“I don’t get it. Can you tell me what it is about this guy?”
—Hillary Clinton, 2008
Destiny beckoned Hillary Rodham Clinton. She had waited her turn. She had stood by her husband for the best and especially the worst—those most abhorrently humiliating moments. She had been the political spouse, a largely ceremonial role that she tried (and largely failed) to parlay into something greater. She had served for one full term as a senator from New York and handily won reelection for a second. Now was her time.
The timing suited the most well-known Democrat in the nation. The two-party system in the United States tends to swing like a pendulum, giving power to Republicans, then Democrats, and back and forth. It didn’t take high-paid political consultants—though she had plenty of them on her payroll—to determine that after two terms of the unpopular George W. Bush, a Democrat would have to be favored right off the bat to win the 2008 presidential election. And the Democrats needed her, of course—or at least that was clearly what she believed. They had lost the last presidential elections with wooden liberal elitists, Al Gore and John Kerry. Now they had a chance to make history with a woman.
According to the political punditry, as thick in Washington as cornfields are in Iowa, a Clinton nomination was inevitable. As one “prominent Democratic operative” told the New York Times in May 2006, “I do think she’s inevitable as the nominee, or pretty close to it. Put it this way: she’s as strong a front-runner as any non-incumbent presidential candidate has been in modern history.”1 Columnist Bob Herbert, who quoted that operative, would write, “Many of [the political] strategists and party bigwigs—not all, but many—speak as though there is something inevitable about Mrs. Clinton ascending to the nomination.”2
Few in the know gave any of Senator Clinton’s potential rivals much of a chance. There was Joe Biden, a creature of the Senate, who came from the tiny state of Delaware, a bumbler who’d immediately begin the election by apologizing for racially insensitive comments toward another rival, Barack Obama. There was Chris Dodd, the senator from liberal and small Connecticut, who didn’t have much of any notoriety outside the halls of Congress. There was John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate for Kerry’s run, who was considered a lightweight pretty boy who had probably run for president one time too many. There was Dennis Kucinich, who knew full well he wouldn’t be elected but who wanted to drag the race leftward and make sure the most liberal parts of the Democratic Party had a voice. There was Bill Richardson, who modeled himself after Bill Clinton but lacked the former president’s intelligence and charm while having similar baggage when it came to womanizing. And there was Barack Obama, the well-spoken senator from Illinois, who had served only a couple of years on the national stage and whose most famous moment to date was a speech he had given at the 2004 Democratic convention. He was running, the conventional wisdom went, to bolster his credibility for a more serious presidential bid in the future.
None of these people posed a threat, at least in the collective mind of Hillaryland. They were blind to the Democratic Party’s deep-seated resentment toward her and her husband, ignoring shots across their bow by people like Howard Dean. And while Hillary had been busy making friends with the Republicans in the Senate, the resentment from those most ideologically aligned with her only grew. All of which would soon become apparent to the president-in-waiting.
She announced on January 20, 2007, two years to the day before she expected to be sworn into office. Speaking on her campaign website from a gold-colored sofa in her adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., Hillary sat alone. Talking into the cameras, the multimillionaire portrayed herself as a champion of the middle class, telling viewers, “I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, and we believed in that promise. I still do. I’ve spent my entire life trying to make good on it, whether it was fighting for women’s basic rights or children’s basic health care, protecting our social security or protecting our soldiers.”
In her remarks she followed the guidelines set up by Mark Penn, a moderate Democrat who had served as Bill Clinton’s pollster for six years while he was in the White House. During that time, he became one of the president’s most prominent and influential advisors. In 2000, the Washington Post concluded in a news analysis that no pollster had ever become “so thoroughly integrated into the policymaking operation” of a presidential administration as had Penn.3 From 2000 on, Penn transferred his services from one CEO of Clinton, Inc. to the other, serving as Hillary’s chief pollster in both of her successful runs for the Senate. Few people were as close to both Clintons as he was, and he was said to have bragged about his access, “a source of jealousy and suspicion among other senior staff,” reported Vanity Fair.4
Penn believed Clinton’s campaign should rally a coalition of voters he called “Invisible Americans,” a group that included women and the middle class.5 She ran as the candidate of experience. A tough and policy-minded Democratic Margaret Thatcher. That strategy appeared to be successful, at least at the outset. For most of 2007 she led all polls by double-digit margins. One Gallup poll released in October, for example, had her ahead of Obama, 50 percent to his 21.6 In an accompanying release, Gallup’s chief pollsters noted that “Clinton holds a commanding lead among nearly every major subgroup of potential Democratic primary voters. Some of her strongest showings are among women, nonwhites, those in lower-income households, those with less formal education, and Southerners.”
What the polls didn’t detect was the deep underlying resentment toward her among the Democratic base. The first to break free from the Clinton chokehold were the millionaires of Hollywood—which was logical, since they more than anyone had the power and financial means to separate from the Clintons with little repercussion. David Geffen, the Hollywood mega-mogul and former Clinton donor, was among the early defectors, lashing out at the Clintons in personal terms in a dishy interview published by Clinton nemesis Maureen Dowd, the snarky New York Times columnist. He labeled Hillary’s campaign “overproduced and overscripted,” in Dowd’s words. The years of Clintonian mendacity had not been forgotten. “Everybody in politics lies,” he said, “but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”7
As one high-dollar Democratic donor explained to me, again under condition of anonymity, she and her friends felt betrayed by President Clinton. They felt like he had the perfect opportunity: It was a time between the end of the Cold War and before September 11, 2001. It was, for the first time in years, a period of relative peace. And markets were booming—the Internet was taking off, job growth was explosive, and there was much hope. It was Bill Clinton who was president over all this, a talented and impressive smooth-talking Southerner, and his liberal allies hoped that he could use the moment to accomplish big things—universal health care and a lasting liberalism. They were hoping that he’d be to Democrats what Ronald Reagan had become to Republicans. And instead he squandered it. Because he couldn’t keep his pants on—and got caught with the intern. Because he couldn’t run a White House without persistent and crippling chaos. And because in reality he never lived up to the potential so many of his supporters saw in him. Hillary, when she finally hit the trail, wouldn’t live up to the billing, either. Those willing to toss her overboard just needed to find another captain to steer their ship. They found him in the bitter cold of Iowa.
For whatever reason, the prim midwesterners of Iowa had never really warmed to the Clintons. Lingering memories of the Lewinsky scandal and the Clintons’ other personal foibles did little to help. Unlike nationwide polls, where Clinton still enjoyed a wide lead, she was in a dogfight in the state with John Edwards, who had been working Iowa for years, and a surprisingly confident Barack Obama. In mid-2007 some polls had her behind both men. Worrying about the potential for a surprise loss for the “inevitable” nominee, a senior Clinton campaign aide, Mike Henry, suggested she bypass the state altogether. The memo suggesting that Clinton turn her back on Iowans, which was leaked to the New York Times by a rival campaign, only made Clinton’s prospects in the state that much shakier.8
On January 3, 2008, a state that was over 90 percent white propelled Barack Obama to a shocking victory, demonstrating nationwide that the country was ready to elect an African American to the White House. (As polls had been predicting, Clinton found herself with a humiliating third-place finish.)
The Iowa victory made the prospect of the first African American president more of a reality than ever—and those eager to shuck themselves of the Clintons climbed aboard the Obama bandwagon almost instantly. Suddenly Hillary was facing a totally different race. Her once-strong lead in New Hampshire, which was to hold the next contest, crumbled. On the eve of the balloting, she was behind Obama in some polls by as many as 10 points. As CNN reported, “That’s a dramatic reversal from the last CNN/WMUR New Hampshire poll taken after Christmas and just before the Iowa caucuses, when Clinton beat Obama in electability by a two to one margin.”9 Just like that, Hillary Clinton was inches—or to be precise, one more election—from her political grave.
Her advisors knew she would never recover from a second consecutive defeat by a political novice. If Obama won both early contests, along with the likelihood of a third victory in the African-American-vote-rich South Carolina, which was the next primary on the calendar, then the race would be all but over. She would almost certainly be out of the race within days—her money would dry up, her endorsements would disappear. She would be what her husband never was, even in his (many) embarrassing moments on the national stage: a loser. And to make the sting worse, the final blow would be struck by the people of New Hampshire, the same voters who had revived her husband’s political fortunes during his 1992 campaign for the presidency, when he battled charges of adultery and draft dodging. Worse for Clinton, CNN’s pollsters reported that Obama had polled even with Clinton among female voters, “a voting bloc that she once dominated in the polls.”10
So she did what a woman is never supposed to do in national politics. She cried before dozens of television cameras. Intended or not, the moment touched the shriveled hearts of the Democratic voters who were abandoning her. The frosty shrew, as she was characterized in focus groups, showed she had a heart after all.
Up until that point, Mrs. Clinton ran as the Queen of the Democratic Establishment. She was programmed, protected, and robotic. Which is to say her campaign was almost from the outset on the wrong footing.
Her performance in 2008 won bipartisan scorn from veteran political pundits. “She’s always been a problematic candidate,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy tells me. “Her 2008 race was not very impressive. She kind of blew the lead to Obama.”
“I actually thought that when she was off the script, she was much better than when she was on the script,” says Bob Shrum. “Now, part of that was because the script was entirely wrong. She ran as a candidate of restoration in a period of change. . . . The day before the New Hampshire primary, when she cried, and people said, ‘Oh my God, she cried. It’s a disaster,’ I think voters liked it, and said, ‘I’ve seen a glimpse of who she really is.’ ”
Defying the polls and defeating Barack Obama by 2.5 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary, the Clintons also had defied death. Again. The most remarkable political comeback in American history journeyed forward, onward, upward, the presidency still in Hillary’s reach. The key to her comeback, which startled most Washington reporters, was women, who at the last minute switched back to Clinton by a margin of 13 points over Obama. “Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice,” Hillary proclaimed to an enthusiastic crowd in Manchester. “I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I’m so glad that you responded. Now together let’s give America the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me.”
For the first time since entering the race, Hillary Clinton was back on track. But first she had to get past Barack Obama—the guy she credited herself with helping get elected to the U.S. Senate only three years earlier.
Never one with a keen political antenna, Hillary was more confused than angry by Obama’s improbable rise. At a private dinner in Los Angeles shortly after her come-from-behind New Hampshire victory, she put it bluntly. “I don’t get it,” she said. She managed a passable imitation of Obama’s speaking style—hitting just the right notes of haughtiness passing for sincerity, and mocking his content-free happy talk—“We’re the change we’ve been waiting for.” That was the kind of speech a graduating college student might make—not a serious candidate for the highest office in the land. In fact it sounded a lot like a young Hillary Rodham at Wellesley College in 1969. She grimaced at the insanity of it all.
For Hillary Clinton’s supporters knew something about her colleague that many other Democrats seemed to (or wanted to) miss: As a politician, Obama was overrated to a perhaps unprecedented degree. As a person, he was a bloodless bore. In fact, Hillary’s own public caricature—arrogant, ponderous, chilly—was not really how she came across to her friends. Those adjectives did, however, describe the private just-above-room-temperature Obama. Perfectly.
Voters got a glimpse of the real Obama in the days before the New Hampshire primary. When Mrs. Clinton was bluntly asked by a moderator why voters didn’t seem to like her as much as Obama, her rival was given an opportunity to say something cheerful and gracious. Instead Obama responded with faint, seemingly mean-spirited praise. “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” he said coldly. It was another Rick Lazio moment—another man patronizing her, and the Clinton campaign made the most of it in New Hampshire.
In general, however, the woman angle seemed to fail her, too. Hillary had based her campaign on the belief that the country would rally to the First Woman President—a modern-day Eleanor Roosevelt finally making it to the Oval Office. Instead they chose to make a different kind of history.
“I don’t get it,” she said again, really pressing for the logic. “Can you tell me what it is about this guy?”
“With all due respect, ma’am,” a friend at the dinner replied, “a lot of it is that he’s not you.”
This infuriated the senator even more, probably because it was true. Obama was the beneficiary of the long if subterranean sense of grievance that Democrats felt toward both Clintons, her husband in particular. A grievance that did not dissipate during her years in the Senate or his time out on the hustings, campaigning for Democrat after Democrat. Many senior Democrats had felt used, lied to, embarrassed, and resentful from the first Clinton era. They were tired of the intimidation tactics of hatchet men like James Carville and Terry McAuliffe, who would cut them in public or in private if they ever violated the Clinton omertà. They resented the cavalier treatment toward allies who were no longer of use to them. Stephanopoulos, for example, was now a nonperson to the Clintons. As was Al Gore, who’d served Bill Clinton loyally for eight years, but who’d challenged him over the Lewinsky scandal and his ethics in an explosive fight that, according to multiple aides and published reporting, left both fuming.
Most members of the political press were tired of the Clintons, too. They long had been victims of rough treatment and sharp elbows from the First Family’s media handlers—and the ever-looming threat of being frozen out by the Clintons, and their careers stunted, if they deviated too far from what the Clintonistas felt was fair game. A prime example of this tendency involved the commentator David Shuster, who dared to raise questions about the crown jewel of the Clinton family—their beloved and sheltered daughter, Chelsea. Shuster’s brush with the Clintons has never before been fully reported, but the story offers a textbook example of the Clintons’ willingness to manipulate and punish disfavored reporters.
As the 2008 campaign turned into a delegate-by-delegate dogfight all the way to the Denver convention, the Clinton campaign had pulled out a secret weapon to try to kick things back into gear: the heretofore reclusive Chelsea Clinton. She of course had grown up in the White House, but had long been sheltered by an off-limits rule to which the press and other Washington fixtures by and large strictly adhered. Few forgot the kerfuffle that resulted when John McCain, in one of his famously acerbic moments, joked at a private fund-raiser, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Her father is Janet Reno.”11 The senator quickly apologized.
The hands-off policy had now been managed to such an extreme that most reporters even extended it to a time when a now-grown-up Chelsea inserted herself into the political spotlight. In 2008, for example, her mission was to pressure so-called superdelegates—unpledged delegates to the Democratic convention who could, in theory, sway the outcome of the nominating process—of primary states into supporting her mother.
“Hey, don’t commit yet, we want you to wait,” Chelsea would tell the superdelegates, who were surprised and startled to hear from the former first child.
Shuster was a fill-in host and political commentator for MSNBC. A telegenic forty-one-year-old, he’d been in broadcasting for nearly two decades. Shuster wanted to do a story for the liberal cable news network on Chelsea’s involvement in the campaign. It was novel, after all, and more than anything he just thought there was news value in figuring out what exactly she was telling these superdelegates in these phone calls.
So he asked her himself. At a South Carolina campaign event, Shuster got his moment and pulled Chelsea aside.
“Hey, do you want to chat?” Shuster asked her. “Can I ask you a couple of questions about what you’re doing with the superdelegates?”
Unsurprisingly, Chelsea declined. “Nah, I really don’t want to talk about it.” This was the kind of rejection a veteran reporter like Shuster is used to—news subjects, especially political ones, prefer to manage the press by bringing them the story. They don’t usually like being asked cold what they themselves are up to.
The encounter was seconds-long, perfunctory, and otherwise meaningless. At least to Shuster. But the next day, Shuster received a phone call from the Clinton campaign.
“Stay away from Chelsea,” warned a gruff Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.
“What?” Shuster asked.
“She is off-limits,” Wolfson replied. “She is not, you know—you are not allowed to just go up and talk to her.”
By now most reporters covering the Clinton campaign were prepared for Wolfson, a tough Clinton loyalist who could play hardball. Having worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 election to the U.S. Senate and her 2006 reelection, Wolfson returned in 2008 to direct communications on her White House campaign. For the first part of the election, Wolfson played a fairly conventional role in a fairly conventional campaign. But as Clinton’s losses to Obama started to pile up in early 2008, Wolfson’s style appeared increasingly desperate. In April, he raised questions about Obama’s relationship with the American terrorist Bill Ayers. He was ferocious in his defense of Chelsea Clinton.
“Look,” Shuster recalls telling Wolfson, “she’s perfectly capable of defending herself and saying, ‘No,’ politely, as she did. And that’s fine. If she didn’t want to comment that’s fine, but you guys are sort of jumping down my throat. . . . She’s twenty-seven years old.”
“Well, she’s the president’s daughter. You need to be respectful,” Wolfson said, ending the call as quickly and bizarrely as it began.
Looking back on the encounter years later, Shuster still remembers what he thought: “Wow!” Never before had he been warned so harshly to steer clear of a campaign surrogate—of someone who was on the campaign trail publicly making the case for a candidate.
But Shuster was a busy guy, and campaigns are busy times, so he carried on. The importance of that phone call and the implicit warning not to talk about Chelsea was missed.
A couple of days later, February 7, 2008, Shuster found himself filling in for host Tucker Carlson’s short-lived show, Tucker. Before the program, as Shuster was going over some segments, an MSNBC executive nonchalantly asked, “Well, how was your trip? What’s going on?”
“Oh, the trip was fine,” Shuster responded. “But I got the most bizarre reaction from the Clinton campaign when I tried to talk to Chelsea, just to see if she would be willing to talk about her phone calls to superdelegates.”
“What do you mean?” replied the MSNBC suit.
“Well, you know, Chelsea said calmly ‘No,’ she wasn’t going to talk and the next day I got this irate Clinton campaign staffer telling me to get the hell away from her. She’s off-limits.”
The executive offered a quick retort, “Oh, so it’s like they’re pimping her out.”
“That’s a great way to explain it,” Shuster said. They put her out there, making those phone calls, making her almost impenetrable in terms of media access. And by doing so they don’t have to explain anything that’s going on—it’s all upside, with nothing on the downside. The phrase stuck in his head.
That night, Shuster’s guests included radio talk show host Bill Press and the former CNN reporter Bob Franken. Shuster opened a segment about Chelsea’s efforts to woo the superdelegates and, addressing Press, said, “Bill, there’s just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea’s out there calling up celebrities, saying support my mom, and apparently she’s also calling these superdelegates.”
“Hey, she’s working for her mom,” Press said. “What’s unseemly about that? During the last campaign, the Bush twins were out working for their dad. I think it’s great. I think she’s grown up in a political family, she’s got politics in her blood, she loves her mom, she thinks she’d make a great president—”
“But doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Shuster asked, stealing the line the MSNBC suit had offered up earlier.
Press said no and defended Chelsea’s choice. Off camera, Bob Franken could be heard loudly laughing.
It was, in short, a typical cable TV news show: Nonsense uttered, nonsense replied. Except to the Clinton campaign. Throughout the evening, Shuster started to receive emails from Clinton campaign officials. “Did you really accuse Chelsea Clinton of being pimped out?” some of the emails asked. Shuster engaged in quick and rough email exchanges with Wolfson and Philippe Reines, Hillary’s spokesman and personal bulldog.
Chuck Todd, the ever-savvy NBC political analyst, observed the back-and-forth and offered a friendly warning. Like every other D.C. reporter, he knew the Clintons’ media operation well. He knew the stories and had felt the occasional sharp elbow. “Be careful,” he advised, “because they’re going to use this against you.”
The next morning, preparing for a previously scheduled appearance on the morning show on MSNBC, Morning Joe, Shuster was greeted by the president of the network. The visit, needless to say, was unusual.
“I’m starting to get a lot of these, you know, a lot of rumble about something you said about Chelsea,” Phil Griffin told Shuster.
Shuster couldn’t believe it. Sure, maybe the phrase “pimped out” sounded a little coarse to an older generation, but no one—at least no one under forty—could possibly think he was saying that Chelsea Clinton’s parents had literally pushed her into prostitution. Shuster was sure they knew exactly what he was saying.
“Can you just do an apology on Morning Joe?” asked Griffin, referring to the cable network’s morning talk program. It wasn’t really a question. “Just do an apology now to take care of it.”
At the end of Shuster’s appearance on Morning Joe, Shuster had his moment. “Can I take care of a housekeeping matter?” Shuster asked. “So you know how yesterday we ran this clip of women from The View. Chelsea Clinton had called them. Well, last night on Tucker’s show we ran the same clip, and then out of that I said a lot of wonderful things about Chelsea.”
It was a lead-up to an apology, and the lead-up took some time. He noted that the previous night he had said that we should all be “proud” of Chelsea, that Mike Huckabee praised the way the Clintons raised her, and that “everybody, all of us, love Chelsea Clinton.”
At this point, Morning Joe’s viewers could have been forgiven for wondering why David Shuster was going to such lengths to sing the praises of Chelsea Clinton. If they hadn’t heard his “pimped out” comment the night before, they surely would have thought Shuster’s morning tribute to the Clintons’ daughter was completely out of the blue. But then, finally, Shuster got to the point.
“But we also talked about the fact that Chelsea Clinton, as the campaign has acknowledged, she’s making calls to these superdelegates.” Still inclined to defend the substance of his comments from the night before, Shuster added that Chelsea’s calls “can be the unseemly side of politics.”
Finally, the apology came. Sort of. “Well, last night, I used a phrase, some slang about her efforts. I didn’t think that people would take it literally, but some people have, and to the extent that people feel I was being pejorative about the actions of Chelsea Clinton making these phone calls, to the extent that people feel I was being pejorative, I apologize for that. I should have seen people would, might, view it that way. And for that, I’m sorry.”
As apologies went, it was not exactly full-throated. Shuster put his “pimped out” comment in the context of his prior praise of Chelsea. He defended the substance of his underlying criticism. And then he finally got around to a sorry-if-anyone’s-been-offended-by-my-comments type of apology.
It was shortly after the appearance that Shuster received a memorable call from a friend on the Clinton campaign. “I’m going to give you a heads-up. The Clinton campaign is about to roll you.” Far too late, Shuster was being warned that this was a fight the Clinton campaign wanted—indeed, they believed this was a fight they needed.
Throughout the campaign, the problem the Clinton campaign kept coming up against was simple: The liberal base was more excited about Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton. The new guy showed more promise, showed more ability to carry out the liberal dream than the old-timer—Hillary Clinton. And the deep-seated liberal disappointment was given a powerful voice at the liberal network, MSNBC. “The Clinton campaign was pissed-off at MSNBC over coverage that they had thought had been unfair,” says someone who worked at MSNBC at that time. A prime source of ire was directed toward Chris Matthews, the loquacious host of Hardball, who’d been known to wax eloquent over Barack Obama on-air and make sexist comments about Hillary Clinton—“she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” “Madame Defarge,” “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” were just a few of the choice phrases Matthews used to assail her.
An MSNBC employee believed the Clinton team went so far as to orchestrate a letter-writing campaign against Matthews, especially after he said what many people long believed: “The reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a frontrunner, is that her husband messed around.” But Matthews was a little harder to roll because he was a far more entrenched figure, one of the low-rated network’s only marquee names.
“Chris got in some trouble internally,” a former employee says, “but I think MSNBC wouldn’t dare to take away Chris’s show.”
The morning of the Shuster apology, the Clinton campaign sent a nasty letter to Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. There was a presidential primary debate scheduled for February 26. MSNBC, part of the NBC News group, was the sponsor. And according to the letter Capus received, Hillary was considering pulling out of the next debate in protest over Shuster’s comment.
The entire network began to panic. “Keep in mind the financial situation,” says a source close to the situation at the time. MSNBC struggles for ratings, and it’s almost always a losing struggle—except on debate nights. “Debates make millions for the networks,” says the source. “They boost their ratings in a huge way.” If Hillary pulled out of the debate, there would be no debate. And “MSNBC couldn’t afford financially to lose a debate.”
Moments later, Shuster got called into a meeting with Phil Griffin, Steve Capus, and several other people, including the vice president for communications at MSNBC, Jeremy Gaines. The consensus from the corporate executives was “We’ve got to do something about this.” As one MSNBC employee puts it, people were “going apeshit.”
Shuster tried to push back. “Don’t you guys get the politics in this?” he asked the corporate bigwigs. “The Clinton campaign is trying to appeal to women, and trying to make Hillary a sympathetic figure.” They wanted to make it look like men, such as David Shuster, were beating up on the woman who could be the first female president of the United States.
Griffin, Capus, and company may have understood the politics of the situation, but it was irrelevant. This wasn’t a fight being waged on the merits. All that mattered was the February 26 debate.
So Shuster tried again, this time explaining to his bosses that Hillary was bluffing. “They need this debate more than Barack Obama does,” he pleaded. Obama was the front-runner and weaker debater, and Hillary’s debate performances were her best chance at snatching the momentum from him. “There’s no way Hillary is pulling out of this debate.”
“It doesn’t matter,” one executive responded. “I mean, we can’t even afford the possibility that they are not going to participate in this debate.”
Shuster disagreed, but by then he knew he was alone. Looking for a way out, he asked, “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to apologize directly to Hillary? To Chelsea?”
“Yeah, why don’t you do that,” one MSNBC suit said. “That would be a good start.”
Shuster got right on it. “Howard,” he said in a phone call to Howard Wolfson, “sorry about all the confusion over everything. I’d like to apologize directly to Hillary Clinton. Can you patch me through to Huma, on the campaign trail, so I can call and apologize directly to Mrs. Clinton?” Huma—the wife of then-congressman Anthony Weiner—was Hillary’s personal aide, a constant presence at the presidential candidate’s side.
“We’re not going to let you do that,” Wolfson replied.
“Okay. Um, all right,” Shuster said. “Can I send a note of apology?”
Wolfson relented, but only slightly. “If you want to email Huma, here’s her email.”
Moments later Shuster sent Huma an apology, hoping it would get directly to Hillary, who had supposedly cried, according to her aides, when she heard Shuster’s remarks about Chelsea. Shuster was hoping the direct apology would be the beginning of his rehabilitation.
It wasn’t.
In fact, it wasn’t even acknowledged. An hour later, Howard Wolfson held a press call with reporters. “The worst part of this,” he said, misleadingly, is that Shuster “has not apologized to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.”
“Fucker!” Shuster thought when he got wind of Wolfson’s call. “He wouldn’t let me apologize!”
Shuster wasn’t on the call, but he found out about it when the Associated Press called him up for a reaction. “Howard Wolfson just went off on you for not apologizing,” the AP reporter told Shuster.
“This is crazy!” said Shuster. Wolfson’s statement on the press call was of course technically true, but only because Wolfson had personally blocked all attempts at a direct apology. Like a laundry list of Clinton targets and scapegoats, from Paula Jones to Ken Starr, Shuster was seeing the lengths to which the Clintons have always gone to destroy inconvenient obstacles to their power, and he felt like a helpless pedestrian watching a speeding bus (driven by the Clintons) plow straight at him.
Meanwhile, as someone who worked at MSNBC at the time explains, “NBC is freaked out. The Clinton campaign is, like, ratcheting this up.” According to a source close to the situation, the Clintons called people on the board of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, to say, “Well, this is outrageous, how NBC News and MSNBC are handling this, and we need to do something about it.” Before long, GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, was on the phone with Jeff Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal at the time, and Steve Capus asking, “What the hell is going on over there? Why are my board members talking about the reporter, and why is your reporter referring to Chelsea as a prostitute?”
Since Shuster, though a liberal, had once been on the wrong team from the Clintons’ perspective—he had worked at Fox, reported there on the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, and had at the time maintained deep contacts in Ken Starr’s office—the Clintons, Shuster believed, took a special joy in trying to destroy him. Their decision to turn against him was a little like Paddy O’Neill’s decision in Patriot Games to turn against a female fellow member of the Irish Republican Army. “Paddy O’Neill can sleep at night,” says Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan. “In fact he probably enjoys the irony. She’s not Irish; she’s English.”
By that Friday afternoon, Steve Capus, Phil Griffin, and Jeremy Gaines told Shuster he’d have to accept a two-week suspension. “We need this debate,” said Capus, who was then president of NBC News. “You’re going to be the one who is going to have to jump on the grenade,” added Gaines.
“If NBC buckles on this,” asked Shuster, once he realized the time had passed for defending himself on the merits, “what kind of message does that send?”
The response was dismissive: “That’s not your job to worry about.” They weren’t there for a debate. The decision to make Shuster a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Clinton, Inc. had been made before Shuster walked into the room. The best they could do for their reporter was to promise to pay him during the suspension—so long as he kept it a secret.
Shuster’s colleagues tried to comfort him. Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, and even Clinton confidant Lanny Davis came to his defense—in private. (Davis would call several times to ensure that, regardless of what happened with the Clintons, he’d still have a relationship with Shuster.) And Tim Russert, the most respected reporter in the NBC News empire, candidly told Shuster. “I know what’s going on.” Russert had been through the same sort of games before he grew too powerful for politicos to play games with, and he assured Shuster, “Someday we’re going to have a beer and laugh about this.” (Russert would suddenly pass away before the two ever had a chance to laugh about it over beers.)
The Clintons, however, weren’t finished. As Chuck Todd had warned, sure enough the exchange of emails between the Clinton campaign and Shuster was leaked by the Clinton campaign to Politico, and organizations like Media Matters, run by Clinton ally David Brock, whipped up liberal fear. The story took a long time to die, because the Clintons didn’t want it to die.
After two weeks, David Shuster returned to the airwaves, but he felt he never fully recovered from the harm to his standing at the network. Shuster believed he had once been “seen as some sort of straight-shooter, take-no-prisoners” political commentator, but that was before the fights with management and the bad-mouthing by someone of Hillary Clinton’s prestige. After the “pimped out” affair, Shuster believed his bosses thought he “was some kind of a hothead.”
Whether Shuster could have handled the situation better is debatable. Should he have apologized more enthusiastically on Morning Joe? Probably. Should he have tried harder to more quickly apologize directly to Hillary and Chelsea? Maybe. There was, after all, nothing stopping him from offering his regrets to them over the air. It’s unclear, however, whether anything Shuster could have done would have made a difference, because with the Clintons, one couldn’t be sure whether their outrage was sincere or feigned for political purposes. What is clear is that the Clintons saw a political opportunity and seized it with the desperate tenacity they’d shown countless times when their backs were against the wall. Consider what their character assassination of David Shuster accomplished. In a matter of days, they silenced any criticism of Chelsea’s refusal to answer questions about her role in lobbying superdelegates. More important, they appealed to female voters by making Hillary and Chelsea look like persecuted victims of men. Finally, they sent a message to the media: You may like Obama more than Hillary, but you’d better watch what you say, because we have the power the destroy you.
To deliver their message, a popular ex-president, the nation’s most famous senator, and their powerful friends bullied a relatively obscure reporter with powerless friends and spineless bosses. While they were at it, the press and public were misled about his attempts to apologize. And Chelsea was used not just to lobby superdelegates, but also to portray themselves as victims of a malicious media and score political points with the public.
Of course, the biggest way to hit Shuster and MSNBC would have been to actually boycott the MSNBC debate. That would have been, in Godfather terms, the equivalent of “going to the mattresses.” But punishing Shuster wasn’t really the Clintons’ goal. He was just the collateral damage of their opportunism, and because Hillary needed the debates more than her front-running opponent did—and was better at them than he was—a boycott of the debate would have hurt Hillary more than it would help, just as Shuster had told his bosses. As someone who worked at MSNBC at the time says, “Their strategy was so transparent and weak that I think calling it a mafia tactic does a disservice to mafia families.”
After Shuster’s gaffe, his subsequent apology, and the announcement of his suspension, Hillary Clinton went through eleven state elections and almost a month before she won another state primary. If her attempt had been to win votes at David Shuster’s expense, she had failed.
As the 2006 midterm election neared, Josh Green, an enterprising reporter who was then with the Atlantic magazine, began to consider 2008. Green pitched his editors a story on the Clintons, and when given approval, he turned to Clinton’s Senate office with the pitch: He was going to study her entire Senate career up to that point (nearly one full term served) and dive in deeper and more comprehensively than any reporter had done until that point.
The piece was going to be written regardless, and the Clinton team figured that if they cooperated with the story, they would be able to shape it. Besides, politically, Green fits the mold of a liberal journalist, dating back to his time as an editor at left-of-center publication Washington Monthly and as a staff writer at the devoutly liberal American Prospect, where he wrote about “frustrating Republican talking points” and the “nauseating roller coaster ride” of the Bush presidency. It helped, too, that he approached Senator Clinton’s office from the Atlantic, which might not have been as overtly liberal as the other places Green worked but would on its face suggest friendly coverage.
So Hillary’s Senate staff let Green in. For the most part, they weren’t wrong: It was overall a flattering piece that detailed how Hillary had won over skeptical Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate and became, against all odds going into the job, pretty well liked among her colleagues.
Clinton, Green uncovered, enthusiastically attended the Senate prayer group, which was dominated by Republican senators who had pretty much all over the years spoken out staunchly against her husband when he was president. Some had even a history of speaking out against Hillary. The piece was filled with great tidbits like that, giving a full picture of how Clinton had been spending her time in the Senate.12
But not all of it was completely flattering. “Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say,” Green concluded.
It was this conclusion that infuriated the Clinton camp, and in a retaliatory mode, they’d move to kill his next Clinton story.
“Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland,” the Virginia-based trade publication Politico would report a few months later. “So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.
“Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said,” reported Ben Smith of Politico.13
That killed GQ story was written by Josh Green, the same reporter who had cast doubt on Hillary’s tenure in the Senate. It is how the Clintons operate with the media, controlling the narrative and dictating the story.
Some Clinton apparatchiks did come to the senator’s defense and advocated her candidacy—the always reliable James Carville and the supposedly unaligned website Media Matters for America, among the most prominent.
One of Carville’s broadsides—“If she gave [Obama] one of her cojones, they’d both have two”—led Obama to rebut the former Clinton spokesman turned CNN commentator directly. “Well, you know, James Carville is well known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about,” Obama replied. “I intend to stay focused on fighting for the American people because what they don’t need is 20 more years of performance art on television.”
By law, Media Matters for America is a tax-exempt organization that cannot back political candidates. Nonetheless, the David Brock–run operation became an all-but-official supporter of the Clinton campaign, there to “expose” Obama supporters in the press and defend her against controversies of all kinds.
In December 2007, for example, Media Matters went after MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, as they would throughout the election season, for his apparent preference for Obama over Clinton. So determined was the organization that it examined “every evaluative remark Matthews made on MSNBC’s Hardball during the months of September, October, and November” and concluded that Matthews was “extremely hostile toward Hillary Clinton.” On January 4, 2008, the organization defended Clinton against a panelist’s assertion on Fox News that her “nagging voice” was turning off men. Again, on March 11, 2008, it defended her against accusations that she had implied Obama was a Muslim. (She had denied he was a Muslim during a television interview while slyly adding, “as far as I know.”) “When people suggest that the press employs a separate standard for covering Clinton, this is the kind of episode they’re talking about,” the website complained. “There simply is no other candidate, from either party, who has had their comments, their fragments, dissected so dishonestly the way Clinton’s have been.”
The conservative-leaning website the Daily Caller would later report that “[f]ormer employees of the liberal messaging organization have told [the Daily Caller] that Brock, a well-known supporter of the former first lady, was often in communication with her presidential campaign during 2008 and was in regular email contact with longtime Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal as recently as 2010. . . . Indeed, from the time that Obama announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, until Edwards dropped out on January 30, 2008, Media Matters ran 1199 posts for Clinton and only 700 for Obama. 378 posts mentioned Edwards.”
These were the exceptions, however. Much of the media, enamored with Obama’s candidacy and (momentarily) relieved at the prospect of paying back the Clintons for a decade of bullying and rough treatment by their media team, seemed only delighted to pile on. The defections of the media and Senate Democrats hurt the Clintons. But Hillary also had another surprising weakness or, more accurately, the same old vulnerability that had dogged her for more than a decade: a renegade husband.