in an interview for this book. It had looked to her as though Hillary had some “work” done.

And that wasn’t the only thing that confused this woman. She naturally sought to portray Hillary in the best possible light. She mentioned how Hillary remembered her classmates’ birthdays and the names of their loved ones; how much fun Hillary was to be with; how she caught a joke instantly and laughed before anyone else. And yet, at the same time and without meaning to, this source described a woman who could be hard to like; a woman who was as coarse as Lyndon Johnson and as paranoid as Richard Nixon; someone who often came across as disingenuous; an irascible woman who found it almost impossible to contain her feelings of resentment and anger.

When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought—
really
thought—about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all.

“Obama has turned into a joke,” she said sharply. “The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and James Rosen’s emails—all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did. During the time I worked on the Watergate case, I got into Nixon’s head and understood why he was so paranoid and angry with his enemies. Bill and I learned from that and didn’t allow ourselves to go crazy bashing people who had anti-Clinton dementia, destroying ourselves in the process.”

This last statement prompted a moment of awkward silence around the table. None of the women had the courage to challenge Hillary’s claim that she never let her enemies get under her skin. For as long as her friends had known her, Hillary had been driven insane by her enemies. She kept an enemies list of those who had crossed the Clintons. The roll call of “ingrates” and “traitors” included people who sold out Hillary and supported Barack Obama in 2008—Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, David Axelrod, and, worst of all, the late Ted Kennedy, whom the Clintons had once treated as an icon until he turned on them.
Vanity Fair
writer Todd S. Purdum made the list after he wrote a scathing profile of Bill Clinton, as did I after I published a book titled
The Truth about Hillary
.

“When we were in the White House, Bill was on top of every department,” Hillary said. “He might have been guilty of
micromanaging, and yes, it’s true, I helped him micromanage, and I’m still proud of that.”

She went on to explain that Bill was a natural leader and great executive, unlike Obama, who was, in her words, “incompetent and feckless.” Bill never respected the chain of command the way Obama did. If something was going on at the Internal Revenue Service or at the Justice Department that Bill didn’t think was kosher, he would call somebody way down the chain and find out what was going on, and he didn’t care who got offended.

“The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time,” she said. “That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the fucking tiller.”

She took another sip of wine, thought for a moment, and then continued: “And you can’t trust the motherfucker. Obama has treated Bill and me incredibly shabbily. And we’re angry. We tried to strike a deal with him. We promised to support him when he ran for reelection and, in return, he’d support me in 2016. He agreed to the arrangement, but then he reneged on the deal. His word isn’t worth shit. The bad blood between us is just too much to overcome.”

Over dessert of fruit and cheese, someone steered the conversation to the role Bill Clinton would play in Hillary’s presidential campaign.

“Bill’s been gaining weight on his doctor’s recommendation, and he looks better than he has in years,” one of the women recalled Hillary saying. “He’s dead set and determined to wrest the Hollywood people away from Obama. He wishes he had
done that years ago, during the 2008 Democratic Party primary fight. But now he’s back in the fight and that makes him strong.”

Hillary rolled her eyes, threw back her head, and cackled with her signature laughter as she went on to describe some of Bill’s recent antics. He would soon celebrate his sixty-seventh birthday, and he was having another of his middle-age crises. When he visited Los Angeles, he rented Corvettes and Ferraris and drove around Hollywood in a new fedora, which she thought looked very snappy on him.

The previous week, Bill had been on one of his magical mystery tours, she said. He started off in Hollywood with Charlize Theron at an event for GLAAD, the gay and lesbian advocacy group. Then he went to Peru with Scarlett Johansson; jetted off to Madrid to spend a few days with Juan Carlos, the playboy king of Spain; went next to London to meet Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; then was off to Vienna for an AIDS benefit with his new best friends Eva Longoria and Carmen Electra.

“The guy is unstoppable,” Hillary said. “The guy’s got a hell of a lot of life left in him. I’ve told him that when we are back in the White House, he’ll have to behave. He laughed hysterically. We are at that point when we can joke about it. You have to love him. I do.”

But then the expression on her face turned suddenly somber, as if she had thought of something else, and she became more serious.

“For the past four years,” she said, “Bill has been largely out of my life. He was in Little Rock or New York or traveling, and I was in D.C. or traveling around the world. We talked every day
on the phone but didn’t spend a lot of time together. And we’ve been getting along great.

“Now we are going to be together on the campaign trail, and it’s going to be complicated. Plus, there is the dynamic that when I run for president I’m going to be the boss, and I’m not sure Bill will be able to handle that. He says he’ll be my adviser and loving husband, but I’m afraid that if I’m elected, he’ll think
he’s
president again and
I’m
first lady. If he starts that shit, I’ll have his ass thrown out of the White House.”

When the dessert dishes and coffee cups were cleared from the table, Hillary said that she would like to get some fresh air. They left the restaurant and started walking up King Street in the direction of her home. Secret Service agents followed in two black SUVs, and a state police car trailed behind, a light flashing on its roof. With Hillary, a casual late afternoon stroll in the suburbs turned into a royal procession.

As they trudged up the winding hill, one of the women said she had a question that she had been reluctant to ask until now.

“What about Benghazi?” she asked. “What about you and Benghazi?”

“I wish I hadn’t flailed around at that Senate committee hearing on Benghazi and said, ‘What difference does it make,’” Hillary replied. “But I said it, and Bill was very disappointed in my performance. In fact, he was shattered. But we don’t fight anymore. We’ve gotten past that years ago. We accept each other as
we are and chase our collective dream. All that shit of throwing things at him and yelling is in the distant past.”

As for Benghazi, she continued, it was going to fade from memory; it would have no impact on her election prospects. “The Clinton Brand,” as she called it, could overcome Benghazi, just as it could overcome the floundering of the Obama administration and the growing unpopularity of the Democrats. The Clinton Brand stood on its own.

“We were the leaders of peace and prosperity for eight years when we were in the White House,” she said. “And when I run, Bill will make speeches for me that’ll make the speeches he’s made for Obama seem like those in a junior high school debate. I’ll run for president on
that
record, not Obama’s record. And we’ll win back the White House. You just wait and see.”

PART ONE

THE DEAL

CHAPTER ONE

WHATEVER IT TAKES

B
arack Obama was in a funk.

He was slouched in a big leather chair, one knee propped against the edge of the conference table, a sullen expression on his face. For the past half hour, he’d been listening with mounting exasperation as two of his closest advisers—David Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett—indulged in a heated debate over how to save him from political calamity.

It was August 2011, and in less than fifteen months Obama would face the American people in a bid for a second term in the White House. Since FDR, only one Democratic president—Bill Clinton—had managed that feat, and according to Plouffe, who had replaced David Axelrod as Obama’s chief in-house campaign strategist, the president’s prospects looked iffy at best. The latest Gallup poll had Obama at the lowest monthly job
approval rating of his presidency, with only 41 percent of adults approving of his performance.

The spare and wiry Plouffe (pronounced
pluff
) was an intense man of few words, a numbers genius, and a formidable competitor. Though Obama’s reelection headquarters was officially based seven hundred miles away in Chicago, Plouffe ruled the campaign from inside the West Wing.

“We have to play hardball,” Plouffe said, according to a person who took part in the meeting. “We have to bury our Republican opponent with attack ads. And we need a popular figure, a point man in the campaign, someone who’ll excite the base and independents and be the president’s chief surrogate. In my opinion, the best person for that job is Bill Clinton.”

Normally, in meetings like this, no one questioned Plouffe’s authority. But as he spoke in favor of enlisting Bill Clinton in the campaign, Plouffe appeared uncharacteristically nervous. He kept glancing down the table at Valerie Jarrett, who sat a few feet away.

Jarrett’s eyes were ablaze with defiance.

Before they gathered for this pivotal campaign strategy meeting, Plouffe had met privately with Jarrett and given her a heads-up. He told her that he planned to urge Obama to approach Bill Clinton, who was widely despised by members of Obama’s inner circle, and ask the former president for help in the coming electoral struggle.

As Plouffe expected, his proposal did not go down well with Jarrett. Her dislike of the Clintons, especially Bill, seemed boundless. Instead, Jarrett suggested that the point person in the campaign should be Oprah Winfrey, whose legendary persuasive powers, especially among women and minorities, was known among opinion poll researchers as “the Oprah Effect.” Jarrett believed that Oprah was more likely to stay on message and be much more controllable than Bill Clinton.

During the 2008 presidential election, Oprah had taken a big gamble with her TV ratings by shedding her nonpartisan reputation and going all-out for Barack Obama. She headlined massive rallies and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his campaign. And she was widely credited with pulling in more than a million votes.