The Truth About Hillary (26 page)

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220 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

case. The skin on Hillary’s face was pulled tight, as though she had recently had a Botox treatment. As indeed she had.

“She’s been Botoxed to the hilt,” said a New York physician who had knowledge of such matters.
2

Most of the women in the delegation had voted for Hillary because they believed her when she had promised during the Senate campaign to take care of poor inner-city children. True, the women knew you couldn’t always count on the Clintons’ keeping their word. For instance, they had been bitterly disap- pointed when then-president Clinton announced he was going to sign a welfare-reform bill requiring people on assistance to go out and find work. Up until the last moment, the women had been optimistic that Marian Wright Edelman could convince Hillary—her protégée from Yale and the Children’s Defense Fund—to stop her husband from signing the bill into law.

“Hillary,” Marian Wright Edelman had said at the time, “will never let this happen.”
3

But not only did Hillary let it happen; she even refused to meet with her mentor, Marian Wright Edelman. Instead, Hil- lary used George Stephanopoulos to carry word to welfare advo- cates all over America that the First Lady could do nothing to change her husband’s mind.

Nonetheless, after Hillary became a senator—with all the power that implied—Marian Wright Edelman recognized the need to patch up their friendship. To those who inquired about the new senator’s intentions, Marian Wright Edelman assured them not to worry; Hillary was still a committed liberal.

“Hillary’s heart,” said Marian Wright Edelman, “is in the right place.”
4

That, however, remained to be seen.

Hillary offered the women a choice of coffee, tea, or water,

“So Hillar y”
221

and then opened the floor for discussion. The well-dressed leader of the group was the first to speak up.

“From the time you were chair of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund,” she said, “we were led to believe that you would do anything in your power to push through legislation to help children. And we were encouraged when you introduced legisla- tion to reauthorize the Child Care Bill. But then you backed off it, and we are having a difficult time with that.”

“The reason I backed off,” Hillary replied a bit testily, “is that the bill was never going to pass.”

“All the bill asks for is $11 billion, over a five-year period, for child care across America,” one of the women pointed out. “That’s lunch money in the federal budget. Right now, one out of seven children is covered. We’re only asking to increase that to two out of seven.”

“It’s not going to fly,” Hillary said firmly. “I’m not going to spend my political capital on something that’s doomed before it starts.”

“We
want
you to spend your capital whether you win or not,” the leader of the group said. “That’s how you’ll get this into the public arena so people can understand there is a problem. If it was Ted Kennedy, he’d stand on what he believes.”

Hillary bristled at the invidious comparison between her and Ted Kennedy. And as the conversation grew more heated, the women began to suspect that Hillary’s agenda was not what Marian Wright Edelman had led them to expect.
5

“If Hillary’s only ambition was to be a liberal senator from New York,” one of the women recalled, “she would gladly have gone down in defeat. But that wasn’t her only ambition. She was clearly taking care of her legislative record so that, when she runs for president, no one could accuse her of being a crazy leftist.”
6

222 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

What had happened to that “crazy leftist”—the Hillary of yore?

Where had Miss
motive
Magazine of 1965 gone? What about Miss Black Panther of 1971?

Not to mention Miss Health-Care Reform of 1993?

The answer came crashing down on the women as they real- ized that Hillary had turned her back on her past—
and them
— and was feverishly repositioning herself as a moderate centrist.

All the signs were there.

Hillary had persuaded Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate leader, to appoint her as head of the party’s steering and coordi- nation committee, a position that gave her a role in shaping the party’s message.

Hillary was instrumental in starting a think tank called the Center for American Progress, a “New Democratic” version of the conservative Heritage Foundation. The center would func- tion as Hillary’s instrument to help move the Democratic Party toward the center.

Hillary gave up her seat on the powerful Senate Budget Committee in exchange for a less prestigious one on the Senate Armed Services Committee. As a woman and a notoriously left- wing Democrat, she needed all the credentials she could get to prove she was solid on military matters and national security.

Hillary voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and, in the words of William Safire, she “startled her conservative detractors by emerging as a congenital hawk.”
7
*

The delegation of New York women was startled, too.

“I think Hillary’s ambition simply got the better of her,” the leader of the group said, “and that she will do anything to get to the White House, including dropping child care.”
9

*Safire was playing on words; he had once called Hillary a “congeni- tal liar.”
8

“So Hillar y”
223

Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, Hillary got up from her chair.

“If you don’t understand my position,” she told the women, “there is nothing more to say. I have other people waiting. . . .
Good-bye!”
10

And with that, she strode out of the room in a huff.

“We had supported her, raised money for her, and there we were with our jaws on our toes,” said the group’s leader. “It was so high-handed, so arrogant . . . so Hillary.”
11

C
H A P T E R F O R T Y
‌

Hillary from Chappaqua

I

t was shortly after ten o’clock on a cold December morning, and Hillary Clinton was just finishing a late breakfast in the glassed-in sunroom of her home at 15 Old House Lane in Chappaqua. She was drinking a cup of decaf- feinated coffee and listening to
The Brian Lehrer Show
on public

radio station WNYC.

Hillary knew that Lehrer planned to devote most of his popular call-in talk show to her emergence as the most popular figure in the Democratic Party. The previous month, she had emceed a Democratic dinner in Iowa, the site of the first-in-the- nation presidential caucuses, and she had blown away all nine of her party’s presidential wannabes.

To drive home the point that she was a political giant in a party of midgets, she invited a small army of print and television reporters to accompany her on her first overseas trip as a U.S. Senator. She flew to Afghanistan to share Thanksgiving din- ner with American servicemen and -women and, while on tour,

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Hillar y from Chappaqua
225

met with prime ministers, generals, and diplomats. She then returned home to a public-relations trifecta—appearing on all three Sunday morning network television news shows on the same day.

“In the last several weeks,” the
New York Times
noted, “it has been all Mrs. Clinton almost all the time.”
1

Almost—but not quite.

As things turned out, while Hillary was in Afghanistan, President Bush upstaged her with his own unannounced Thanks- giving trip to Iraq. When she was informed by an aide traveling with her in Kabul that the President had unexpectedly turned up in Baghdad, Hillary snapped: “Son of a bitch!”
2

But George W. Bush was the least of Hillary’s worries. Her decision not to run for the 2004 nomination left a power vacuum in the Democratic Party that had been filled by her least-favorite candidate—Howard Dean. Almost overnight, the former gover- nor of Vermont had become the darling of the antiwar wing of the party. As the 2004 primary season approached, Dean had taken a commanding lead in the polls and was poised to capture the nomination.

It was Hillary’s firm belief that an antiwar candidate like Dean had about as much chance of winning the White House as had George McGovern, who was buried in a Republican land- slide in 1972. Most political analysts assumed that Hillary would be pleased by a Dean defeat, since that would give her an unob- structed shot at the presidency in 2008.

But Hillary did not see it that way. In her view, Howard Dean’s very
nomination
posed a major threat to her power over the Democratic Party. Unlike John Kerry and the other candi- dates, Dean was not dependent on the traditional Democratic money pool controlled by Bill and Hillary Clinton. His financial base was on the Internet, where he raised funds from hundreds

226 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

of thousands of small donors.* If Hillary was going to hold on to the reins of the Democratic Party for the next four years, she had to stop Dean and his army of young, Internet-savvy volun- teers from capturing the nomination.

With that in mind, she huddled with Bill Clinton and her other top advisers and devised a two-pronged strategy aimed at maintaining her claim to the future leadership of the party. On the one hand, she would do everything in her power to prop up John Kerry or some other Democrat as an alternative to Dean. At the same time, she would position herself as representing a broad spectrum in the party—from left to right.

To outflank Dean on the left, Hillary launched a withering attack on the Bush administration for its “ruinous policies”:
4
alienating traditional allies in Europe; granting “no-bid con- tracts to the likes of Halliburton”;
5
failing to put enough boots on the ground in Iraq; supporting Israel’s security fence; running up a huge national deficit; underfunding public schools; and stinting on unemployment benefits.

At the same time, she appealed to the moderates in her party by emerging as a full-fledged hawk, who favored a “tough- minded and muscular foreign and defense policy.”
6

“When Tim Russert on
Meet the Press
gave her the opening to say she had been misled when she voted for the Senate resolu- tion authorizing war,” wrote William Safire, “Senator Clinton countered with a hard line: ‘There was certainly adequate intelli- gence, without it being gilded and exaggerated by the adminis- tration, to raise questions about chemical and biological programs and a continuing effort to obtain nuclear weapons.’ . . .

“Her range of expressed opinions urging us to ‘stay the

*As of November 30, 2004, Howard Dean had received 97 percent of his campaign contributions from individual contributors.
3

Hillar y from Chappaqua
227

course,’ ” Safire concluded, “can only be characterized as tough- minded.”
7

Not everyone agreed.

Indeed, even as Hillary was finishing her breakfast of bran flakes, a listener to
The Brian Lehrer Show
was impugning her credibility as a hawk.

Forty miles south of Chappaqua, Brian Lehrer sat in a windowless studio in the Municipal Building in lower Man- hattan. It was from these same studios that Fiorello La Guardia, the legendary mayor of New York City, had famously read the funnies during a newspaper strike in the midst of the Great Depression.

Lehrer was a veteran broadcaster, who had hosted his own show for the past fifteen years. Under his big, padded earphones, he was the picture of casual composure in an open-necked shirt and a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard.

Each week, Lehrer did a segment called “Monday Morning Politics,” in which he and a guest journalist analyzed the previ- ous Sunday’s network talk shows. Today, his guest was Jodie Allen, the managing editor of
U.S. News and World Report.

He and Jodie Allen had just taken a call from a listener who complained that Tim Russert had failed to ask Hillary an impor- tant question on
Meet the Press
: how could anyone take Hillary seriously as a hawk when she had established a policy barring military personnel from wearing their uniforms in the White House?