The Truth About Hillary (22 page)

“You get the sense that she doesn’t think like a woman. She thinks like a man.”
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182 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

What did women want from Hillary? Ickes and Thomases weren’t sure, but they knew they had to “warm up” their candi- date as quickly as possible. That meant Hillary had to appear more maternal, more wifely, and more feminine than she actu- ally was.

They asked Mandy Grunwald to put together a speakers’ bureau, whose job was to win over women voters. The bureau was called Hillary’s Advocates, and it was run by Ann Lewis, a Democratic Party activist and the sister of Barney Frank, the gay congressman from Massachusetts. Ann Lewis gave Hillary’s Ad- vocates a set of talking points, which were aimed in large part at portraying Hillary as a victim of male sexism:

Probably the most important issue to address can be illustrated by one guest’s remark—“Something is stopping me from trusting or supporting [Hil- lary].” What seems to address this “something” successfully is the realization that more is being asked of her because she is a woman than would be asked of a man in her position—she has to know what it’s like to work and change a diaper but he doesn’t, she has to justify her marriage, her “realness” but he doesn’t. . . .

Typically, a critical mass of positive remarks from the assembled group (not just the speakers) is reached, and the whole room changes. It’s pos- sible to see people’s faces change from hostility, cynicism, and disbelief to something else—they begin to nod instead of shake their heads.
5

Even as Ickes and company were grappling with Hillary’s

“woman problem,” they were developing a strategy to attack

Hillar y’ s Problem
183

Rudolph Giuliani. Opposition researchers were asked to come up with talking points for Hillary and her campaign surrogates that would help them portray Giuliani as an oppressive male bully—the other side of the female-victim coin:

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has pressed his claim to higher office on four specific boasts about his perfor- mance in City Hall, in addition to his general claim that he has “turned the city around” by rejecting the failed policies of the past.

Each of his specific claims is demonstrably false. The general acceptance of his claims by much of the public is a tribute to the power of the shouted word, or the bully’s ability to silence critics by sheer power of personality. . . . Beyond the hollowness of his claims to achievement lies Rudy Giuliani’s Achilles heel: his arrogance and in-

ability to work with others.
6

The women’s arm of the campaign—New York Women for

Hillary—scoured Rolodexes and Day Planners for rich donors:

S
UBJ
: Re: New York Women for Hillary F
ROM
: Maredaly

Doris Cadoux Stoneyfield Yogurt

Kim Brassaloria $$$$$$$

Rena Shulsky $$$$$$$

Sharon Davis (let me check her interest in campaign, she is big dollars)

184 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Trudie Styler (Mrs. Sting; I believe are here in Dec) [phone number] (Tru- die is worth a Hillary call. . . . She has lots of friends)

Donna Schinderman husband is Ann Morris An-

tiques, has time, beautiful apt money and rich friends

Marilyn Fireman $$$$$$$$$

Would you like to do a Hillary event in Garrison? I am very wired there and know the richest who would love to host her to raise $$$$$$$. It is the right place for her to do suburban sprawl, environment, etc.
7

Often, when Hillary addressed women, she appeared wooden and overrehearsed. In one such meeting, which was set up by Ellen Chesler at her husband’s law firm in Manhattan, Hillary talked to one hundred committed Democratic women. Yet, dur- ing the question-and-answer period, none of the women made a single positive comment about the candidate.

“And this was a meeting of the so-called converted,” recalled Eva Moskowitz, a Democratic city councilwoman. “But even at this meeting, one woman asked [Hillary] how she could stay with [her husband].”
8

At bottom, when all the fancy analysis was stripped away, Hillary’s problem seemed to be quite simple: women were far more likely than men to see that all her talk about compassion was an act.

“She’s the most unbelievable actress I have ever met,” said a woman who worked on Hillary’s Senate campaign. “I remember one time at a Woman’s Leadership Forum event in New York, thirty of us sat around Hillary, talking about politics. And she said, ‘You know, I love this organization, not just because we sit

Hillar y’ s Problem
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around and talk about politics, but because of the bonds of friendship forming around us.’ The way she said it, people were riveted by her performance. But I had gotten to know her, and I could tell she didn’t mean it. She has this unbelievable ability to be a liar. She is soulless.”
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“A Legend Imploding”

A

t some point in the campaign, Harold Ickes realized that his biggest problem—bigger than women, bigger than Jews—was Hillary Clinton herself.

After years of stumping for her husband, Hillary still had a perverse talent for putting her foot in her mouth. The woman who had once mocked moms who “bake cookies and make tea” and complained of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was still talk- ing like Mrs. Malaprop.
1

Ickes’s initial instinct was to keep Hillary as far from the press as possible. Her media advisers regularly informed television cam- era crews to be prepared for “a 70-foot throw”—campaign-speak, as the
New York Post
’s Gersh Kuntzman helpfully pointed out, for “the distance reporters will be kept from the candidate.”
2

“She’s been insulated in the cocoon so long that she’s defi- nitely uncomfortable,” said WNBC’s Gabe Pressman, the dean of the New York press corps. “She’s not used to hugs and it shows. But she can learn to do it, just like that other alleged car- petbagger, Bobby Kennedy. He was stiff when he started, too.”
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“A Legend Imploding”
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But “stiff” didn’t even begin to describe Hillary Clinton’s clumsiness as a candidate. “Ineptness” and “incompetence” were more like it. In fact, Hillary made so many gaffes during her first few months on the campaign trail that people began to wonder if she was cut out for the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics.

When she sat for an interview with a writer from
Talk
, Tina Brown’s new celebrity magazine, Hillary indulged in New Age psychobabble. She painted herself as the victim of a cheating husband, and made excuses for Bill Clinton’s sexual misbehavior on the ground that he had had an unhappy childhood. The reac- tion to the Hillary who was portrayed in the article was almost universally negative.

“Another dollop of Clintonspeak,” sniffed one newspaper.
4
When the Yankees won the American League pennant,

Hillary lost no time in inviting them to the White House. Man- ager Joe Torre presented her with a team cap, and she promptly put it on and declared that she had “always been a big Yankees fan.”
5
After the laughter died down in the saloons and taverns throughout New York City, Hillary looked more like an out-of- touch carpetbagger than ever.

When President Clinton granted pardons to sixteen impris- oned Puerto Rican terrorists in an obvious bid to help his wife win New York’s two million Hispanic votes, Hillary said she had not been involved in the decision—a claim that no one believed. In fact, Hillary’s brother Hugh Rodham and her campaign trea- surer, William Cunningham, had both lobbied to win pardons from the President.
6

When Pardongate became yet another Clinton scandal, Hillary spoke out against the clemency offer. But her failure to alert Latino officials in advance of her about-face prompted howls of protest from Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president and the highest-ranking Puerto Rican official in the

188 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

city. Eventually, Hillary patched up her relations with the His- panic community—but not without paying a high cost.
7

When Hillary made the obligatory trip to Israel to win Jew- ish votes back home, she went to the Palestinian-controlled city of Ramallah. There, she appeared onstage with Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, who made the outrageously false charge that Israel was poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases. At the end of Mrs. Arafat’s speech, Hillary applauded enthusias- tically, then gave Suha Arafat a big hug and kiss. The photo of the two women kissing, which was played around the world, sowed serious doubts about Hillary in the minds of many Jewish voters.
8

When Hillary realized that she had gotten herself in a jam with Jewish voters, she suddenly turned up a long-lost Jewish stepgrandfather—an announcement that was dismissed by many cynical New York voters as an example of her pandering.
9

When Mayor Giuliani attacked the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which was running an exhibit that featured a painting of the Virgin Mary with breasts made of dried elephant dung, Hillary did not rush forward to defend the museum’s First Amendment rights. Trying to have it both ways with voters, she said she found the show “deeply offensive,” but believed shutting it down, as Giuliani proposed, was “a very wrong response.”
10

Her
response made her look like a woman without any convictions.

When a reporter asked Hillary if she planned to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, she promptly responded: “I sure hope to!” Those four words, perhaps more than any others, re- vealed Hillary’s ignorance of New York’s convoluted politics. For years, Democratic candidates had avoided the parade be- cause the Ancient Order of Hibernians refused to allow gays and lesbians to march under their own banner. By saying she

“A Legend Imploding”
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would march, Hillary offended one of her core constituencies— homosexuals.

“Independently, the mistakes are meaningless,” said Demo- cratic political consultant George Arzt. “Cumulatively, I think they are very damaging. . . . She doesn’t have the instincts yet of a New York pol. It’s like a quarterback not reading the defenses.”
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“Here’s a woman I’ve admired since ’92 for being a strong, smart feminist,” wrote Lenore Skenazy. “A woman who knew her own mind—and spoke it. Now I wonder who’s at the con- trols. Every morning I open the papers to find out how she’s shot herself in the foot today. With a .38? An Uzi? A small grenade?

The gaffes just won’t stop.”
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Others were less generous.

“She’d had about as bad a six months as a candidate can have,” wrote one observer. “Her attempt to refashion herself from a distant First Lady into a flesh-and-blood pol was by turns earnest, amateurish, sad, disastrous. The Hillary Clinton of the 70 percent approval ratings and the 172 active fan clubs—the Hillary Clinton whom New York Democrats had begged to en- ter this race—was scarcely even a memory now.”
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“That odd sound you hear,” wrote Noemie Emery in the
National Review
, “is a legend imploding; the short, saintly star- dom of Hillary Clinton, as it sputters to a halt.”
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The Turnaround

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n February
4
,
2000
, Bill Clinton and a small group of aides gathered in the White House movie theater to help Hillary rehearse her formal announcement

speech. Standing at the podium, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, Hillary began reading haltingly from her draft speech.

All of a sudden, the President jumped from his seat.

“You need to say
why
you’re running here and now!” he shouted.

“Because I’m a masochist,” Hillary shot back, half in jest.

The President looked down at the copy of the draft in his hand, and began rearranging the order of the paragraphs.

“She’ll announce,” he said. “They’ll cheer and dance around. That’s fine. . . . Why is she doing it? Why not Illinois, Arkansas, Alaska? Why not rake in some dough? Why ask to be trashed right now? . . . What I wish you could do, Hillary, is a sentence here: ‘The overwhelming reason is that I don’t want to give up my life in public service.’ ”

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The Tur naround
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“I’m just a little policy wonk,” Hillary joked. “I just want to make life better for little children.”

She paused, and then let out a big, heavy sigh. “I have to memorize too much.”
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But Bill Clinton refused to ease up on his wife. He tele- phoned Harold Ickes, Susan Thomases, and Mandy Grunwald several times a day, asking for updates on how Hillary was doing. He kibitzed the campaign. He made sure that he was involved in every aspect of decision making, including the most important part of all—fund-raising.

“Past presidents were content selling ambassadorships,” the
New York Times
’s Maureen Dowd wrote in September 2000. “The Clintons may as well have listed the Lincoln Bedroom on eBay. Lately, they have packed state dinners with politicians, donors and journalists they hope will boost Mrs. Clinton’s Sen- ate campaign. They even put up a circus tent on the lawn for the India state dinner. They have to jam them in fast—only 118 days left to peddle the People’s House.”
2

About three-quarters of the way through the campaign, Hillary finally began to get the hang of things. In part, aides at- tributed the turnaround to Hillary’s considerable intelligence. Tony Bullock, Pat Moynihan’s chief of staff, found that Hillary displayed an awesome ability to absorb complex information.