There had been elaborate plans for the commemorative march across the Alabama
river, but at the start it was mostly chaos.
Elderly African-American priests and Alabama matrons in flamboyant hats
jostled for a glimpse of the presidential candidates who had descended on
the town of Selma to mark the 42nd anniversary of a notorious police attack
on black civil-rights activists.
As the commemorative phalanx began to form on the street below Selma’s Brown Chapel,
there was a stir at the arrival of Senator Barack Obama, 45, the Illinois
prodigy who has electrified the African-American community with his bid to
become America’s first black president.
Yet the greatest commotion was further along the line. A dozen feet away from
Obama, smartly turned out in a cream trouser suit, stood Senator Hillary
Clinton, the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the 2008
presidential race. And next to Hillary, soaking up cheers and applause, was
her beaming husband, Bill.
Billary is back. The strangest, most volatile, yet arguably the most
successful political marriage in American presidential history is once again
enthralling or appalling Americans, depending on how they remember those
volcanic, scandal-plagued years of the Bill Clinton administration. It
scarcely seemed possible at the height of the dramas that chased them from
office in early 2001, but six years later, Bill’n’Hill are on the road to
the White House again.
The encounter at Selma was not only the first face-off between Clinton and
Obama, it was also the first time the Clintons had appeared together at a
public campaign event since Hillary became an official candidate. For six
weeks her advisers had kept Bill, now 60, out of the public eye. His only
campaign appearances had been at private fundraising events, where his job
was to charm dollars for Hillary from rich donors.
Yet now Obama’s growing popularity – and the substantial donations that were
reportedly flowing into his own campaign accounts – were forcing the
Clintons to confront what may prove the defining issue of Hillary’s
presidential campaign: how to deal with “the Bill problem”.
It is not just the familiar saga of Bill’s sexual scandals and the fear that
they might recur. The other part of Hillary’s problem, according to Frank
Luntz, a Republican strategist who battled the Clintons for much of the
1990s, is a charisma imbalance that is magnified whenever Bill appears in
public with his wife. “When Bill drapes his hands over the podium and looks
at you, there’s this aw-shucks demeanour.
He’s completely unpredictable, so you listen,” Luntz says. Hillary, on the
other hand, is “incredibly smart, but you don’t get the singsong in the
voice”.
Yet however difficult it may be for Hillary to avoid being overshadowed by her
husband, she needs the glamour and excitement he provides. “He is her best
cheerleader, fundraiser, surrogate, liaison to the [Democratic] party,
political consultant and chief adviser,” says Dick Morris, a former
Clinton aide. “She cannot reach the presidency without him.”
Hillary originally intended to leave Bill behind when she travelled to
Alabama. But a few days before the commemorative march, a new opinion poll
gave Obama a lead of 44% to 33% among black voters. In January, Hillary had
led by 40 points. So she called on Bill for help, and he has appeared with
her regularly since.
Among the more entertaining headlines that pursued the Clintons out of the
White House six years ago was one in the National Enquirer: “Hillary Demands
Divorce – Bill Goes Berserk”.
In Living History, her autobiography (for which she received an $8m advance
that went nicely with the $12m that Bill had banked for his own life story),
Hillary acknowledged that at one point during the scandal over her husband’s
affair with Monica Lewinsky she was undecided “whether our marriage could or
should last”. She was not only upset that her husband’s sordid trysts under
his Oval Office desk had “violated my trust [and] hurt me deeply”, she was
also furious that he had “given his enemies something real to exploit after
years of enduring their false charges, partisan investigations and lawsuits”.
As his wife, Hillary wrote: “I wanted to wring Bill’s neck.” But he was also
her president, and – like many other Americans, as it turned out – she did
not want to lose his skills and deftness, not least because she was
preparing to embark on a political career of her own. And so, to the
disappointment of the many Republicans who predicted the Clintons would
split the moment they stepped from power, they somehow stayed together.
Hillary set about reinventing herself as a senator for New York; Bill
retreated to the suburban woods of Chappaqua, an hour north of Manhattan,
where the couple bought a house to establish Hillary as a bona fide New
Yorker. And then, to everyone’s surprise, nothing remotely scandalous
disturbed the Clinton peace.
Some called it “Clinton fatigue”. Others identified a more sinister campaign
by Hillary’s henchmen to crush impertinent speculation and focus on her
senatorial accomplishments. If there was a turning point in the way America
regarded the Clintons – when it stopped thinking about sex and started
thinking about President Hillary – it may have come in early 2005, when
Edward Klein, a New York journalist with a distinguished reputation,
published a book called The Truth about Hillary.
As a former editor of the dauntingly highbrow New York Times Magazine, Klein
is scarcely a tabloid hack. He was also a former foreign editor of Newsweek
and the author of a bestselling book about the Kennedys. During two years of
research he interviewed over 100 people about everything from Hillary’s
childhood belligerence to the inside workings of her Washington office.
The timing of Klein’s book appeared to be perfect. After a quiet start as a
freshman senator, Hillary was rapidly emerging by 2005 as a credible
presidential contender. Nobody else in the party had her name recognition,
her established political machine, her fundraising capabilities – and, of
course, nobody else had Bill.
Yet there remained many doubts among Democrats that Hillary was electable.
Would America really forget all that scandal? Could she overcome her
reputation as “Sister Frigidaire” – a university nickname – or as
“mendacious and grasping”, as one of her enemies described her? Klein hoped
to provide some answers, but you didn’t need to read very far into his book
to wonder what Hillary had done to inspire such a hatchet job. Klein boasted
that his biography contained “sensational new revelations” that could do
“serious damage” to Hillary’s presidential chances.
No right-wing kook could have done a better job of portraying Hillary as a
scheming, vicious hypocrite who prefers the company of lesbians and whose
supposed anguishing about Bill’s misdeeds was a convenient sham to make her
appear more sympathetic. In reality, Klein, and Hillary’s other critics,
suggested that she only cared about whom Bill was screwing if it threatened
her own political plans.
As if that wasn’t nasty enough, Klein slipped in a couple of rhetorical
questions, in the guise of reporting speculation among White House staff,
that made even some of Hillary’s enemies blush. “Was it true [the Clintons]
slept in separate beds?” asked Klein. “Were there any telltale signs on the
presidential sheets that they ever had sex with each other? For that
matter, did [Hillary] have any interest in sex with a man?”
It makes a change, when writing about the Clintons, to come across a left-wing
conspiracy. Hillary once famously blamed all her problems on “a vast
right-wing conspiracy”. But whoever is doing the conspiring, Klein’s book
has signally failed – at least so far – in its stated intention: to do
Hillary “serious damage”. Far from derailing her presidential bid, The Truth
about Hillary has itself ended up in the sidings.
It is a lovely spring morning in Washington, DC. I have just driven past the
British embassy and turned into Whitehaven Street, a cul-de-sac just off
Massachusetts Avenue. On the right stands the seven-bedroom Georgian-style
mansion that the Clintons bought for $2.85m in 2001. It is Hillary’s base in
Washington, and the effective nerve centre of her presidential bid.
Today, though, the place is empty. Hillary is off campaigning in New
Hampshire, and Bill – well, who knows where Bill is? He could be in
Chappaqua plotting Hillary’s next move; he might be at his offices in
Harlem, where he runs Clinton Global Initiative and other charitable
endeavours; he could be raising money in California – where he stays so
often with his billionaire financier friend Ron Burkle that one of the rooms
in Burkle’s Beverly Hills mansion is known as the Clinton Bedroom. He may
even be in any of the 70 or so countries he has visited in the past six
years on his way to amassing around $10m a year as perhaps the world’s most
highly paid after-dinner speaker.
Say what you like about Klein and his interest in stained sheets, but the
uncomfortable fact remains that the Clinton marriage is, at the very least,
unconventional. Stories about the couple’s apartness are legion. When
Hillary returned to Washington as a senator, her neighbour across her
back-garden wall was Sir Christopher Meyer, the then British ambassador.
The Meyers had been frequent visitors to the Clinton White House, and were
duly invited to several soirées at the home of the new senator. “I can
remember going around there when she was hosting,” Meyer told me. “And I
went there when he was hosting. But I don’t believe we ever went when they
were hosting together.”
It was reported more recently that Bill no longer sleeps at Whitehaven Street,
and that most of his personal belongings are in Chappaqua. Until quite
recently, Hillary often stayed in hotels when visiting New York.
Then there have been the tabloid sightings – notably of Bill with Belinda
Stronach, a wealthy Canadian heiress who has grown tired of explaining that
she and Bill are “just friends”. There have also been reports of a liaison
between Bill and a glamorous Chappaqua divorcée.
Clinton aides are adept at swatting aside such salacious speculation. The
nearest Hillary has come to discussing the subject was with David Remnick,
editor of The New Yorker magazine, which last September published a
21,000-word account of Bill’s post-presidential meanderings. “I’m just not
going to give up a lot of psychic energy worrying about what other people
worry about,” Hillary said. “I’m endlessly fascinated by people’s
fascination with us, but that’s not something I’m going to spend much time
on.”
Just how much damage would Hillary suffer if Bill was caught with his pants
down again? It’s hard to find any prominent Democrat who will publicly
address the party’s private fears that Hillary’s campaign might collapse at
the first sign of what Susan Estrich describes as “a smoking gun in a blue
dress”.
Estrich teaches law at the University of Southern California. She not only
believes that America is ready to elect a woman president, she argues that
the climate of hostility and polarisation that had long seemed Hillary’s
greatest handicap has finally begun to change.
“The truly polarising figure is the old public perception of Bill Clinton’s
first lady, not the woman she has become in her own right,” says Estrich.
She regards Klein’s book as “an outrageous hatchet job” and takes particular
exception to the suggestion that Hillary has not been hurt by Bill’s
philandering.
“There is not a woman alive who doesn’t care about her husband cheating right
before her eyes, with every person in the room watching,” says Estrich. Dick
Morris has since fallen out with the Clintons – mainly because he blames
Hillary for most of the couple’s misfortunes – but he agrees with Estrich.
Through persistence, hard work and shrewd political judgment of her own,
Hillary has “transcended the rude comments and partisan character
assassination attempts”, insists Estrich. “She has become widely respected
by colleagues on both sides of the Senate for her brains and sense of
humour.”
Estrich argues that Hillary is “no longer in transition. She is no longer a
self-made victim, a desperate housewife, half Evita or half Marie
Antoinette”. Another of Hillary’s biographers agrees. “She has become a
warmer, more self-assured, more agile public figure,” says Gil Troy, a
presidential historian from New York. “She is much less brittle and more
impervious to criticism.”
Many are pondering the awkward question of what Bill will actually do – not to
mention what his title would be – should his wife become president. Will
there be the kind of “co-presidency” that Bill himself once promised, but
swiftly abandoned after the collapse of Hillary’s aggressive attempts to
take control of US health-care reform? Or will Bill be dispatched to the
Middle East for years of attempted peacemaking – mainly to keep him out of
Hillary’s way ?
Late-night comedians are enjoying a field day with the idea that Bill could
become America’s “first gentleman”. (One suggested he be called “first
ladies’ man”. Another noted drily: “More like he gets first pick of new
interns.”) Others have suggested he simply be called first man, and
that his secret-service code name be Adam. Bill himself has joked, possibly
unwisely, that he plans on becoming the “first laddie”.
Some Democrats have suggested that the first lady’s duties may be taken over
by the couple’s 27-year-old daughter, Chelsea, who currently works in New
York for the management consultancy McKinsey. Chelsea might become both her
mother’s adviser and stand-in hostess.
Hillary is often asked at campaign meetings what she’ll do with Bill. She
replies uncontroversially that he should become “a tremendous ambassador for
our country… an ambassador to the world”. All this happy talk makes a
striking contrast to the reported recent remark of one Democratic official
that the best place for Bill was “in a cage… with a blanket thrown over it”.
It was a measure of the Clinton campaign’s continuing uncertainty that
Hillary’s staff recently drew up a “talking points” memo on how best to deal
with difficult questions. It was distributed to supporters in Iowa – the
first state to vote when the primary season begins next January – and
promptly leaked to the media. One of the 15 questions the memo addressed
was: “Will President Clinton be a drag on the campaign?” The suggested
answer was: “Of course not. Americans give President Clinton very high
ratings and he is one of the most respected and beloved leaders in the
world.”
Another question asks: “How do you combat Clinton fatigue, or those who don’t
want the drama of the Clintons again?” Don’t even think of answering with
“Vote for Obama”. The correct answer is: “A lot of Americans will gladly
take the eight great years of economic prosperity and peace that the Clinton
administration delivered… We can do this again with experienced leaders like
Hillary at the helm.”
Hillary’s team has become adept at dealing with awkward issues, and the early
indications from the primary race could scarcely be more encouraging. A
recent Gallup poll gave Hillary a respectable 54% approval rating, with Bill
still widely popular at 60%. Despite the media fanfares that greeted Obama’s
candidacy, and his early fundraising successes, the younger black challenger
still trails Hillary by several points in national polls.
Yet the Clintons have plenty to worry about. They are bracing for the
publication later this week of a pair of potentially damaging new books on
Hillary, one of which is written by Carl Bernstein, the legendary Watergate
sleuth.
And then there is Al Gore, the former vice-president turned Oscar-winning
global-warming campaigner who continues to lurk at the margins of the race.
Gore has become a magnet for Democrats still nervous that voters may
ultimately turn their backs on a black or woman candidate. A standard-issue
white male millionaire, Gore recently described himself as “an unlikely but
not impossible” candidate for 2008.
As the race tightens, it is certain to get nastier. The Clintons have already
suffered one sucker punch: David Geffen, the billionaire Hollywood mogul who
was once one of their most generous supporters, has decided to back Obama
and has turned on his old friends with a vengeance.
“Everybody in politics lies,” Geffen told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times.
“But [the Clintons] do it with such ease it’s troubling.” Geffen described
Bill Clinton as “a reckless guy” who had given his enemies ammunition to
“hurt him and distract the country”. Then Geffen went for the jugular: “I
don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden
Bill Clinton has become a different person.”
We must not forget the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Morris is working on an
anti-Hillary TV documentary with R Emmett Tyrrell Jr, the editor of The
American Spectator and a mortal enemy of the Clintons ever since his
magazine first published claims in the 1990s that Arkansas state troopers
had procured women for Bill, then governor of the small southern state.
Tyrrell has already unleashed an opening blast in the shape of his latest
book, The Clinton Crack-Up, a genially partisan romp through the post-White
House life of Bill, who is variously referred to as a “hayseed huckster” and
“the most low-grade lout ever elected president”.
Tyrrell’s book attracted brief publicity for its claim that the ex-president
had an affair with Denise Rich, the ex-wife of the former fugitive financier
Marc Rich, who was among the felons controversially pardoned by Bill in one
of his last acts at the White House. Tyrrell likens the Clintons’ marriage
to “a typical European playboy’s marriage… rascal chasing skirts;
ever-vigilant busybody wife patrolling her husband’s recreations”. The
Clinton camp responded to the book by ignoring it, and it has had no
perceptible impact on Hillary’s standing.
Yet the book proved interesting in a way that Tyrrell might not have foreseen.
It perfectly sums up both the pained disbelief and reluctant admiration that
many rightwingers feel at Hillary’s political rise. “How can a dowdy,
middle-aged woman of matronly proportions with bags under her eyes after a
day at the Senate and a laugh that is a chilling cackle be described as
charismatic?” Tyrrell wonders. He has also written: “One must acknowledge
and even admire her strength, the indefatigable will at her core.” Other
rightwingers have been notable for their absence from the anti-Hillary fray.
Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to a banking fortune, spent more than $2m
investigating Clinton scandals throughout the 1990s, but one of his
right-wing associates recently admitted to The New York Times that “both of
us have had a rethink”.
Christopher Ruddy, who now runs a conservative website, acknowledged that
Clinton had “moderated and developed a separate image… the level of
intensity and anger toward Hillary is not getting to the level that it was
toward Bill Clinton when he was president”.
There’s plenty of time for intensity and anger. For now, the campaigns are
focused on Iraq, George Bush and the promise of a triumphant Democratic
charge to the White House in 2008. Should Hillary lead that charge? She is
running hard against Obama, but she is also running against something much
harder and more difficult to predict. Her real adversary in this race is
what America knows – or thinks it knows – about her unfathomable marriage to
Bill.
