Can anything stop Hillary?
Yes, says Tina Brown. Another sex scandal involving her husband could seriously damage Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House It may have been lost in all the news about Iraq but Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat Senator of New York, has received the 2005 National Farmers Union presidential award for her leadership in introducing the Milk Import Tariff Equity Act. The snippy feminist who nearly derailed her husband’s first presidential campaign by scoffing that she didn’t just ‘stay home and bake cookies’ can now be presented as the Butter Queen of the Empire State.
It’s another piquant moment in the stunning evolution of Hillary Clinton. The first lady who chafed at the hostessy duties of political wifehood has been all homey practicality since she got out of the White House. At the same time her political image has morphed from blue-state bluestocking to unscary centrist. Far from the elite drawing-rooms of Manhattan she has worked her behind off in the backwoods wooing farmers and townsfolk upstate, where the values and problems are more like those in the rural parts of her native Illinois. This won’t just help her get re-elected to the Senate. It’s excellent market testing for perfecting a red-state presidential pitch for 2008.
So far, Hillary’s re-election campaign has been flawless. In fact she’s succeeded in inducing the Republican opposition to run straight off a cliff. Their candidate was meant to be Jeanine Pirro, the formidable district attorney of Westchester County (where Hillary lives), a firecracker brunette in fourinch Manolo Blahnik heels who is famed for her toughness in busting drug rings and snaring internet paedophiles. They didn’t seriously think she could win, but they figured she could dent Hillary’s armour by making a contest of it while amassing a useful fundraising list of diehard Hillary haters to be tapped in case of a presidential bid. But Pirro is unexpectedly flaming out, her cable-TV self-possession melting under the cool professionalism of Hillary’s disregard and her $15 million war chest. More surprisingly, Pirro got no help from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. Friendly meetings earlier this year between Hillary and Murdoch, recorded in the New York Observer, are signs of embryonic bethedging by Rupert on a Democratic power shift.
How did Hillary get so good so fast? When she first announced her run for the Senate in 1999 few thought she could emerge as a political power to reckon with. After the spectacular failure of her healthcare reform initiative in the first year of her husband’s presidency she’d been pummelled by Left and Right alike and knocked back to manoeuvre mad deningly behind the scenes — a thwarted role fraught with internal resentment and political danger.
Five years ago this month I saw the toll it took on her. In the last days of the Clinton presidency I was one of six publishers who went to see her in the White House in a beauty contest to win her memoirs as First Lady. Talk Miramax Books was the publishing imprint, along with Talk magazine, which was part of the media venture I started with Miramax Films. Because our chairman, Harvey Weinstein, had long been an ardent Democratic donor and FOB (Friend of Bill) and I had got to know the Clintons over the years, we thought we had the inside track to the book of the year. (We were wrong.) Hillary looked exhausted, as anyone might at the fag end of a hellish eight years of unrelenting pressure, including a punishing, if tri umphant, run for the US Senate. Under heavy professional make-up her eyelids literally drooped with fatigue. The small attentive smile she always wears on the job was strained. Like many global superstars, she has a larger head than you expect, and it tends to nod slowly (and endorsingly, one thinks) as she listens. Her least beguiling quality is a flat, strong, Midwestern voice, and she immediately started pitching the book to us without any of the bonding and interpersonal foreplay you would have got with Bill. ‘I am the only one to have inhabited my own life,’ she said ‘and I am the only one to tell this story.’ The elephant in the room, of course, was how much she would inhabit the bit of her life about Monica Lewinsky, which was what publishers were lining up to write cheques for. But there was something about the implacable self-belief in Hillary’s stare that made it very hard to bring up Monica. Eventually we did. Sort of. ‘It will be there the Monica section,’ the First Lady said levelly. The unspoken words in the long pause that followed were, ‘I will give you as much as I have to give you on that fat cow to collect eight million bucks.’ Hillary is nothing if not disciplined.
The leverage in her relationship with Bill has always depended on an exhausting cycle of rage and appeasement. The traditional American way for a woman to make an errant husband pay for his sins is by bingeing on his Amex card. Hillary’s method of extracting restitution was to make the President endorse some high-minded Bill or spend an afternoon with the something-orother women’s caucus. Those who doubt that her shock at ‘finding out’ about Monica was feigned, however, didn’t see how truly devastated she looked the summer before the Kenneth Starr report, hiding her puffy eyes behind dark glasses on Martha’s Vineyard, going off on far-flung trips with Chelsea, spending hours in her room on the phone to her only confidante, her mother. Her chagrin was total because the betrayal was twofold: not just the personal humiliation but also the sabotaging of everything they had worked to achieve politically. After all the psychic rock’n’roll of the White House, Hillary craved and needed the stable sobriety of institutional power for herself. She was tired of borrowed influence, tired of depending on Bill. The paradox was that she also needed the Senate bid to save her marriage. Politics has always restored the Clintons’ erotic charge. What no one perceived then was what a quick study she would be in elected office. One thing you can say for Hillary is that she never makes the same mistake twice. That early gaffe in her first Senate campaign when she appeared in a cosy shot with Mrs Arafat? Last week she got a standing ovation when she received an honorary degree from Yeshiva University.
In the Senate, instead of coming over as a big diva, pulling former First Lady rank and issuing pronunciamentos, she spent the first two years humbling up. The change was reflected in her appearance. The hectic quest for a hairstyle settled into a chic functional bob cut and she deftly avoided the fashion police in the power woman’s burka, a black Armani pantsuit. Using all the flattery and guile in the female playbook, she exerted ruthless bipartisan charm on warhorse Republican senators who voted against her husband in the impeachment trial, co-sponsoring their Bills and staying out of their limelight. Faith? Hillary has always been an ardent Methodist. She just talks about it more these days. Every week she attends a Republican-dominated Senate prayer breakfast. Even on the most divisive domestic subject, abortion, she has found a credible centre position, acknowledging a choice of last recourse.
She has ploughed the same furrow on the war. In December 2003, two days after Saddam Hussein was captured, she showed up to make a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. She was briefed to the hilt in her role on the Senate foreign relations committee and spoke for 40 minutes with only an intermittent glance at her notes. All over the news the Bushies were crowing. The capture of Saddam had made every Democrat feel that they were toast. Not Hillary. Planted solidly behind the lectern in her purpose-built pantsuit you could see her moving inexorably into the Democratic leadership void. More hawkish than Bush on the need to ramp up the troop numbers in Iraq, yet also shrewdly promoting the need for maternal care in Afghanistan, she was suddenly, if not a commander-in-chief in waiting, a credible Democratic Major Barbara.
If Hillary wins re-election big enough, the 2008 presidential nomination is hers to lose. No one else has either her star power or her ability to raise money. But it won’t be without a fight. Her war position is getting harder to maintain inside her own party. There’s been a Democratic lurch to the Left on foreign policy since Bill’s day. Protesters from the group Code Pink: Women for Peace are stalking her public events, yelling and brandishing placards that read, ‘Hillary, You’re not listening! Bring the troops home now!’ She did not support the party’s craggy new folk hero, Congressman and ex-marine John Murtha, whose credibility rattled the Republicans when he called for an immediate pull-out last month. ‘A big mistake,’ was Hillary’s Murtha critique. ‘It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was.’ But neither does she support the Bush position of Stay the Course. ‘I reject a rigid timetable that the terrorists can exploit, and I reject an open timetable that has no ending attached to it,’ she told Kentucky Democrats in early December. The leading liberal weekly the Nation has become so exasperated that it kissed her off last week in an editorial which promised pointedly that it won’t endorse any Democrat who isn’t forthrightly anti-war. And the blogs have gone berserk all over again over her co-sponsorship — with the Republican troglodyte Senator Robert Bennett of Utah — of a Bill to outlaw flagburning, a move that looked so horribly cyni cal that even her staunchest supporters had to reach for the sick bag. ‘She’s taken it off the table,’ one of the Hillary camp explained, dubiously.
The Clinton people think they can live with the hostility of the Left for now. In fact they rather like it. They reckon that every time the Left assails her it’s good repositioning. The Left is a prop for proving centrist bona fides, a serious political problem only if an anti-war candidate emerges who’s got enough oomph to win a broader base. Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin maverick who’s trying to be that guy, doesn’t look capable so far of pulling it off.
Hillary’s got a new pitch on the trail. She talks about the need for America to be returned to an ‘evidence-based’, pragmatic way of governing, free of the ideology-based disregard of the facts that has been the hallmark of the Bush administration. She told me the other day that she was ‘heartsick’ about the direction of her country. ‘I never expected competence to be a rallying cry,’ she said, ‘but all Americans want is someone who can get the job done.’ In a post-Katrina world, this is probably smarter than pounding on Iraq, a constantly moving target.
For the Hillary people, it’s not the war but Bill who’s the slumbering worry. But until he’s a problem he’s her greatest asset. The charismatic ex-President has never performed better. Since his bypass operation he has a sexy, brush-with-death look — slimmed down, with a dash of gravitas from dangling paternal reading glasses. His style was always inclusive even when he was on the attack, but his partnership with Bush Sr on tsunami relief has been a masterstroke of mellowness (and a cunning way, perhaps, to defang the Bush machine from open hostilities against Hillary in the coming presidential contest). Combined with his leadership on Aids in Africa, it’s made him the premier statesman of the world.
Which is why the constant muttering about what may or may not be going on with Bill in private is a bomb that Democrats fear will explode sometime between a Hillary nomination and a Hillary victory.
There are old but persistent rumours of two female names, one a comely Canadian former MP, the other ‘a brunette neighbour’ in Chappaqua. At media dinner parties in New York someone is bound to mutter that Time or Newsweek or the National Enquirer are ‘sitting on a major story about Bill’. Maybe it’s just reverse nostalgia. But if it were true, would America’s voters be willing to go through another Clintonian marital psychodrama? And could they picture Hillary as commander-in-chief with an image of Bill hound-dogging in the background? The risk makes even her fans long for an alternative (preferably male, red-state and conventionally married). Senator John Kerry, who was beaten by Bush last time, is said to be banking on this scenario — the party will turn to him again, he fantasises, after a sudden Hillary withdrawal.
The Clinton marriage, in fact, is a mystery only to people who haven’t seen them together — haven’t seen his big lazy paw hanging around her shoulder as they listened to Tony Bennett serenade the room at the recent Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York, or his obvious pride when he watches her wow a room full of donors he can own just by showing up. A friend says that when Hillary heard the news that Bill had been rushed to hospital with a heart problem ‘she just fell apart’. You still feel that all her striving has been in part a way to keep him interested. As her campaign for the White House slowly revs up, the ‘Stop Hillary’ campaign revs up too. But only Bill can really stop Hill. Her scars are spurs.
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