Bill Clinton: Equal parts stupid and shrewd

That fit perfectly with the Bill
Clinton I had come to know as I wrote a book about his post-presidency, Clinton
in Exile: A President out of the White House. I
started to write it in April 2006 and put it to bed in March 2008 as Hillary
and Obama continued to battle for the nomination. I figured that Obama would
win. I also knew that Bill Clinton — as much as he messed up Hillary’s campaign
with his need for constant excitement and attention, his incoherent,
self-serving speeches and his manic, mean, racist attacks on Obama — really
wanted Hillary to be president. Not because he felt she was the “most gifted
member of her generation,” as he often said, but because the country owed it to
him (and her). After all, he had worked so hard and put up with so much in his
selfless service to the American people.

Heilemann and Halperin
report that the Clintons were scheming in 2004 to get the nomination for
Hillary. Although most of the book sounds right to me, that does not jibe with
my reporting and interviewing.

The Clintons
figured that Hillary served herself best by staying in the Senate and winning
reelection in 2006. Their twisted plan was to help John Kerry to lose to George
W. Bush in 2004, leaving the field open for Hillary in 2008. (If Kerry won in
’04, he would certainly run again in ’08.) At that point Obama, a state senator
from Illinois with little chance of winning the U.S. Senate seat, was invisible
to the Clintons.

In 2004, Bill and
Hillary were busy drawing Arkansas-reared Gen. Wesley Clark into the nomination
battle. They seemed to have missed that the retired NATO supreme allied
commander was a babe in the woods, comically naïve — he admitted to having
voted for Reagan in ’80 and George H.W. Bush in ’88 and promised reporters that
John Kerry would soon “implode” over an “intern problem.” (Kerry’s daughter,
Vanessa, said she almost died laughing when she read that.)

Once Clark’s
campaign died, Bill, intent on keeping his hand in the action, called Kerry
with advice and dispatched a couple of his aides — Joe Lockhart, Mike McCurry,
for example — to help Kerry fix his campaign. Lou Susman, Kerry’s national
finance chairman — now Obama’s ambassador to the U.K. — and one of those who
thought the Clintons were using Gen. Clark as a stalking horse, told me in
2006, “There are people who believe that that effort was helpful and there are
people who believe it wasn’t helpful.” Susman seemed to believe the latter. The
Kerry campaign was hobbled by “two camps,” Susman explained, “people who were
more loyal to Clinton than they were to Kerry, as opposed to the Kerry people who
had been there from the beginning.”

Kerry, not
surprisingly, kept his distance from Clinton, and it was made easier when Bill
Clinton’s door-stopper memoir, My Life,
was published in June 2004, in the middle of the general election, infuriating
Kerry backers who feared, correctly, that Clinton would steal the spotlight and
also remind swing voters why they didn’t want to vote for another Democrat.
(Clinton being Clinton procrastinated in getting to work on the memoir, so he
missed his publisher’s deadline.) Clinton embarked on a nonstop media tour for
the book — in the U.S. and abroad — until late August 2004, when he was hobbled
by chest pains and ended up with quadruple-bypass surgery, taking him,
effectively, off the Kerry campaign trail in the closing weeks (with the
exception of, seven weeks post-surgery, a bit more than a week before Election Day,
a rally of 80,000 people in Philadelphia). One strategist told me that the
Philadelphia rally, as rousing as it was and healing to Bill’s ego, pushed
Arkansas into the George W. Bush column.

For the Clintons,
things had, in a way, turned out as they wanted. Kerry was finished in
presidential politics. 2008 was Hillary’s oyster.

Bill Clinton saw
in the summer of 2006 that Obama, who improbably won his U.S. Senate seat — who
could have foreseen the implosion in sex scandals of both his primary and
general-election opponents? — and then became more of a rock star than Bill
after delivering the keynote address at Kerry’s convention — was trouble. Bill
urged Hillary’s people to go after him, to destroy Obama before he could best
Hillary. They did not listen until it was too late — and Game Change has some new material about Hillary’s desire, during
the 2008 primaries, to paint Obama as a drug dealer.

Members of HillaryLand who are
dumping all over the Clintons in Game Change chose not to heed Bill’s warning to get in there and attack Obama
before he could reach the iconic status that carried him, instead of Bill (and
Hillary), to the White House.