Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine by Daniel Halper Read Free Book Online Page A

“still sort of pissed off all of the time.” Whether explicit or understood, the First Couple had a new deal, a new spin on their partnership, from then on out. A close friend of the Clintons told biographer Jerry Oppenheimer her attitude when announcing her plans to her husband: “It’s my turn, my day in the sun. You better support me, or else. And by the way, go fuck yourself.” 17 (The psychological effect on the daughter who worshipped them both could also prove long-lasting and consequential.)
    The stop in Buffalo, where Hillary waxed poetic about the difficulties of marriage, was before the kickoff of a “listening tour” of the state, a savvy ploy to show New Yorkers, especially the often forgotten upstaters, that she was intent on hearing their concerns and that she would be a good proxy in Washington.
    Republicans tried to block her run, introducing legislation in the state to prevent her from “carpetbagging.” The law, which was sponsored by Republican assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, would’ve required Hillary to have lived in the state for five years before being able to represent it. “I thought carpetbagging went out in the 1860s,” Calhoun told the New York Post . “We have lots of talent in both parties within this state, and certainly our next senator should come from New York.” 18
    “The word ‘carpetbagger’ has crept into Mr. Giuliani’s speeches as he and Mrs. Clinton crisscross the state, each exploring a run for the same United States Senate seat next year,” the New York Times noted. 19
    But the paper and other Democrats would do their part to mold Mrs. Clinton as the second coming of Robert F. Kennedy, welcoming the celebrity politician as a token of the greatness of New York.
    Yet, despite the sympathy Mrs. Clinton was engendering, the Kennedy example proved an apt one for her. Just not in the way she had been expecting. As the New York Times noted in a piece in 2000, “For Robert Kennedy in 1964, and for Mrs. Clinton today, the label ‘carpetbagger’ was really shorthand for a general condemnation, expressed in startlingly similar terms: they were, according to their critics, ambitious, opportunistic, ruthless (for Kennedy) and untrustworthy (for Mrs. Clinton).” 20
    Robert Kennedy Jr. reflected to reporters that year on “The intensity of feeling with my father’s race, and the almost inexplicable intensity of feeling toward Hillary Clinton. People who ought to like Hillary Clinton, but don’t, and can’t really explain why, but just kind of have a visceral reaction to her—that’s the same kind of thing that I remember from my father.” 21
     
    For the first time in her life Hillary needed to campaign for herself, and the dirty secret was that she wasn’t good at it, especially when compared to her husband.
    “I’ve seen her and him in rooms, and she doesn’t have the whirr,” veteran Democratic campaign consultant Bob Shrum tells me in an interview. “Your eyes aren’t constantly drawn to her the way they are to him.”
    Similarly, a former Clinton aide compared Hillary to Al Gore, a policy wonk who could be famously stiff and awkward in public settings and whose campaign style Clinton once compared to Mussolini. “Gore hated Clinton because Clinton was everything that Gore wasn’t,” he told me. At the funeral for Democratic operative Bob Squier, a close Gore friend, the vice president watched with envy and resentment as Clinton, who didn’t know Squier as well, delivered the moving, crowd-pleasing eulogy that Gore knew he could never have managed.
    “It’s the same thing with Hillary,” said the aide. “She knows that she’s probably better than him on the intellectual stuff—though not a lot—but he blows her away on the retail.”
    A former presidential press aide similarly noted the contrast between the nimble Bill and the more programmed Hillary. “He was constantly improvising speeches right up to the very last second even in the middle of