The Truth About Hillary (28 page)

Hillary’s future depended on George W. Bush remaining in the White House. But she could not afford to be seen by her fel- low Democrats as wobbly or disloyal. On the contrary, she had to
appear
as though she was doing everything in her power to ad- vance the cause of John Kerry.

This balancing act was not as difficult as it might appear. Hillary had always subscribed to the view that perception trumped truth. With a great show of magnanimity, she an- nounced that she and her husband would cancel their plans to hold a book-signing party during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, lest they be accused of stealing the spotlight from John Kerry (which they did anyway).

When Kerry had to cancel an appearance at the annual con- vention of the National Education Association—a powerful teachers’ lobby whose legions of left-wing activists were vital to the Democrats’ fortunes at the ballot box—Hillary agreed to fill in for him at the last moment.

“If anyone was disappointed by the switch [from Kerry to Hillary], it was hard to tell as Mrs. Clinton took the stage,” the
New York Times
reported. “People jumped to their feet with a

238 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

sudden burst of applause, hoots and cheers, as confetti rained down on the convention floor. ‘Hillary for President,’ someone shouted.”
7

Hillary plunged into a blistering attack against George W. Bush, which the delegates ate up.

“If he was one of your students, you would be sending notes to his mother: ‘Dear Mrs. Bush, he never admits he’s wrong,’ ” she told the audience of nine thousand teachers, to roars of laughter.
8

Hillary offered some obligatory words of praise for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. But she spoke mostly about
herself
—how
she
was interested in education, and how much
she
had done for children and teachers. By the end of the speech, the teachers had all but forgotten John Kerry, and were wondering why Hillary wasn’t running for president.

For the next several weeks, Hillary campaigned for herself under the guise of campaigning for Kerry.

“I have two overwhelming priorities,” Hillary told reporters. “To elect Kerry-Edwards and to elect a Democratic Senate.”
9

She instructed her advisers to draw attention to the fact that she was giving John Kerry’s staff access to her valuable donor list and top fund-raisers.
10
The Hillary publicity machine left the impression that she was engaged in a full-court press on behalf of the nominee.

The truth was quite different. Hillary spent most of her time on the road raising money and campaigning for Democratic
senatorial
and
congressional
candidates, not for the
presidential
ticket. And she made numerous appearances in states, like South Dakota, where John Kerry did not have the slightest chance of winning.

“We know how hard Hillary can campaign when she wants to win,” said a Democratic political analyst. “Think of how fiercely she campaigned on behalf of her husband. Think of that famous line of

Hedging Her Bets
239

hers from the New Hampshire primary of 1992. She said she’d campaign ‘until the last dog dies.’ Well, the dogs were still alive and barking when she stopped campaigning for John Kerry.”
11

One of Hillary’s overwhelming priorities was to prevent Kerry from taking over the Democratic Party. A key part of her strategy was to strengthen her hold on the party’s fund-raising machinery through Terry McAuliffe, the Clintons’ handpicked chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

“McAuliffe dominates the party’s fund-raising efforts,” wrote Dick Morris. “Democrat fat cats give when they are told, and to whom they are instructed by the smoothly oiled national fund-raising operation. Despite Howard Dean’s now-legendary Internet-driven fund-raising success, the big checks still do the talking—and the Clintons control the process.”
12

However, in the event that Kerry won the election and was able to seize control of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary hedged her bets. She encouraged Harold Ickes to join with billionaire George Soros in setting up a group called Ameri- cans Coming Together. The goal of this group was to raise sev- eral hundred million dollars in soft money and, in effect, strip the Democratic National Committee of its main role as a fund- raising machine for candidates and causes.
13

One way or another, Hillary was going to be ready for 2008.

C
H A P T E R F O R T Y - T H R E E
‌

Gearing Up

W

ithin days of Kerry’s defeat, she made her first

move.

Hillary had been scheduled to deliver the an- nual Issam M. Fares Lecture on the Middle East at Tufts Uni- versity the previous spring, but had postponed her appearance until one week after the presidential election in order to achieve the maximum possible impact.
1

It was the opening salvo of her 2008 presidential campaign, and she did not squander the opportunity. In her remarks, she deftly dispatched her likely baby-faced competitors for the 2008 Democratic nomination—John Edwards of North Carolina and Evan Bayh of Indiana—and set out to seize the leadership of the party for herself. Then she tackled the questions in the mind of the audience about her qualifications:

How was she going to handle the issue of moral values? Could a woman be elected president?

Would Hillary make red-state voters see
more
red?
2

240

Gearing Up
241

In her speech, Hillary portrayed herself as a God-fearing, church-going, Bible-reading Democrat from a southern state (Arkansas), not some soulless, canapé-nibbling, Chablis-sipping northeastern liberal.

“I don’t think you can win an election or even run a success- ful campaign if you don’t acknowledge what is important to peo- ple,” she told the partisan crowd of 2,300 people jammed into the Tufts University gym. “No one can read the New Testament of our Bible without recognizing that Jesus had a lot more to say about how we treat the poor than most of the issues that were talked about in this election.”
3

Jesus was on her side.

But what about flesh-and-blood voters?

It was an immutable fact of electoral politics that men were from Mars and mostly Republican, and women were from Venus and often felt more comfortable voting for Democrats. In fact, as John Kerry had just demonstrated to his dismay, a Democratic candidate for president could not win without attracting a siz- able majority of women.

Would that pattern hold if a woman ran for president? Put another way: men might not be ready for a woman presidential candidate, but were
women
ready for a
woman?

Hillary thought so.

A woman, she told the Tufts audience, had been on the ballot in Afghanistan’s recent elections—“a feat that puts Afghanistan women ahead of American women!”
4

Human progress was on Hillary’s side, too.

Some of the shrewdest political handicappers in the busi- ness thought that Hillary was on to something, and the public was ready for a woman president.*

*With four years to go until the next presidential election, Hillary-

242 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“Her approval rating in New York went from 38 percent in February 2001 to a high of 61 percent last month, suggesting she has expanded her appeal beyond Democratic diehards,” wrote Jill Lawrence in
USA Today
.
5

SportingbetUSA.com, an online gambling site, made Hillary its odds-on favorite in 2008. The site offered odds of seven to one that Hillary would be the next Democratic presidential nominee—well ahead of the runner-up, Senator John Edwards, who was twelve to one.
6

Not long after the election, Dick Morris appeared on the Fox News Network’s popular program
Hannity and Colmes
, where Sean Hannity, brandishing a red-and-blue electoral map of the United States, sought to persuade Morris that Hillary Clinton could not hope to win a single red state.

“Well,” replied Morris, “it’s [an evolving] map, Sean. Let me give you an example. Texas is now 49.5 percent minority. By 2008, it’ll be 53 or 54 percent minority.”

“But that didn’t answer the question,” Hannity pressed on. “Can she win a single red state that you see?”

“Oh,” said Morris, “I think that she would have a very good chance of carrying Ohio. I think it’s going to become much more Democratic and black and Hispanic. . . . I think she would have a good chance in Missouri. I think she’d have a good chance in a number of those [red] states.”
7

But did Hillary have a
SERIOUS
chance of becoming our next

president?

Many people still doubted it. They clung to the notion that a blue-state woman couldn’t possibly conquer the red-state world.

mania swept the Internet, where surfers bought shirts, hats, coffee cups, and bumper stickers promoting her candidacy.

Gearing Up
243

And it was true that Hillary’s negative poll numbers were nose- bleed high across broad swaths of the country. Millions of peo- ple said they wouldn’t vote for her under any circumstances.

And yet, the political experts who handicapped such things thought she would make a strong candidate. They reminded us that George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 even though he, too, was reviled by millions of his fellow countrymen. Indeed, looked at from Hillary’s point of view, her positives far out- weighed her negatives.

More than any other figure in her party, she had universal name recognition, control over the party’s powerful money ma- chine, the advice of the smartest politician in the party—Bill Clinton—and the support of millions of liberals, gays, lesbians, feminists, young people, teachers, journalists, trial lawyers, Afri- can Americans, and poor Hispanics and other minorities.

What’s more, as a U.S. Senator, Hillary had developed into a cunning and crafty politician. She wisely swallowed her pride and made friends with her onetime Republican enemies in the Senate. Through sheer determination and hard practice, she honed her oratorical skills to the point where she was now one of the best public speakers in America. In the eyes of many of her fellow liberals, she even managed to acquire a quality that her husband possesses in great abundance:
charisma
.

Because she dominated her party, some people were willing to concede that Hillary was in a strong position to capture the Democratic presidential
nomination
. But they were quick to ar- gue that she was too much of a northeastern elitist liberal to win the
general election
.

Hillary and her closest political advisers strongly disagreed. They were optimistic that in a campaign for the White

House, she would begin with tremendous advantages. They were counting on carrying New York, California, Florida, New

244 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Jersey, and Massachusetts—five critical states whose combined 140 electoral college votes amounted to more than half the 270 required for victory.

And that was just for starters. As a result of demographic changes favoring Democrats in the 2008 election, Hillary would be viable in such red states as Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri, which could add another 72 electoral votes to her 140, and put her within 58 electoral votes of winning the White House. Throw in Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania—and she was over the top.

Still, the skeptics persisted.

They pointed to the scarlet letter—
L
for liberal—that was emblazoned on Hillary’s forehead. How, they asked, was she go- ing to disguise
that?

They seemed to forget that, like Madonna, her sister in blonde ambition, Hillary was a master of reinvention. She would simply invent a “new Hillary.” In fact, she had already begun to do just that by positioning herself as a centrist on domestic policy and a hawk on foreign affairs.