Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (31 page)

Though Oprah didn’t say so, there was one person who could get her involved in politics again: Hillary Clinton.

“I have a much warmer relationship with Hillary than I do with either Michelle or Barack,” Oprah said. “The Clintons make me feel at ease 100 percent of the time. But even when the Obamas think they’re being charming, they hold you at arm’s length. They make me jumpy, even when they obviously don’t mean to.”

The Clintons worked hard to stay on the good side of Oprah. Their relationship with Oprah dated back to Bill’s first presidential election in 1992. Over the years they had kept in constant touch with Oprah, sending her chatty notes, invitations, birthday greetings, and get-well cards—all of which were handwritten and signed personally by Bill or Hillary.

“Recently,” said a member of the Clinton inner circle, “Bill and Hillary have both had long talks with Oprah. They’ve made it clear they’re planning a run for the White House and would appreciate her support. They want her to do for Hillary what she did for Obama in his first campaign, in 2008. They think her support is worth a million votes, and maybe more. Hillary says she’s convinced that Oprah is going to come on board.

“The Clintons’ spies tell them that Joe Biden has also been sending Oprah notes,” this person continued. “But they’re confident that she’ll go with them, not Joe. The big question is how involved Oprah’s willing to be in the campaign. They’ve told her that, if she gets involved, they won’t forget it. They won’t drop her like the Obamas dropped Oprah after 2008. They’ve promised Oprah that she’ll be a big part of Hillary’s presidency. She’ll have a golden key to the Clinton White House.”

“On one level, Oprah enjoyed Michelle’s visit to Maui and their girly talk,” said one of Oprah’s friends. “They had fun together. And they also got into some serious stuff. They discussed the president’s political problems. Oprah offered advice, including suggestions that the White House reach out more and compromise more. She said the Obama administration had come to be seen as unwilling even to discuss compromise and was too harsh toward the Republicans.

“It was clear to Oprah that Valerie and Michelle were concerned that Obama was losing big time and his enemies were gaining ground,” this person continued. “They put Bill and Hillary into the category of enemies. They don’t want Oprah to turn to the Clintons and campaign for Hillary in 2016. They believe Hillary is going to be very critical of the Obama administration in general and the president in particular, and that she’s going to distance herself and hurt Obama.

“Valerie and Michelle thought they could charm Oprah back into their camp and get her to use her megawattage to help them dig out of the hole they’re in. But nothing changed in terms of the relationship between Oprah and the Obamas. If the visit to Maui was meant to be a reset of the relationship, it failed. Once you piss off Oprah, she stays pissed. That’s the way she’s always been. In a lot of ways, then, Michelle and Valerie blew it.”

That was one way of looking at it. However, if Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama left Maui with less than they had hoped for, they weren’t entirely disappointed with the results. At Valerie’s
urging, the PR machine in the East Wing of the White House put out stories about Oprah hobnobbing at her Maui mansion with the first lady. Those stories left the impression that Oprah stood four-square behind the Obama administration.

She didn’t.

And after the confab in Maui, Oprah the Great and Powerful once again went AWOL on the Obama White House.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

THE CLINTONS TRIUMPHANT

S
hortly before his State of the Union speech in late January 2014, Barack Obama phoned Hillary Clinton to lodge a complaint.

Several of his most valuable political operatives, including Jim Messina, who managed Obama’s campaign in 2012, had recently been lured away by Bill Clinton to help Hillary win her race for the White House. The raid of Obama’s talent pool signaled a tectonic shift in Democratic Party politics. As the
New York Times
put it, “The [Messina] announcement cements a broader takeover by Clinton allies of the Democratic Party’s growing outside-spending infrastructure.”

President Obama didn’t mince words when he spoke to Hillary.

“Can’t you rein in Bill?” he said, according to several sources who were told about the conversation. “I don’t want to lose these folks.”

Hillary laughed at the suggestion that she could stop Bill from hiring away Obama’s campaign virtuosos—among them, Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, who led Obama’s field operation in 2012, and Buffy Wicks, a highly regarded get-out-the-vote specialist who was named executive director of the pro-Hillary PAC Priorities USA.

“Are you serious?” Hillary said. “I can’t rein Bill in. Never have, never will.”

Obama was apoplectic.

Within hours of his phone call to Hillary, Valerie Jarrett called a crisis meeting of her staff and lectured them on the virtues of loyalty to the president.

“The president has every intention of keeping his team intact after he leaves office,” she told them, according to her recollection of the meeting, which she conveyed to a friend. “He has a desire to continue to control the political dialogue and accomplish a progressive agenda. He means to have a major impact for a long time. He’s not going to retire or leave the stage after this term. He’ll be young, with fire in his belly to get things done. To do that, he needs you—money raisers and organization. He wants to keep his team together.”

Jarrett never mentioned the Clintons by name, but it was clear to those who heard her speech that Bill and Hillary were the objects of Obama’s displeasure.

“It’s Bill’s revenge—that’s how they see it in the White House,” said one of Jarrett’s close friends. “He is gleefully poaching staff.
He has his shotgun on his shoulder and is marching through the White House like it’s hunting season. Obama is pissed. It really pains him to see these people go over to the other side—the dark side.”

The fact was, Bill Clinton had been courting Jim Messina for quite some time. Bill first reached out to Messina while he was still working on Obama’s last campaign. When the Obamans got wind that Bill was wooing Messina, their campaign manager, his gall flabbergasted them. They didn’t want to lose Messina, and they certainly didn’t want him to share proprietary information about their magic election machine.

“The Obamans failed to stall Bill,” said a member of Clinton’s inner circle. “He’s taking over. His intention is to hook up a truck and tow the whole damn party away. That’s what he’s doing. If Obama won’t cooperate—and clearly he has no intention of doing so—Bill is going to do whatever it takes to create a parallel political universe separate from the Obama-dominated Democratic National Committee.”

“And why wouldn’t people move in Hillary’s direction?” said Doug Schoen, one of the nation’s top political analysts and pollsters. “Professional fees are involved. These people are going with the winner, Hillary, who’s going to raise more money than any other Democrat, and they’ll get a percentage of the money they raise. With the amount of money that can be raised for Hillary, anyone who’s an operative like Messina says, ‘There’s gold in them thar hills!’”

Henry Sheinkopf, a leading political, public affairs, and corporate media consultant, agreed.

“Bill Clinton is the smartest political operative of our generation,” Sheinkopf said, “and he’s been at it longer than all the others put together. He’s not bashful about raising money and creating a parallel structure. He isn’t waiting for someone to say, ‘Of course you may do this.’ He’s doing whatever he wants to do.

“Obama doesn’t want to step out of his way, because he doesn’t want to see the Clintons become the true leaders of the Democratic Party,” Sheinkopf continued. “But unlike any of their predecessors, the Clintons have remained a central force within their political party. It’s making Obama nuts, because he’s no longer running the political machinery of the party. He’s not running anything. The Clintons have made Obama irrelevant in the party. Obama isn’t going to have a say about the next nominee. In fact, the Clintons are making sure he has very little say about anything.”

Not since the feud between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter tore apart the Democratic Party more than thirty years earlier had two pillars of the political establishment loathed each other quite as much as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As we saw in the early chapters of this book, the rival Clinton and Obama clans had been at war with each other ever since the bruising 2008 presidential primary campaign, when Obama’s surrogates tarred and feathered Bill Clinton for being a “racist,” and a Clinton aide mocked Barack Obama for embracing “the politics of trash.”

A temporary truce to this conflict was called in 2012 when Bill Clinton put his feelings about Obama aside during the presidential campaign and adopted a policy of political expediency. His speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he nominated a man he had once dismissed as an amateur, led some to believe that the Clintons and Obamas had patched things up and were no longer at each other’s throats.

That was Bill Clinton’s political calculation as well. In return for his support of Obama in 2012, he expected Obama to support Hillary in 2016. He thought they had a deal. When he found out otherwise, he resumed their feud more savagely than ever.

This was a family fight, and as the saying goes, no one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood. Like all family squabbles, this one was about power, money, and primacy. Obama’s legacy hung in the balance. If the Clintons captured control of the Democratic Party and returned to the White House, they would try to expunge much of Obama’s legacy; they would try to make him a historic anomaly—America’s first black president—in a sixteen-year interregnum between the two Clinton regimes.