On March 21, 2010, Bill Clinton gave what amounted to an encore performance in front of one of his favorite audiences, the Washington press corps. The scene was the 125th anniversary of the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner, one of those rare moments when the nation’s leaders and the media that covers them get together to break bread at a swank hotel in the nation’s capital—and, most important, to make fun of each other. The Gridiron dinner is essentially a fancier version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and is considered more exclusive; it’s easily one of the tougher tickets to secure, even for an average member of Congress. It may be the last dinner in Washington where it is mandatory for men to wear white tie and tails. Obama, who, as is his anti-Washington MO, was skipping the Washington ritual for the second year in a row, had asked Clinton to stand in for him after many members of the Gridiron Club berated the White House for its lack of respect for one of the oldest media institutions in Washington.*
Most presidents hate these events but figure out a way to tolerate and even use them as persuasion tools with the Washington elite. However, these dinners, and especially those for the various other Washington clubs, made Obama’s eyes roll—more than most things—and he went out of his way to avoid them. Of course, the president’s inability to hide his disdain for the dinners only added to the (correct) perception of him as someone who loathed these Washington rituals. As a result, the White House was happy to facilitate Clinton’s pinch hit.
The Gridiron dinner is the type of event that best suits Clinton, a master orator who delivers a punch line better than most comedians and who has no qualms about making fun of himself at the same time he skewers the media. And indeed, he gave a tour-de-force performance that evening. But the former president’s appearance served as a reminder of the contrast between him and the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania, and that meant a reminder of the contrast between that resident and Hillary.
Of all the great Washington parlor games inspired by the Obama presidency—the second president in a row, after the famously reserved George W. Bush, who refused to engage in the traditional D.C. circuit of dinner parties and cocktail affairs—few generate as much intense gossip as the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They represent the future and past of the modern Democratic establishment: one a minority in a party increasingly reliant on minority voters, a cerebral urban liberal from a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1988; the other a southern populist able to connect not only with the emerging minority base but also with the white working-class voters who sent Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter to the White House.
Over the nearly six years that Bill and Hillary Clinton fought, then worked with, then worked for Barack Obama, a sort of relationship developed. After Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries, the Clintons and their allies were deeply resentful, as the Bushes had been of Reagan almost three decades earlier. But as Obama has grown into the Oval Office, the two sides have learned that they have to work together, and that this work can be to their mutual benefit.
Once established in Foggy Bottom and the White House, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama began forging an uneasy truce. They would meet weekly, in the course of national security briefings or high-level cabinet meetings, and occasionally more often than that. And it helped that the two actually kind of liked each other. They were more alike, in some ways, than either was like Bill. Obama and Hillary were both more cerebral, bookish, and organized, and both had to force themselves to be politicians. While Bill had the intelligence and curiosity that both Obama and Hillary had, he was much more of a natural at the campaign part of politics. In fact, he liked it. Neither Hillary nor Obama much liked campaigning, and the discomfort showed; both easily could have been university presidents, Supreme Court justices, or academic deans and probably have been just as happy. But they chose the world of elective politics, and while not naturals, their competitiveness drove their success. One senior White House aide recalled being startled when he walked into the Oval Office one day in the summer of 2009 to find Obama and Clinton sitting next to each other on a couch, laughing together at a private joke. One key bond the two had was the 2008 campaign, and there is a sense that some Obama staffers, even ones who still resented Clinton, thought the president felt that only Hillary actually understood the things about the White House bubble that he didn’t like and wanted to vent about.
There were bumps along the way, as one would expect of any relationship between two of the nation’s most powerful and popular figures. The White House, Clinton felt, tended to micromanage American diplomacy to an extent unprecedented in previous administrations. It’s one of the undertold stories of the first Obama term that at times the Obama national security team sometimes treated Clinton almost as a figurehead, and they certainly drove policy and the agenda. It was a White House decision, not Clinton’s, to make jump-starting the Middle East peace process a first-year priority. Clinton approved of Obama’s decision to tap former Maine senator George Mitchell, the respected international negotiator and veteran Washington insider who had helped her husband forge a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, to serve as a special envoy to the Middle East, but chafed at the fact that Mitchell reported to the White House, not the State Department. Nevertheless, she didn’t complain about the arrangement, though Mitchell was unable to restart negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. This was Hillary in a nutshell: even if she didn’t like the decisions, she saw herself as a team player.
By and large, Clinton made certain that her State Department worked hand in glove with the White House. Despite the deep fears of Obama’s most skeptical advisors, she spent her time executing administration policy rather than freelancing on her own or undermining the president. Their only clashes were over personnel, and even then they were few: Obama’s aborted effort to send Greg Craig to the State Department, where he served as director of policy planning during Bill Clinton’s administration, and Clinton’s leaden idea of bringing longtime political aide (and hatchet man) Sidney Blumenthal to Foggy Bottom. Blumenthal was a legendary practitioner of the dark arts of opposition research, and of spilling that research into the public domain at the opportune time. During the 2008 primary fight, right-wing Internet maven Matt Drudge unloaded a series of anti-Obama attacks, much of them supplied by the Clinton campaign—by, Gibbs and Axelrod believed, Blumenthal himself. Gibbs and Axelrod held few Clinton loyalists in lower regard than Blumenthal. They took their concerns to Obama, then to Rahm Emanuel. The chief of staff talked with Clinton and explained the White House’s deep reservations. Where Bill Clinton, famously loyal to a fault to some of his closest advisors, might have fought to keep Blumenthal aboard, Hillary decided her loyalty could only go so far. It wasn’t worth the fight, and Sidney Blumenthal was out of a job.
Obama and Clinton would never become confidants or friends, but in the Washington sense, that didn’t matter. They became close enough to share a joke, and to trust that neither was out to undermine the other.
Bill Clinton, however, took longer to win over.
Perhaps it was because the two presidents are such different kinds of people: Clinton is gregarious, having worked a million phone lines and shaken a million hands, having spent hours every day talking with senators and congressmen from both parties. He craves human contact; less charitable observers say Clinton is almost afraid to be alone. Obama is the opposite, a lone wolf much more at peace with himself and much more regimented in his actions and attitudes. It’s not uncommon for him to spend an evening at the White House, with headphones on and reading alone after his family has hit the hay. Clinton can vacillate between red-faced rage and childlike glee in the course of a single meeting; Obama advisors have trouble remembering more than a handful of times when their boss has shown any type of extreme emotion.
As two members of the most exclusive club in the world, Clinton and Obama both thought they understood what it took to be president of the United States. But their understandings were vastly different, and when they looked at each other, they saw little beyond the other man’s flaws. Clinton saw Obama as an unskilled retail, people-to-people politician who somehow got by with weak political skills, who was terrible at hand-to-hand campaigning, yet suddenly was a two-term president. Early on, Clinton felt no sympathy for Obama in spite of the loathing the right directed at him; after all, the right had so despised Clinton they had impeached him. For his part, Obama respected Clinton’s remarkable talents, but he saw in the forty-second president a deeply undisciplined soul. Clinton had all the tools required of a great president, but that lack of discipline ultimately prevented him from being truly great. If there’s one thing Obama has always prided himself on, it’s discipline, and he is perhaps a bit judgmental about undisciplined people around him. This is arguably why he and Bill Daley just never clicked in their president–chief-of-staff relationship; Daley’s management style is more Clintonesque.
With every frustrating day Obama spent in the Oval Office, stymied by reluctant or nervous Democrats, stopped in his tracks by recalcitrant Republicans, his attitude toward Clinton began to soften. And every time Republicans took what Bill Clinton believed was another unfair shot at Obama, his antipathy softened. Clinton still believed that Obama got easy treatment from the media, but he began to empathize about some of their shared experiences.
The turning point in their relationship grew out of one of those shared experiences. In 1994, riding the wave of an unpopular effort to reform the American health care system, Republicans won back control of Congress, delivering a major blow to Clinton’s hopes of an ambitious domestic agenda. In 2010, riding the wave of an unpopular but ultimately successful effort to reform the American health care system, Republicans delivered an even bigger thumping to the Democratic congressional majority than the party experienced in 1994. At that moment, Clinton came to truly sympathize with Obama. And Obama and his senior White House staff recognized that someone else had been in his position before, and that they might need Bill Clinton after all.
The disastrous 2010 midterms gave Obama an opportunity to rethink the structure of the White House he had built and the relationships and staff he had relied upon since his earliest days on the national scene. An introspective and isolated man by nature, Obama decided he needed to reach beyond the walls of the White House for perspective. On his own, with no input from his most trusted advisors, Obama set about scheduling meetings with Washington wise men from both parties, among them John Podesta; Tom Daschle; Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s last chief of staff and one of those Washington players who was partisan only to power and prided himself on having bipartisan relationships (he actually made it clear he wanted to replace Rahm as chief of staff); Vernon Jordan, the longtime Democratic wise man who was very tight with the Clintons but despite being an early African American power player inside the party had very little interaction with Obama; and Ken Mehlman, the Harvard Law School classmate of Obama’s who had managed George W. Bush’s re-election bid.
Obama’s staff was largely left out of these meetings. Pete Rouse handled the logistics, but the gatherings themselves were private, one-on-one discussions. Few knew they were taking place at all. At one point, Dan Pfeiffer, the communications director at the time, and David Axelrod, the senior strategist, were chatting outside the Roosevelt Room, just down the hall from the Oval Office, and were surprised when David Gergen walked out of the bathroom. Obama had summoned the CNN analyst and veteran bipartisan presidential advisor to both Reagan and Clinton to give him advice, too. And this was the puzzle that was sometimes Obama when it came to Republican outreach. The president loved to talk to Republicans around the country or to ex–Washington Republicans, to seek their advice and, frankly, hear them empathize with him about the extreme nature of the Tea Party. But talking to Republicans active inside the Beltway was another story entirely and something he seemed to avoid, almost afraid to hear what they believed. It was more comforting to hear from those who had left Washington.
Another person he summoned was the one who would turn out to give him the best advice, at least so believed the president. He reached out to the only other person in the world who had faced exactly the same situation in which he now found himself—a Democratic president forced, by dint of his own deeply unpopular policy positions, to work with a deeply conservative group of Republicans elected with a mandate to block his agenda, a president scrambling to save his legacy. Barack Obama in 2010 wanted to know how Bill Clinton in 1994 had done it.
For years, those in Clinton’s orbit had dropped hints that Obama needed to solicit his predecessor’s opinions more often. And Clinton himself had at various times mentioned his regular phone calls with George W. Bush during Bush’s presidency, a barely veiled reminder that he still had advice to give. That Obama rarely seeks advice from anyone didn’t placate Clinton: he was Bill Clinton, not just anyone else!
On December 10, 2010, they met privately in the Oval Office for more than an hour. Obama had struck a deal with House Republicans on an extension of the Bush tax cuts, an acknowledgment that the GOP had thumped the Democratic majority, and he needed Clinton’s help to get reluctant Democrats on board. Beyond that, though, Obama sought Clinton’s advice: How should he navigate the two years ahead? How should he reorganize his White House in order to be a more effective president? Obama never told his staff what Clinton had told him. But judging by the changes the president did make, it was clear that the emphasis was on generally sticking with the folks who had gotten him there and on focusing immediately on re-election. If there was one thing Clinton supposedly regretted about some of his reorganization decisions going into 1996, it was bringing in too many new voices, including that of Dick Morris, whose occasional good advice wasn’t worth all the bad mojo he brought with him.
There was one thing Clinton told Obama that the current president wanted said publicly. So, once they’d finished chatting, the two presidents meandered through the West Wing in search of a journalist with a microphone. Talk about something Obama never would have done on his own…
Two presidents sharing the podium in the White House briefing room would be an unprecedented event, a startling contrast of old and new. Yet uncharacteristically for Obama, the coolheaded, methodical planner, the idea of barging into the press room on a quiet Friday afternoon in December was completely spontaneous. The unplanned nature of the impulse, and the fact that Obama would be asked questions for which he hadn’t prepared with his staff, would have scared the daylights out of any professional political operative. Unscripted remarks, in short, lead to mistakes.
But Obama’s team wasn’t worried about the president’s plan to share the podium with Bill Clinton, because at that particular moment they had no idea what was happening. In another part of the building, staffers were gathering for one of the seemingly endless number of holiday parties the White House throws every year.
Outside the press briefing room, Obama tried the handle. The door was locked, something the press office does once a “lid” is called. (That’s the White House code to the press indicating that no more public statements or presidential actions will be taking place; in other words, it’s a signal that the folks stuck working at the White House covering the president can go home. Of course, many press folks don’t leave until after 6:30 p.m., when the network newscasts begin.)
Obama and Clinton bounded up the few steps between the locked door and the press office. Most staffers were at the party; only Katie Hogan, a young assistant press secretary, had been left behind to field emergency calls. Robert Gibbs was in his office, the door closed. Suddenly Hogan had two U.S. presidents standing above her.
“Do you know how to open up the briefing room?” Obama asked.
“Yeah, can you help us unlock it?” Clinton added.
Gibbs’s ears perked up. “What are you guys up to?” he asked, walking out of his office.
“We’re looking for some reporters,” Obama said. Obama wanted Clinton to talk about the tax compromise—the two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. This was going to be among his first major broken promises as president, and he needed help to sell the decision and to make some Democrats believe him when he pledged to make this the last full extension of them. Watch any rerun of a 2008 Democratic presidential primary debate and you’ll hear Obama along with every other candidate talk about not whether they would repeal the Bush tax cuts for the rich, but when. Every plan those candidates in 2008 proposed they claimed they would pay for with the money “saved” from repealing the Bush tax cuts. But with the economy still struggling and Republicans about to be in charge of the House, Obama knew he didn’t have the political capital to deal with this at the time; his best option was to punt for two years and gamble that he’d win re-election, whereupon he could fulfill the repeal promise.
“Can you guys give me about five minutes?” Gibbs asked. He practically sprinted down to the briefing room, where he flipped a switch to turn on the microphone at the podium. Hogan made an announcement over the public-address system in the West Wing. Reporters, she said, should get to the briefing room right away. Many had gone for the day because of the lid, but it was not yet 6:30, which meant that reporters from the major outlets, both TV and print, were still hanging around, working on their stories. Little did they know that they were about to have a new lead story to write and run with.
Gibbs furiously pounded out an e-mail to every staffer he could think of, though he didn’t have time to summon everyone. Pfeiffer was at the Christmas party; he had to leave his parents, who were in town visiting. When Obama and Clinton entered the briefing room, some White House staffers learned what was happening from breaking news alerts that hit their BlackBerrys. (Yes, the White House staff still use Blackberrys, because iPhones and other smartphones are not considered national security–safe.)
In the briefing room some reporters, accustomed to long waits for the president, asked Gibbs how long it would be. It was about 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, and they wanted to go home. “How long?” Gibbs replied, hardly believing what he was saying. “They’re just on the other side of the door!”1
Obama took the podium first. The cable networks broke into their regularly scheduled programming. “It’s a slow news day so I thought I’d bring the other guy in,” Obama said as he waltzed in, not bothering with the pomp that dominated other interactions with the media.2
“I thought, given the fact that he presided over as good an economy as we’ve seen in our lifetimes, that it might be useful for him to share some of his thoughts,” Obama announced. “I’m going to let him speak very briefly, and then I’ve actually got to go over and do some—just one more Christmas party. So he may decide he wants to take some questions, but I wanted to make sure that you guys heard from him directly.”
Obama’s definition of “very briefly” turned out to be about eleven minutes. When the first reporter asked a question, Obama saw his chance to bolt. “I’ve been keeping the First Lady waiting for about half an hour, so I’m going to take off,” Obama said, cleverly eluding having to answer an actual question.
“Well I don’t want to make her mad, please go,” Clinton said with a laugh.3
With Obama gone, one might be forgiven for thinking the 1990s had suddenly come roaring back. Clinton leaned on the podium, the White House seal in front of him, one arm resting on the other, hand on his chin, as he’d done so many times during his eight years in office. Ann Compton, George Condon, and Mark Knoller, three veteran reporters who’d had seats in the briefing room when Clinton was in office, asked questions; Clinton called on them by name. The only things that might remind viewers that Clinton was an interloper were his white hair and the large high-definition television over his left shoulder displaying the White House’s web address.
Clinton’s definition of “very briefly” was different from Obama’s. He took almost a dozen questions, defending the Obama administration’s economic record in the manner only Clinton could. (Obama advisors even came to admit that for all his flaws, Clinton knows how to spin the story of the economy better than any living political figure.) The courtship was far from complete, but advisors to both men believed it would be politically beneficial if their bosses, the two most successful Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt, maintained at least a veneer of friendliness—even if it was only in the Washington sense of friendship. Now, in the modest-sized briefing room, Bill Clinton held court. In a few years Barack Obama would cede the stage to the former president yet again—and by then, much more would be at stake.
In the fall of 2011, Obama’s brain trust was busy creating a campaign plan that would put their man on a path toward re-election. Given the president’s low approval ratings, theirs would be no easy task. Only two men alive had achieved what Obama was setting out to do—win a second term as president of the United States. One of them, George W. Bush, had in effect paved the way for Obama’s election in the first place. Bush’s second term had been mired in the mismanaged Iraq War, the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina, and a recession that so badly tarnished the Republican brand that Obama found the wind at his back when he ran in 2008 (and then found his first term consumed by that very recession).
The other was William Jefferson Clinton. In the history of the Republic, Clinton was one of just five Democrats—along with Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt—to win two presidential elections. That’s some rare air. And Clinton was no ordinary politician, but the best politician of his generation; he had a feel for the national mood, a feel for legislative and electoral politics, and he’s probably among the better political strategists alive. Oh, and let’s not forget his ability to get out of a personal political crisis.*
Clinton thus seemed like the perfect person to give advice to Obama’s team. In addition, since former presidents’ approval ratings always go up, Clinton could serve as an important validator, a high-profile surrogate able to make the case for Obama’s second term, especially on the economy and with some wavering older white voters.
The only trouble was that the former president felt a deep personal antipathy toward Obama’s senior advisors. Four years after Obama won the White House, the current and former president had bridged some of the personal divides between them, but the scars remained, especially over the South Carolina primary. Bill Clinton, once called America’s “first black president,” has never gotten over what happened to him that primary week down south in early 2008. Trying to downplay Obama’s win in South Carolina, Bill Clinton made an offhand remark to the press traveling with him that Jesse Jackson had won the South Carolina primary back in the 1980s, and that it had led to nothing for him. The way Clinton said it, or at least the way Team Obama decided to interpret it, gave the impression that Clinton was implying that Obama had won the primary only because he’s black—after all, even Jesse Jackson won this primary; how else do you explain it? so Clinton was trying to say. While Clinton denies to this day that he was being dismissive of black voters, it certainly came across as bitter and condescending, especially to black voters in South Carolina. The incident served essentially to win over whatever chunk of the black vote Hillary had been receiving—in this case from older black voters with positive memories of the Clinton years. The way this incident with Bill blew up, it ended up serving almost as a rallying point for the Obama campaign as it marched to victory on Super Tuesday a few weeks later.
So upset was Bill Clinton at being fingered as the reason Hillary struggled during the February primaries that it took him years to get over it. He held certain folks in personal contempt, including key members of the press (whom he blamed for carrying Obama’s water) and people in the Obama inner circle.
But that was then, and now Team Obama needed to do whatever it took to keep Bill happy. As they worked on their campaign plan, political decorum and common sense demanded that Obama’s advisors keep Clinton in the loop and work to get him on board. To start that process, Jim Messina, Axelrod, and Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director who headed the Democratic National Committee, took the time to fly up to New York to meet with Clinton in his Harlem office.
Axelrod was late to the meeting, the result of a delayed flight out of Washington. When he did show up, it was clear that Clinton was uncomfortable with his presence. Clinton would add the occasional reference to the unpleasantness of 2008—“You know, I used to be able to help you with the African American vote,” he told the Obama advisors. “But after South Carolina, I can’t help you there anymore.” What struck the two other participants most forcefully, though, was that Clinton wouldn’t even make eye contact with Axelrod.
In the summer of 2011, Gaspard called Doug Band, Clinton’s protective (and sometimes vindictive) right-hand man, to ask for Clinton’s help. Gaspard wanted Clinton to host several fund-raisers for Obama and to campaign in key battleground states on his behalf. Band made it clear that Clinton would need a little more wooing. Why doesn’t Obama take Clinton out to Andrews Air Force Base, just outside the Beltway, for a round of golf—so it was suggested. So he did. Obama called Clinton to extend the invitation the following day. On September 24, the two men hit the links;4 the few photographs the White House released showed Clinton, glasses on, virtually lecturing Obama, who didn’t exactly seem to be enjoying himself.5 Obama grinned and bore it, but it was an outing that was not repeated—which tells you more about how forced the arrangement at the time was. And yet that day paid the necessary campaign dividends. Obama asked Clinton for help on his re-election campaign, and Clinton agreed. But Clinton had made his point; he wanted Obama to have to work for his help. Obama sought advice, and Clinton dispensed it freely.
The first joint Obama fund-raiser Clinton attended demonstrated the generational bridge the two men were forging. It was held at the home of Terry McAuliffe, one of Clinton’s biggest backers, who had enthusiastically jumped on the Obama bandwagon as the president’s re-election campaign began in earnest. Of course, McAuliffe had his own motives—he wanted to be governor of Virginia, something that would happen only if the Obama coalition showed up on Election Day 2013. To guarantee Obama’s cooperation, he needed to be all in. McAuliffe was an old-school transactional operator who got rich in Washington the way many had, by mixing political and business connections to his own benefit.
And McAuliffe was the quintessential Washington power broker, his generation’s version of Vernon Jordan for the Democrats or Haley Barbour on the Republican side. A longtime Democratic Party fund-raiser, McAuliffe was bombastic, unafraid to tout (and sometimes exaggerate) his accomplishments, and perpetually in the know. He had raised so much money for Clinton that the president helped ensure that McAuliffe would be made chairman of the Democratic National Committee as one of the last political acts of his presidency. Then McAuliffe proceeded to raise record sums at the DNC. If there could be a bridge between Clinton and the Obama campaign’s top strategists, it would be McAuliffe, who put a premium on the Democratic Party’s success.
Before the April 29, 2012, fund-raiser at McAuliffe’s palatial home in McLean, just across the Potomac from Washington, Clinton and Obama shared a private dinner—and Obama laid it on thick, thick enough that it actually moved Clinton. At the subsequent fund-raiser attended by five hundred major donors, he ignored virtually all of his prepared remarks, which were filled with perfunctory nods to Obama, the way a generic party leader praises another generic Democrat. Clinton had been planning to merely go through the motions, as a favor to McAuliffe and, more important, Hillary. Instead, Bill Clinton gave a full-throated defense of Obama’s leadership and made the case for a second term in a way that no Democrat had done to date; Obama took notice, not just of the remarks but of the reaction of those mostly Clinton partisans at the McAuliffe home.
Perhaps as tellingly, from then on, Obama began to use Clinton in his stump speech, citing the forty-second president’s record of economic growth. For Obama, validating Clinton’s legacy was a political opportunity. For Clinton, it was the balm he had craved for so long. After all, Obama based most of his 2008 campaign—at least during the never-ending primary part—on not being Clinton. In 2008 the Clintons were the past, they (at least as the Obama campaign was telling it) were part of the overt politicization of Washington that was fraying the nation. In fact, the initial motivation to use the slogan “No Drama Obama” was its contrast with the Clintons, who seemed to be mired in a never-ending soap opera. But as 2012 was getting started, Obama was beginning to appreciate Clinton’s political skills, and he was trying to convince voters that he was Clinton ’96.
As it turned out, trying to emulate Clinton wouldn’t end with the 2012 election. Over the next six months, the rapport between Clinton and the Obama team grew markedly better. Even the relationship with Axelrod thawed a little. When Clinton traveled to Chicago to meet with Obama’s senior advisors and get an update on the campaign, Axelrod took the former president into a private room. He told Clinton he understood that there had been bad blood, and he apologized for the perceived slights. What kind of apology it actually was is unclear, but it was at a minimum one of those Washington apologies, meaning that Axelrod was apologizing for all the angst, for allowing things to get so personal so quickly back in 2008. Clinton is a serial forgiver, and he appreciated Axelrod’s sincerity. He’s one of those remarkable politicians who never forgets but can at least pretend to forgive—at the end of the day, he does view every slight as an opportunity. This can be his best and his worst quality, wrapped up in one.
As the campaign went on, Clinton’s voice would become a constant presence in Jim Messina’s ear. While Clinton may have harbored ill will toward Axelrod and others, Messina was different; he hadn’t been involved in the primary campaign, and Clinton respected his single-minded focus on the 270 electoral votes Obama would need to win a second term. And Messina spoke one of Clinton’s favorite languages: poll numbers. Clinton would frequently call with advice: he thought the campaign should be talking about Medicare and Medicaid, offering a more nuanced message on the federal budget, and campaigning in specific places in Florida. Clinton also helped persuade the Obama team to focus on the hard-line conservative positions Mitt Romney had been forced to take in the primary. It was Clinton, for instance, who steered the Obama campaign away from focusing on Romney as a flip-flopper. He thought labeling Romney a flip-flopper would only allow independents to believe Romney would take their side once in office. After all, Clinton himself was often labeled a flip-flopper by his GOP opponents in the 1990s, and it was something Clinton believed actually helped him be perceived as a moderate.
Obama had based much of his national rise on being the anti-Clinton, not just the anti-Bush. His doing something out of political necessity might be considered by some as Obama starting to change his ways. But actually, with further distance between the point the Obama-Clinton change happened in 2010 and, say, the gridlock of 2014, it’s clear Obama had Clinton in a box; it’s similar to what Obama does with a lot of staff and politicians in general. He puts them in boxes and rarely views them as helpful in other areas. With Clinton, it means Obama views him as simply one of the world’s expert campaigners. Because while Obama wanted and needed Clinton’s help for 2012, it’s not like he’s been as needy of Clinton when it comes to dealing with Congress. It also exposes another truth about Obama: candidate Obama is more nimble and accommodating than President Obama. There’s something about a campaign that seems to bring out the best in Obama’s instincts, both internally on decisions and externally on the trail. But he has struggled to channel that same drive to win on the trail back in Washington. Bill Clinton had both ambitions.
Another key difference between the two: Obama is someone who seems to accept his station with folks who don’t like him. Perhaps living life in two worlds, black and white, has convinced him that there will always be folks who hate him and there isn’t anything he can do about it. But he seems to, too easily, accept the fact that he can’t work with someone who he believes is intransigent.
Bill Clinton has always believed there isn’t a hater he can’t turn into a lover. The more someone hates him or trashes him, the more focused he is on finding some way to accommodate the hater. Or flip the hater. It’s that drive that kept Clinton focused on trying to work with Republicans in Congress who were trying to throw him out of office because of his undisciplined sexual appetite.
The story of Obama and the Clintons is a study in accommodating big personalities. There are few bigger personalities, and even fewer who are so stubbornly confident in their positions in American life, than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Seldom in American history have two such prominent political figures sought to share the spotlight atop the same political party. Imagine Ronald Reagan being present and active during the two terms of George W. Bush—alpha dog overload. Not since Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter fought for supremacy over the party have Democrats had two polestars like Bill and Obama to follow. But then there is Hillary; and that was the political brilliance of bringing her into the Obama tent. It kept Bill on the sidelines, and after a rough couple of years finding his place, Bill found a relatively productive place in Obama’s universe. And while Obama had pledged to change the transactional politics of Washington, it’s the one area where Obama has learned from the ultimate transactional politicians—and profited from it. Of course, why Obama hasn’t applied his Clinton triangulation strategy to the rest of Washington is something many in the party have been scratching their heads about for years, and that lack of vision has only made it difficult for Obama to succeed in Washington. He’s got the ballot box down; it’s navigating America’s most famous swamp (D.C.) that’s been elusive.