Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (7 page)

Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that Michelle has a high opinion of herself and is very controlling.

“Michelle treats Barack like a lesser star,” said a woman who had spent a good deal of time with them. “She has always pushed him around and taken credit for his best ideas, which drives Barack to distraction.

“Michelle constantly second-guesses Barack,” this person continued. “When he makes a decision or comment that draws public criticism, she gives him a withering stare and storms out of the room, ignoring his calls after her. She has never forgiven him for giving the State Department to Hillary, and she blames every bad thing that happens in the world on Hillary’s incompetence. Michelle has refused to invite Bill and Hillary to dinner in the White House. She doesn’t want anything to do with them.

“When Michelle and Barack are fighting, everyone in the White House is aware of it and walks on eggs. When Michelle is angry, she is apt to exile staffers who annoy her. She fired one whom she said gave her a headache every time she saw her. She fired another for just looking at Barack too often.

“Michelle is obsessed with jealousy over Barack. She thinks he would like to be a ladies’ man like JFK, and she knows that movie stars throw themselves at him whenever they get a chance. Michelle pulls tricks like bursting in on meetings with women to see if she can catch Barack in a compromising position. Women, even at a fairly high level, know better than to give Michelle any reason to suspect them of trying to get friendly with him. It’s suicide if Barack shows affection to you.

“When Michelle is on the prowl in the West Wing or East Wing, staffers warn their friends, relaying what corridors she is headed for, so they can run in the other direction, or slip into the ladies’ room, or even a supply closet. The reason is, if she sees you, she might come up with some awful task, or she might just berate you for not being at your desk.

“Barack gets so fed up with her behavior that he actually encourages Michelle to take separate planes when they go on vacation, so he doesn’t have to fly with her. And he even persuaded her to take her own vacations without him, and allow him to go off on a men’s-only vacation of his own.”

Valerie Jarrett played an indispensable role in the Obama marriage. As the first lady’s best friend, Jarrett was in a unique position to mediate the relationship between Barack and Michelle. Jarrett acted as a buffer, smoothing things over and advising each marriage partner how to get along with the other. It was a marriage that needed constant buttressing, and when
Barack and Michelle were fighting, Valerie shuttled back and forth between them, carrying messages.

She was the third member in the marriage. And at times, that made things even more complicated.

“There is a certain amount of palace intrigue even between Valerie and Michelle,” said a woman who worked for Oprah Winfrey and had frequent dealings with both Valerie and Michelle. “They don’t completely trust each other. When Valerie is shuttling back and forth between the Obamas during their frequent fights, she doesn’t try to salve the wounds and bring them together. She relishes their fights, because it gives her more power when they are at odds.

“Valerie and Michelle have spies in each other’s camp to make sure one isn’t trying to shaft the other,” this woman continued. “They are very suspicious of each other even though they have an amazingly close collaboration. The stakes are just so outrageously high.

“But Michelle could never push Valerie out, even if they had a huge falling-out, because she knows too many secrets and where too many bodies are buried. Oprah says that Barack is incredibly agile and smart at the way he plays the two women off each other to get his way. It’s a game of chess, and all three are masters.”

Jarrett developed certain methods to calm the Obamas before their disputes turned too ugly. At times when Barack was so tense that he was visibly shaking, Jarrett would lead him out onto the Truman Balcony and talk to him while he smoked a cigarette. Other times she would sit on Michelle’s bed and listen to her grief, fears, and frustrations. She explained to Sasha and Malia what tremendous pressure their parents were under.

Jarrett carries two BlackBerry devices with her at all times, as well as a mobile phone that she uses only when she calls the president or first lady. She was known around the White House as “the Night Stalker,” because she was frequently seen heading to the family quarters after dark. There she had dinner with the Obamas and their daughters—the only White House adviser accorded such a privilege.

One cannot exaggerate the influence that Jarrett has over the Obama family. She was in on the decision to send Sasha and Malia to the Sidwell Friends School instead of to a public school. She helps pick out the girls’ clothes. During dinner she feels free to contradict the girls’ parents and say things like, “Another scoop of ice cream won’t hurt them.”

“Often, she sits up with the president and his wife until late at night and goes over pressing business,” said a former White House aide who discussed with Jarrett her nightly sessions with the Obamas in the Residence. “Valerie and Michelle both take notes during those sessions. They are very much working meetings, not girly gossip. And Valerie didn’t miss the opportunity to set off some IEDs [improvised explosive devices] under the legs of her White House rivals.”

“There is a tremendous amount of jockeying in the White House under Barack Obama, people hoping to push other people out of their positions, fighting over stupid stuff,” a former high-ranking member of the staff told me. “This fighting is not built around flattering the king and queen. It’s about arousing suspicion in their minds. . . . In all of this, Valerie Jarrett is both the arsonist and the firefighter. She has been able to spread her tentacles into every nook and cranny of the executive branch of
government. She creates problems so she can say to the president and first lady, ‘I would do anything for you; I would put everything at risk to show how trustworthy I am.’”

There was yet another aspect to the relationship between Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett. Since he felt so utterly dependent on her, he believed he couldn’t get along without her. Indeed, he readily admitted that he didn’t make a decision about anything—whether it was tax policy or whom he should see on an overseas trip—without first passing it by Jarrett for her approval.

Such dependence often breeds feelings of helplessness and vulnerability on the part of the needy person, and you had to wonder if Obama’s relationship with Jarrett wasn’t more complicated and ambivalent than it appeared. In any case, Obama’s dependent behavior seemed out of character with his arrogant and haughty personality and led to the conclusion that, despite appearances, Obama was plagued, as were so many other politicians, by a lack of self-confidence.

Because of this self-doubt, Obama was vulnerable and thin-skinned. He was easily wounded. He interpreted all criticism as public humiliation. And this, in turn, made him hesitant to engage in the vigorous give-and-take of politics, where he might be unmasked, laid bare before his enemies, and left feeling once again like a helpless child.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MAKING THE CASE AGAINST BILL

D
uring their ten-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, the Obamas occupied separate bedrooms.

“They slept in their own bedrooms,” a member of the Blue Heron Farm household staff said in an interview for this book. “They both had stacks of books by their beds. The president was reading
The Bayou Trilogy
by Daniel Woodrell and
Rodin’s Debutante
by Ward Just. I don’t know if they visited each other’s bedroom at night, but I didn’t see any signs of that.

“The president ate in bed,” the domestic servant continued. “You had to change the sheets every day. He smoked cigarettes and didn’t try to hide it at all. And he snores. I heard him. He ate a lot of junk food, chips and stuff. He loved fudge and bought it from Murdick’s Fudge. It was a wonder that he stayed so thin.

“The Obamas seemed like they were bickering a lot, but they whispered so you couldn’t exactly hear what it was about. But I can tell when people are pissed off at each other, and they seemed to be pissed a lot. In fact, I didn’t see much warmth between the president and the first lady at all. They almost seemed to avoid each other. When the president was going on about something, Michelle would put on her earphones and listen to her iPod. She tuned him out. And they didn’t do much together. Michelle went out with her friends to lunch or dinner, and he stayed at home or went to the gym to play basketball or had a game of golf.”

Jarrett was the only White House aide who vacationed with the Obamas. But on this trip to Martha’s Vineyard, she chose not to stay with the Obamas. Instead, she rented a house nearby with her daughter, Laura, a Harvard Law School grad.

“But Valerie Jarrett was at Blue Heron Farm all the time,” said another member of the household staff. “She went out with the president when he visited the home of Professor Ogletree. Michelle didn’t join them. The president and Valerie seemed closer than the president and his wife.”

Jarrett recalled in a later conversation with a close friend that she used her time alone with Obama to make her case about how to handle Bill Clinton. As on so many other issues, she believed that the president needed to be pushed. He was a ditherer and vacillator. He was most comfortable explaining and lecturing and being intellectual about issues. He expected that when he explained things from his point of view, everyone would see the light and accept his superior wisdom and fall into line. He expected Bill Clinton to fall into line.

Jarrett told her friend that she didn’t believe for a minute that Obama could seal a secret backroom deal with Clinton without Clinton manipulating the relationship in such a way that he’d be the one in charge. Knowing Clinton, she thought he’d probably veer off message and cause huge and unforeseen problems. Jarrett reminded Obama that when he first approached Hillary to be his secretary of state, Hillary had been reluctant to take the job, because she couldn’t control her husband. He was unmanageable, she said, and at some point could become a big problem.

Jarrett didn’t stop there. She recounted stories, based on sketchy and unverifiable information, about Bill’s out-of-control post-presidential life: how he jetted around the world on Ron Burkle’s custom-converted Boeing 757 (nicknamed Air Fuck One) with a scandalous posse of skirt chasers; how he’d been involved in shady business deals with dodgy characters, such as Vinod Gupta, a Nebraska multimillionaire who had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Clintons’ political campaigns; and how he’d carried on affairs with countless socialites, female politicians, actresses, wives of fund-raisers, and assorted bar girls.

She criticized the sloppy way Clinton mixed his philanthropy through the Clinton Foundation with the private business interests of his biggest donors. She said Clinton was venal, corrupt, and unscrupulous. Not the kind of man you could trust.

Furthermore, Jarrett had collected proof that Clinton had spies—“Clintonistas,” she called them—who reported to him from inside the Obama administration. Clinton interfered with Barack’s running of the government. Clinton didn’t hesitate to call government officials, and he shared his opinions on how agencies should
be run. He was constantly talking to congressmen and senators. He had his own agenda, and it didn’t necessarily mesh with Obama’s.

What was at stake, Jarrett said, was nothing less than the future of the Democratic Party and the destiny of the United States. Clinton’s goal—his sole objective—was to seize control of the party and return to the White House as co-president with Hillary for a third Clinton term.

That was Bill’s goal.

“What’s
your
goal?” she asked Obama.

If Obama was successful in winning reelection, he would be only fifty-five years old when he left the White House. He’d be a young man with a long career still in front of him. Maybe not in elective office, but in prestige, influence, and power. What was he going to do with all those years? What was he going to do with all his talent? What was he going to do about his vision for America?

Was he prepared to cede control of the Democratic Party to Clinton, an undisciplined, unprincipled man who didn’t share Obama’s vision for America and who was angling to return to the White House on Hillary’s coattails?

“You can’t do that,” she said. “Whatever you promise him, you don’t have to deliver. After the election, Clinton must be shut out.”

Obama nodded. And Valerie Jarrett knew she had finally gotten through to the president of the United States. He was prepared to welsh on any deal he made with Clinton.