A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCEA NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.
—The late congressman Mo Udall
Oprah Winfrey delivered the first blow to Hillary in Iowa.
For as long as anyone could remember, Oprah had been known as the “Queen of All Media.” But to many of her fans, especially those on the Left, Oprah was more than that. In their eyes, she was the “Queen of Everything”—the doyenne of America’s self-absorbed, secular, redistributive, and politically correct culture.
Over the years, Hillary had worked hard to ingratiate herself with this powerful cultural figure. She sent Oprah handwritten notes, birthday greetings, and invitations to special Clinton events. Oprah had never endorsed a political candidate, and in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses of 2008, Hillary expected that Oprah’s support for her would be understated—perhaps a nice spread in O, the Oprah Magazine and a couple of well-timed touchy-feely appearances on Oprah’s TV show.
But in a dramatic break with precedent, Oprah ditched Hillary and endorsed Barack Obama for president. Her endorsement garnered headlines all over America.
To explain her decision, Oprah appeared on Larry King Live. The irrepressible King could hardly wait to ask the Queen if she had put her money where her mouth was.
“Well,” replied Oprah, who was a mega-millionaire, “the truth of the matter is, whether I contribute or not contribute, you are limited to how much you [can] contribute, so my money isn’t going to make any difference to him. I think that my value to him, my support of him, is probably worth more than any check.”
That turned out to be the understatement of the election season. A study by two Maryland economists later concluded that Oprah’s endorsement of Obama was worth more than one million votes in the primary race and put him over the top.
It was no secret that Oprah wanted to see an African American in the Oval Office. But her rationale for backing Obama went beyond race. The fact was, Oprah had never forgotten—nor forgiven—how she was dissed when Bill and Hillary were in the White House.
In an interview for this book, a close Oprah friend explained why Oprah still carried a grudge against the Clintons.
On May 7, 1999, two of President Clinton’s senior White House advisers, Richard Socarides and Minyon Moore, exchanged memos about Oprah with the following derogatory subject line: “The fat lady hasn’t sung yet.”
The memos were distributed to Elena Kagan, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council and a future justice of the Supreme Court; Neera Tanden, senior policy adviser to First Lady Hillary Clinton; and Bruce Lindsey, deputy counsel to President Clinton.
None of the recipients of the memos thought to object to the slur against Oprah.
Oprah had sources in the Clinton White House who told her about the offending “fat lady” memo.
“People in the Clinton administration desperately wanted Oprah to back certain presidential initiatives and lend her support to legislation, and when she showed a reluctance to do so, they joked ‘the fat lady hasn’t sung yet,’” explained one of Oprah’s closest friends who was intimately acquainted with her thinking. “It’s not that she isn’t aware that people make fun of her weight and define her as being a heavy person. She certainly is aware of it and, for the most part, ignores it.
“But it is a different thing to have a slur about her weight written as the subject line of a memo that is circulated in the White House,” the friend continued. “It doesn’t matter that Hillary and Bill’s fingerprints weren’t on the memo. In Oprah’s opinion, members of the Clinton administration wouldn’t have used phrases like that if they thought the president and first lady would find it offensive.
“That wasn’t the only reason Oprah never warmed to Hillary. But it was one of the many slights that distanced her from Hillary. She thought Hillary was a user and not a particularly trustworthy person. Oprah always kept her at arm’s length. I’m sure Hillary will make an approach to get Oprah’s support in the 2016 election, but I’m just as sure she won’t get it.”
The second blow to fall on Hillary in 2008 came from another sort of royalty—Hollywood royalty in the form of the Dream-Works SKG trio of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen.
Everyone in Hollywood was under the impression that the SKGs were FOBs—Friends of Bill. That is, until Geffen, who was worth $6 billion, threw a fund-raiser for Barack Obama in the sprawling ten-acre backyard of his Beverly Hills mansion.
Geffen and his friends raised $1.3 million for Obama.
But that wasn’t the worst of it as far as Hillary was concerned.
Afterward, Geffen agreed to sit for a rare on-the-record interview with his homegirl New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. The interview took place at his home, the fabulous old Jack Warner estate on Angelo Drive. On display in the 13,600-square-foot mansion were paintings by famous American artists, which were valued at $1.1 billion, making it the most valuable private art collection in the world. The home also featured a curiosity that was tailor-made for a Hollywood mogul—the floor on which Napoleon was standing when he proposed to Josephine.
Normally, Geffen played his cards close to the vest, but he couldn’t restrain himself when he started venting about the Clintons.
“It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the [Iraq] war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Geffen said. “She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”
Most people outside Geffen’s inner circle didn’t know that he had parted company with Bill and Hillary several years before the Dowd interview.
In the final hours of the Clinton administration, Bill granted 177 presidential pardons. One of them went to bank swindlers Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory. It was later learned that Tony Rodham, Hillary’s younger brother, had received a “consultant’s fee” to arrange the Gregory pardon.
Another pardon went to the fugitive Marc Rich, an international commodities trader who had fled to Switzerland to avoid being prosecuted on charges of tax evasion. The pardon was viewed in many circles as a flagrant payoff to Rich’s former wife, Denise, who had contributed more than $100,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign and $450,000 to the Clinton Library.
At the same time that Bill was letting the Gregorys and Rich go scot-free, Geffen—who was also a major Democratic Party donor—was lobbying the president to grant a pardon to Leonard Peltier. A Native American activist, Peltier was serving two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first-degree murder in the shooting of two FBI agents. Many in Hollywood and beyond believed that Peltier had been wrongly convicted, and Geffen was joined in his appeal for a pardon by Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama as well as by such smooth operators as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Clinton ignored Geffen’s request.
And as anyone in Hollywood could tell you, you didn’t cross David Geffen without paying a price.
The Dowd interview was Geffen’s payback.
“Marc Rich getting pardon?” Geffen scoffed. “An oil-profiteer expatriate who left the country rather than pay taxes or face justice? Yet another time when the Clintons were unwilling to stand for the things that they genuinely believe in. Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
When that phrase—“they do it [lie] with such ease, it’s troubling”—appeared in black and white in Dowd’s column, it ricocheted from coast to coast and instantly became part of political lore. It was a reminder of William Safire’s famous opening sentence about Hillary in a 1996 Times column: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar.”
By early December 2007, Barack Obama had captured the lead in the Iowa polls, and Oprah Winfrey was drawing record crowds at Obama campaign rallies.
Panic broke out among Hillary’s donors. Rumors began flying of a shake-up in her unruly and famously unmanageable staff. Reporters started writing eulogies for Hillary’s campaign.
Hillary responded by calling in the cavalry: Bill Clinton.
With the presidential caucuses just two weeks away, she and Bill started making joint appearances at coffee shops and diners all across Iowa. She dropped her objection to using her mother, Dorothy, and daughter, Chelsea, in TV commercials. And just before Christmas, she embarked on what a New York Times headline writer with a droll sense of humor described as a “Likability Tour.”
This is how the Times played it: “Mrs. Clinton has embarked this week on a warm-and-fuzzy tour, blitzing full throttle by helicopter across Iowa to present herself as likable and heart-warming, a complement to her ‘strength and experience’ message that the campaign felt a female candidate needed first.”
After Hillary lost to Obama in Iowa (she came in third after Obama and John Edwards), she mused about the outcome of the campaign.
“Maybe,” she said, “they just don’t like me.”
There was no maybe about it.
When Hillary got to New Hampshire, the site of the first primary in the nation, she reverted to form. She was spitting mad over her loss to Obama in Iowa, and she was eager to demonstrate that she wasn’t intimidated by Obama’s Chicago-style brass-knuckles politics. As her mother, Dorothy, might have said: “There’s no room in this campaign for cowards.”
During their final debate in the Granite State, Hillary came across as defensive and angry—her old default expression when speaking in public.
“Making change is not about what you believe, it’s not about a speech you make,” she said, taking a shot at Obama, a first-term U.S. senator who, she believed, was riding on a smile and a shoe-shine and a lot of hot air.
The moderator caught Hillary’s negative vibes and asked about her “personality deficit.”
How would she respond to voters who thought Obama was more likeable than she was?
“Well,” she replied, “that hurts my feelings, but I’ll try to go on.”
Then she turned to Obama and added, “He’s very likeable. I agree with that. I don’t think I’m that bad.”
But Obama wouldn’t let Hillary off the hook.
“You’re likeable enough, Hillary,” he said, throwing her some shade.
Hillary’s camp complained that Obama had been cruel and insensitive. He wouldn’t have used such a patronizing phrase if his opponent were a man. Hillary accused him of being “sexist”—her automatic fallback position whenever someone criticized her.
But the S-word didn’t seem to damage Obama, for within forty-eight hours, he had piled up a double-digit lead in the polls.
It looked like a repeat of Iowa.
Toward the end of the New Hampshire campaign, Hillary found herself in a small Portsmouth café, answering questions from sixteen undecided voters, most of them women.
“My question is very personal, how do you do it?” asked Marianne Pernold Young, a freelance photographer. “How do you, how do you . . . keep upbeat and so wonderful?”
Facing the likely prospect of defeat, Hillary indulged her penchant for self-pity.
“You know,” she said, tearing up, “this is very personal for me.”
This wasn’t the first time a candidate for the Democratic nomination appeared to cry during a New Hampshire primary campaign. Edmund Muskie, the former governor of Maine and an early favorite for his party’s nod in 1972, was reported to have tears streaming down his face while he stood in a snowstorm and delivered a speech defending his wife. As a result, Muskie was attacked as a crybaby and his candidacy was doomed.
Some critics said Hillary’s tears were phony. But whether genuine or not, it didn’t seem to matter. When Hillary turned on the waterworks, the liberal media hailed her for being brave and for revealing her “personal” side.
“The feminist debate that raged two decades ago will henceforth be settled in favor of crying,” Timothy Noah wrote, tongue in cheek, in Slate, an online magazine.
Against all the odds and expectations, the newly “humanized” Hillary won in New Hampshire. When one of her aides congratulated her on the victory, Hillary said, “I get really tough when people fuck with me.”
She mounted a fierce, five-month-long battle against Obama. After she lost to Obama in the Maine caucuses, she went negative, launching a blistering series of attack ads against Obama that appealed to white working-class voters and racialized the campaign.
In the end, Hillary racked up nearly eighteen million primary votes, virtually tying Obama in the popular-vote total. But Obama defeated her in the arena that counted: convention delegates. Obama won 2,285½ delegates to Hillary’s 1,973.
Obama declared victory on June 3, 2008.
Hillary refused to concede.
Her mother had told her never to back down. Her father had taught her to have a hide like a rhinoceros.
Hillary threatened to contest the nomination right up to the Democratic Party’s August convention.
Finally, after four days of kvetching and carrying on, she threw in the towel.
Hillary viewed her near-death experience in the January 2008 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary as a critical turning point in her political life. In her opinion, it proved she could come from behind and connect with voters and be a credible national candidate.
Through the long years of the Obama presidency, it was her experience in New Hampshire that kept alive her determination to run again for president.
And memories of victory in New Hampshire helped to bring her full circle to the presidential campaign of 2016—this time around as a candidate with no killer challenger in her own party. Instead, she would have a projected $2 billion war chest, a massive data-driven ground operation, a liberal media lusting for a female president, and most demographic trends in her favor.
But Hillary also entered the 2016 presidential campaign with a boatload of baggage—a tissue-thin résumé as a U.S. senator and secretary of state, a Vesuvius of scandals, widespread Clinton fatigue, a reputation for mendacity, no clear rationale for her candidacy, a brawler’s reputation for foreign interventions, and a forbidding personality.
Chuck Schumer, her former Senate colleague from New York, called her “the most opaque person you’ll ever meet in your life.”
Many top Democrats in Iowa, site of the first-in-the-nation caucuses, were put off by her unlikeability.
“Elizabeth Warren, I could enjoy going out to lunch with her. Hillary less,” said Lorraine Williams, the chairwoman of Iowa’s Washington County Democrats.
In recent years, candidates who succeeded in capturing the White House—Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—have all had one thing in common: a compelling personality that inspired millions of people to trust them.
Hillary Clinton is missing that chip.
She is the polar opposite of charismatic.
She can only pretend to be likeable.