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

the speech,” he recalled during our interview. “There’s nothing like sitting next to him watching him give a speech, and watching a new speechwriter who’s written this thing just flip through the pages and try to find where he’s talking about. She’s written speeches in advance, pretty much has it committed to memory, and wouldn’t improvise a word, frankly much more like Bush or Obama.”
    From the start, she faced stumbles. For one, there was the purchase of her house. New York, as one journalist put it at the time, “had a residency ‘requirement’ so lax that it was more of a suggestion.” 22 So it was relatively easy for the First Family to find digs that allowed her to comply with state law in a timely fashion.
    They settled on Chappaqua, with a population of less than ten thousand, just north of New York City in Westchester County. The house was listed at $1.7 million in 1999. The trouble was the Clintons were broke—owing a fortune in legal fees from the many investigations into their personal lives. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend known for allegations of questionable business and legal dealings, offered to front them the bulk of the money, $1.3 million. The loan raised questions as to whether the Clintons were evading campaign and gift laws and made for an unneeded reminder of what the New York Times in an editorial labeled the “ethical sloppiness of the Clinton White House.” 23 The Clintons eventually opted for a conventional mortgage.
    For the first time in decades the Clintons were not living in public housing, but their personal taste had not seemed to mature with the times. A former White House press aide remembers the house search with a mix of humor and horror.
    “We went to look at these houses, and the houses that they liked had shag rugs and gold walls,” the aide tells me. Everything Bill and Hillary favored seemed like it had come from the 1970s, the last time they were ordinary citizens. “It was horrible and I just remember being with the press pool and thinking, ‘Oh God. Do not say out loud how much you like this house,’ ” the aide says. “I think it just says a lot. Can you imagine living in this bubble for so long and then all of a sudden being let out of it?”
    Further troubles came when the First Lady got quickly out of sorts with Jewish voters by sitting and smiling through an anti-Israel diatribe by the wife of Yasser Arafat, Suha Arafat, whom Hillary kissed at the event’s close. She also clumsily announced that “I’ve always been a Yankees fan”—which no one believed of a girl from Chicago, who actually grew up rooting for the Cubs.
    Bill Clinton, of course, was an enthusiastic booster of Hillary’s fortunes. In part, this was because he always saw her in public office. It could also have helped alleviate some of his guilt over Monica. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t have any choice. On the day of her Senate campaign announcement, the president did something unusual, if not unprecedented. He sat onstage for forty minutes and never said a word.
    Ever the political analyst, the president was all but chomping at the bit for Hillary to face off against Rudy Giuliani. When Lazio signaled early on that in deference to Giuliani he wasn’t going to join the race, Clinton pulled him aside during an encounter in the Oval Office.
    As Lazio recalls in our interview, the president engaged in his usual practice with potential adversaries—flattery. Clinton’s ability for “charm offensives” has long been considered a strategic asset to the Clinton brand.
    “You know what the very best day in Hillary’s campaign has been?” Lazio recalls Clinton asking him. “The day you decided to pull out of the race.”
    Clearly studying polls of the race, the president assessed Giuliani as polarizing and unlikable. (This was the pre-9/11 Rudy, who as mayor could be an abrasive combatant with his many enemies in the city.) “Giuliani is an easy person to run