The Truth About Hillary (23 page)

“She would call me to discuss the Brookhaven National Lab, the controversial Peace Bridge in Buffalo, and the Lake Onon- daga pollution cleanup issue,” Bullock said in an interview for this book. “She would get into these details, learn these issues, and then her audiences would be blown away by how she knew more than they did about their local issues.”
3

At the start of the campaign Hillary had come off poorly in small groups. Now, she seemed more at ease schmoozing poten- tial donors.

192 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“I was her table companion at dinner one night,” said a com- mitted Democrat. “She takes control as much as she can. She hates the media because she can’t control them. But she also listens—she’s a good listener, and her responses are thoughtful and discriminating. She doesn’t come on with any cuteness, any feminine qualities. She’s not taking advantage of being a woman. You could have the very same conversations you have with her with a man.”
4

But there was another explanation for Hillary’s dramatic im- provement as a campaigner: focus groups.

Ickes and company relied heavily on focus groups to shape the way they marketed their candidate. Gone was the left-wing Hillary, the gender feminist who sounded to many people like a radical bomb-thrower. In her place was the newly minted Hil- lary, a kinder, gentler, family-oriented candidate who champi- oned such issues as children’s mental health.

Elizabeth Moynihan had warned Hillary, “You can’t run a campaign that looks and smells like a presidential campaign. You don’t provide travel and hotels for the press. Let them fend for themselves. The most important reporter is not from
Time
and the other national media, but from the local New York State newspapers.”
5

Hillary took Liz’s advice to heart.

“If she was sitting across the table from the board of editors of a Syracuse newspaper,” said Tony Bullock, “she would know what the fuck she was talking about. She took a page out of Chuck Schumer’s book, and campaigned like an animal in west- ern New York.”
6

What’s more, as part of their campaign strategy, Ickes and company confronted the frequently heard question: Why do people dislike Hillary so much?

Their answer:
a strong woman threatens men.

Of course, it wasn’t only men who disliked Hillary; she had

The Tur naround
193

even more trouble winning the trust and support of white, sub- urban, college-educated women. Still, the notion advanced by Ickes and company that Hillary threatened
insecure men
was an effective ploy. It resonated with many successful women, who se- cretly worried that they, too, might intimidate their husbands, boyfriends, and male coworkers. Such women identified with Hillary, because they knew how hard it was to juggle career, family, and femininity.

Furthermore, Hillary’s campaign managers accused her crit- ics of using a double standard when they criticized her for being overly ambitious. Why should ambition be considered a vir- tue in men, but a vice in women? they asked. Why were boys encouraged to dream of growing up to become president, but girls were not? Why was ambition in Hillary any different than, say, ambition in Rudy Giuliani or, for that matter, in any male candidate?

These were all legitimate questions. But they totally missed the point. The objection that people had to Hillary was not that she was ambitious, or that she pursued power. Nowadays, people applauded powerful women in every field of endeavor—from Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to Secretary of State Con- doleezza Rice. Such women had
earned
their place in the sun.

Hillary, on the other hand, behaved as though she was
enti- tled
to power. She had been brought up by parents who taught her to believe that she was stronger, smarter, and better than everyone else. Her Methodist youth minister, Don Jones, rein- forced her grandiose self-image by convincing her that she was doing God’s work. It was Hillary’s exaggerated sense of her own importance and her feelings of superiority—
not her gender
—that turned people off. People hesitated to vote for a woman like Hillary not because she was a woman, but because she acted as though she had a divine right to rule.

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“Pure Hollywood”

“W

here’s Pat?”

That question—repeated over and over by the political reporters covering Hillary—

became a constant refrain of the campaign.

“Why isn’t Pat here supporting Hillary?” the reporters asked.

“He’s coming,” Hillary’s press spokesman replied. “He’s coming.”

But Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan didn’t come. In fact, with the exception of one campaign commercial on Hillary’s be- half, Pat Moynihan had been virtually invisible since the satellite trucks and television cameras left his farm at Pindars Corners several months before.

That did not come as much of a surprise to those who knew of Pat and Liz Moynihan’s standoffish attitude toward Hillary. And yet, Ickes and company reacted to the Moynihan snub with panic. They had been counting on Moynihan to act as a counter- weight to Hillary’s opponent, Rudolph Giuliani. After all, Moyni-

194

“Pur e Hollywood”
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han was popular with some of the same groups that made up Giuliani’s base, especially Irish Americans and Italian Americans. Even more important, Jews adored Pat Moynihan, and Hil- lary needed all the help she could get with Jewish voters. Indeed, when it was revealed that she had attended secret fund-raisers sponsored by Muslim groups, some of which were dedicated to the destruction of Israel, Hillary realized she had painted herself

into a corner.
1

Astute political observers detected the fingerprints of Bill Clinton on the campaign’s Muslim strategy. They pointed out that one Muslim donor, Hani Masri, who helped raise $50,000 for Hillary’s campaign, was simultaneously lobbying her hus- band the President for a $60 million government loan.
2

That Hillary was courting radical Muslim groups did not re- main secret for long. And when she showed up to march in the annual Israel Day Parade, the crowds roundly booed her. Worse, she was booed off the stage during a “Solidarity for Israel” rally at the Israeli consulate in New York.
3

On the morning of May
19
, shortly after she was formally nominated as her party’s standard-bearer, Hillary woke to dis- cover that Pat Moynihan’s usefulness had been radically dimin- ished. For on that day—and with just six months to go until the election—Rudy Giuliani announced he had prostate cancer, and was bowing out of the race.

In Rudy’s place, the Republican Party turned to a young Long Island congressman by the name of Rick Lazio. Though he was likable and telegenic, Lazio was never able to mount a campaign to match Hillary’s.

“She’d fly into these little upstate towns aboard an Air Force plane, with this Secret Service entourage, and out steps the reign- ing First Lady,” Lazio complained. “It was pure Hollywood.”
4

Nor did Lazio have time to develop an effective ground

196 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

game. He failed to show up at county fairs in upstate New York, and completely ignored direct mail. Instead, he spent all his re- sources on TV commercials and raising hard money.

Many of Lazio’s managers came from out of state, and seemed more intent on running a hate campaign than a political campaign. They spent a lot of money running negative commer- cials against Hillary, even though her negative poll numbers were already as high as they were going to get. They did little to present a positive image of Lazio himself.

What’s more, they seemed obsessed with Hillary’s ready access to soft money. But instead of trying to keep up with her on the soft-money front, they attempted to shame Hillary into agreeing to bar soft money in the campaign.

Of course, Hillary made all the appropriate noises about the toxic effects of soft money on politics. Meanwhile, her Machi- avellian campaign manager, Harold Ickes, was raising soft money as fast as he could.

Hillary’s aides were not above dealing in some underhanded tactics. In June, one of Harold Ickes’s closest political cronies in New York, Comptroller H. Carl McCall, used his official letter- head to write to the Securities and Exchange Commission to re- quest an investigation of a stock transaction by Rick Lazio. Simultaneously, McCall released the letter to the
New York Times
. (Lazio was subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing.)
5

Thrown on the defensive, Lazio entered the first of three candidates’ debates with an ill-conceived plan to embarrass Hil- lary. When it came his turn to answer moderator Tim Russert’s question, Lazio left his podium, walked across to Hillary Clin- ton, and waved a piece of paper in her face.

“You say you are against soft money,” Lazio said. “Will you sign this pledge not to use soft money in this campaign?”

Hillary refused, and many of the women watching the debate on television recoiled at Lazio’s bullying tactics, which reminded

“Pur e Hollywood”
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them of their husbands’ or boyfriends’ overbearing behavior during a fight. Lazio, they felt, had invaded “Hillary’s space.”

After that debate, Hillary’s transformation from political troublemaker into sympathetic victim was complete. Her sup- porters flocked to the polls, and on election night in November 2000, she won by a landslide—55 percent to Lazio’s 43 percent.

She was now
Senator-elect
Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her hus- band was soon to be
former president
Bill Clinton. After nearly three decades of playing a supporting role for Bill, it was now Hillary’s turn to step into the political spotlight.

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The Road Back to the

White House

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The “Phenom”

T

he Reverend Don Jones, a heavyset, balding man now well into his sixties, peered down from the packed gallery of the U.S. Senate. Below, he spotted Hillary

Rodham Clinton, his onetime Methodist youth group student, being escorted by New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, from her seat in the back row of the chamber to the well of the Senate.
1

She was dressed for the occasion in a turquoise pantsuit, which made her a conspicuous figure (as if she wasn’t already one) in the sea of dark-suited men.
2
She raised her right hand, and took the oath administered by the presiding officer of the Senate, Vice President Al Gore, who was still bitter over his loss of the White House to George W. Bush, a defeat that he blamed in no small part on Hillary.*

*Actually, Gore reproached both Bill and Hillary. He blamed Bill because the lingering stench of the Lewinsky scandal had turned off many people who might otherwise have voted for the Gore-

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“Congratulations,
Senator
,” Gore told Hillary.

In the gallery, Don Jones and Dorothy Rodham beamed with pride. Hillary’s father, who had died several years before, wasn’t around to wisecrack that the Senate must be an easy place to get into if it admitted his daughter.

Only three years before, at the height of the Monica Lewin- sky scandal, many people had predicted that Hillary and her husband were washed up politically. But rather than allow that near-death experience to destroy her, Hillary had turned it to her advantage by casting herself as a sympathetic victim and na- tional martyr.

“Hillary’s gone from a completely derivative role to non- derivative role,” said a former White House staff member. “In Washington, ‘First Lady’ has never really been taken that seri- ously. ‘Senator’ has. She’s not trying to construct something from nothing.”
3

But some things never changed. And even as she was recit- ing the oath of office, Hillary was once again at the center of an ethical storm. Just weeks before she became a senator, she had signed a controversial $8 million book contract with Simon & Schuster.

The deal dismayed even her most enthusiastic fans. It was, said the
New York Times
’s editorial page, “an affront to common sense. No lawmaker should accept a large, unearned sum from a publisher whose parent company, Viacom, is vitally interested in government policy on issues likely to come before Congress— for example, copyright or broadcasting legislation.”
4

Greed seemed to be the only explanation for the outlandish