Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (9 page)

Again and again, Bill made it clear to Hillary and their friends that he still felt he had been right to push his wife to challenge Obama in the 2012 primary, regardless of the internecine war that it would have triggered in the Democratic Party.

Hillary was simply a better politician than Obama, he said, and would make a better president. While Obama had been unable to create a sense of trust with the members of Congress and was disliked by both Republicans and Democrats, Hillary was widely respected on both sides of the aisle. For example, Bill said, while she was secretary of state, Hillary made a point of staying on good terms with John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House. When a story started making the rounds that Hillary’s longtime trusted aide Huma Abedin (who grew up in Saudi
Arabia) had familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hillary convinced Boehner to speak out on Abedin’s behalf and vouch for her reputation.

“That’s the kind of touch that has been missing from the policy people, legislative liaison people, and senior officials of the White House, including Obama,” Clinton said. “That’s Hillary’s touch.”

He looked over at Hillary, who basked in his praise.

“The question is, if we wait for Hillary to run in 2016, will we need Barack Obama for the campaign?” Clinton continued. “I don’t think so. Obama may even be a liability. Things aren’t going terribly well in his first term, and in a second term he’ll be playing to his base, which will make him a liability, not an asset.”

“But he’s a great campaigner,” Hillary interjected.

“I agree,” Bill replied, “but I still wonder if Obama will go out of his way for us. He hates me. He tolerates you. Anyway, the votes he can deliver are the same ones I can deliver. And if he serves two terms, the public is going to be weary of him. They never seem to get weary of me. He’ll disappear like George W. Bush.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HIGH STAKES

“I
t had rained the day before, and the course was still wet,” recalled a caddie at the Andrews Air Force Base golf course. “There were puddles everywhere. Really bad conditions. It was a gray, humid day, and it looked like it was going to rain again. The two presidents [Obama and Clinton] arrived in a grumpy mood. Both looked on edge, like they weren’t happy to be there.”

The muggy weather wasn’t the chief cause of Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s discontent. The simple truth was that each of these vain and self-obsessed men had come here to strike a deal with someone he didn’t trust. And what made matters worse, they didn’t have much choice. Political calculations had forced their hands—each man wanted something from the other—and to say that they were ambivalent about today’s golfing get-together would have been a gross understatement.

Indeed, based on the author’s year-and-a-half-long conversations with sources close to both men, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Clinton and Obama approached the golf game with a premonition of betrayal; the feeling must have been as palpable as the sticky, oppressive weather. This was a hazardous venture. Nothing less than two presidencies—Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s—hung on the outcome of their deal.

The presidential golf outing had been organized with all the precision of a military operation. It was a logistical nightmare, involving the coordination of scores of personnel from the various branches of the armed forces, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Secret Service. As soon as the two presidents’ entourages cleared the gates at Andrews on the morning of September 24, iron wedge barriers were raised to ward off cars and trucks carrying potential suicide bombers. The grounds bristled with the antennas of communications equipment. Men and women in camouflage uniforms lurked behind bushes and trees, armed with automatic weapons.

The huge base, which is located outside Washington in Prince George’s County, Maryland, was the home of the VC-25As, the highly modified Boeing 747s that served as Air Force One when the president was aboard. The three eighteen-hole golf courses at Andrews had attracted every presidential duffer since George Herbert Walker Bush. But Barack Obama, an avid golfer who counted Tiger Woods as a friend, had been the most frequent presidential visitor; out of the more than eighty rounds of golf he
had played since entering office, he had traipsed the fairways at Andrews more than thirty times.

He usually brought along junior White House staffers as golf partners and used his hours on the links to get away from Washington politicking, which he scorned as beneath him. He never used golf as an opportunity to do political horse trading with members of Congress or business leaders, as other presidents had done in the past.

Today, however, was different. When Obama and Clinton arrived at about 10:00 on this gray September morning, they were all business. They brought along their big guns: Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, who had been commerce secretary in Clinton’s administration, and Clinton’s closest political adviser, Doug Band.

Few people outside the Beltway had heard of Band, who had joined the Clinton administration right out of college as President Clinton’s body man, carrying his bags and fetching his Diet Cokes, and who eventually went on to become his single most indispensable aide. Clinton treated him like a surrogate son.

“The most important thing about Doug is that he sort of took control of President Clinton’s career at a moment when he was dropping from about 60 percent [favorability] to 39 percent [in 1994],” said Paul Begala, the former Clinton adviser. “You look up today and Bill is in a league inhabited only by himself and [the late] Nelson Mandela and the Pope. He’s one of the most beloved people on the planet and an American political colossus as well. That’s just astonishing—and Doug’s been central to that.”

Central—but highly controversial. Band had been flayed in a 2007
Wall Street Journal
investigative piece as the gatekeeper to
Clinton’s ethically questionable web of business and charitable enterprises. And the
Journal
wasn’t the only media outlet that found fault with Doug Band’s methods.

“There are those who worry about the overlap between [Band’s] work for the Clinton Global Initiative—which he conceived and helped run for six years—and his energetic efforts to expand Teneo’s [Band’s corporate advisory firm] client base,” wrote Alec MacGillis in the
New Republic
. “And there are those who worry about how some of the messier aspects of the charity’s operations could create trouble for Hillary Clinton, who has made the family foundation her base as she contemplates a presidential run.”

For the golf game with Obama, Clinton wore black slacks and a bright-red golf shirt. Obama was in gray, with khaki pants and a golf hat. As always, he had his BlackBerry strapped to his belt so that he could stay in touch with Valerie and Michelle. The two presidents climbed into a golf cart, and Obama took the wheel. Bill Daley and Doug Band followed in a separate cart.

“When they got out to golf, they didn’t keep score,” the caddie said. “It wasn’t that kind of a game. After each shot, they returned to their cart as quickly as possible. But they were drenched in sweat. It was awfully humid. The place is a swamp in the summer, and September is still Indian summer.

“Bill Clinton seemed agitated,” the caddie continued. “He was gesturing and doing most of the talking. President Obama seemed
calm and determined. He was looking ahead, not at Clinton. I wasn’t close enough to overhear what they said. The Secret Service guys made sure they had a lot of space around them.”

Members of the media were kept behind a barrier and out of earshot, and as a result, there was scant coverage of the golf game the next day. The
New York Times
ran a brief story that concluded: “Mr. Obama expanded on his conversations with Mr. Clinton later, when he spoke at a gala dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He told several thousand diners that he and Mr. Clinton talked about his resolve to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire after 2012 for high incomes—the top tax rates then would return to levels in place during Mr. Clinton’s administration—and Mr. Clinton recalled that the economy thrived during his presidency despite Republicans’ predictions otherwise.”

That, as things turned out, wasn’t half of it.

Clinton didn’t waste any time reminding Obama that as president he had presided over eight years of prosperity, while Obama had been unable to dig the country out of the longest financial doldrums since the Great Depression.

“Bill is one of the few people who can intimidate Barack, and he enjoys that,” said a Clinton family friend who discussed the golf game with the former president. “He presses his advantage when they are one on one. A lot of presidents and ex-presidents are at loggerheads. But these two, considering they are of the same party, are especially testy.

“Bill got into it right away,” this person continued. “He told Obama, ‘Hillary and I are gearing up for a run in 2016.’ He said
Hillary would be ‘the most qualified, most experienced candidate, perhaps in history.’ His reference to Hillary’s experience made Obama wince, since it was clearly a shot at his
lack
of experience when he ran for president.

“And so Bill continued to talk about Hillary’s qualifications and the coming campaign in 2016. But Barack didn’t bite. He changed the subject several times. Then suddenly, Barack said something that took Bill by complete surprise. He said, ‘You know, Michelle would make a great presidential candidate too.’

“Bill was speechless. Was Barack comparing Michelle’s qualifications to Hillary’s? Bill said that if he hadn’t been on a mission to strike a deal with Barack, he might have stormed off the golf course then and there.”

The comparison of Michelle to Hillary might have struck Bill Clinton as preposterous, but Barack Obama didn’t think so. His wife had a well-earned reputation for disparaging politics and politicians. Her friends back in Chicago, who knew her best, thought that Michelle’s personality—caustic, mistrustful, cynical—disqualified her from participating in the give-and-take of politics. Her PR people in the East Wing had positioned her as an antiobesity campaigner who was happiest when she was boogying with Ellen DeGeneres or “mom dancing” with Jimmy Fallon.

But Michelle’s favorable poll numbers were in the high sixties, right up there with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s, and as she gained
more and more confidence as a public figure, Michelle had secretly begun to reconsider her attitude toward politics.

Michelle was thinking about forming a political exploratory committee, according to one of Valerie Jarrett’s close friends with whom Valerie discussed the matter. The job of the committee would be to determine whether Michelle should run for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois that was currently occupied by Republican Mark Kirk. Kirk had never fully recovered from a massive ischemic stroke that he suffered in January 2012, and it was far from clear that he had the physical stamina to run a full-throttled reelection campaign.