"That was her decision," Clinton said in our conversation,
acknowledging that he had been thoroughly familiar with it.
"She's got the best of both worlds because [Axelrod] is working
for the state party."
The significance of Penn is that he, more than any other adviser,
is the architect of the president's successful effort to define
and occupy the political center. Penn believes that swing voters
are moved not so much by a candidate's inspiring rhetoric or
compelling personal biography, but by concrete issues whose
popularity is scientifically ascertained through exhaustive
polling. It is a data-driven approach to politics, wonderfully
suited to a president who inhales data, and over the years the
smooth pol and the rumpled pollster have established a remarkable
communion.
But whether that communion can be transferred successfully to
Hillary is another matter. The May convention speech was a
perfect example of why her Senate campaign has left some longtime
supporters despondent. It was a collection of issue slogans-I
support a patients' bill of rights, I support a prescription drug
benefit for Medicare, I support targeted tax cuts for
education-delivered in a voice raised to a shout. It was as if
someone had called the Democratic National Committee and said, "I
can't tell you the name of the candidate, but fax me a stump
speech right away!" There was scarcely a word about her
biography, her values, her personal reasons for running.
"We have lost the real Hillary in this campaign," says one
campaign adviser.
The president emphatically rejects this, constantly professing
admiration at her emergence as a politician in her own right. He
confesses that he sometimes bobbles his own role as supportive
spouse. In July, an old Arkansas colleague turned adversary
leveled a lurid allegation that Hillary Clinton had hurled
antisemitic slurs at him 26 years ago. Clinton called the New
York Daily News to defend her. "It may not have even been the
right thing to do," he said in our interview, "because all it did
was sort of give more visibility to a charge that was hokum."
His old aide Harold Ickes, who is informally advising her
campaign, says the occasionally awkward reversal of roles between
Bill and Hillary has led to a new dimension in the relationship.
"There's a deeper appreciation," he says. "She understands now
how good he is, and how difficult it is to do what he does."
If the 2000 campaign has strengthened Bill Clinton's relations
with Hillary, it has grievously strained his relationship with
his other partner, Vice President Gore. Episodically over the
past year there have been reports from anonymous Clinton
sympathizers describing the president's anger at Gore's attempts
to distance himself from Clinton's scandals by ostentatiously
volunteering how upset he was by the Lewinsky affair.
But Clinton's predominant emotion, several White House aides say,
is one of bewilderment. He is genuinely confused by Gore's clumsy
efforts at disassociation, and he is baffled by Gore's
deficiencies in the theater of politics. "I think Clinton is just
incredibly frustrated," says one longtime political adviser.
"He's thinking, `Why doesn't he say it like this? Here's what the
ads should say.' "
Clinton and his team are also irritated by what, from their
vantage point, looks like an effort to prematurely end the
Clinton presidency. The one consistent theme of the Gore team's
complaints is that Clinton, with his ability to command the
spotlight, is stepping on the vice president's message. "They
think that we're getting the eight seconds on the evening news
that they should be getting," said a senior White House official
before Gore's nomination. "They don't realize they're not getting
the eight seconds anyway."
>From the Gore camp's vantage point, Clinton's performance
epitomizes the selfishness of the man. But if anything, this year
Clinton has shown a concern for others that some doubted he had.
He has willingly shared his political talents-for endorsements,
fundraising or behind-the-scenes advice-with any Democrat who has
asked (and with some who didn't).
"He is fully conversant with every race," says Sen. Robert
Torricelli of New Jersey, who heads the Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee and has traveled extensively with Clinton this
year. "He knows the polls, he knows the issues. There is almost
no level of detail with which he is not familiar." Torricelli
recalls flying recently on Air Force One to raise money for
Demo-cratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. Clinton spent the flight
giving Wyden a discourse on how to win his own campaign.
As for Hillary Clinton, she acknowledged her own debt to her
husband in her speech in Albany. In a line that aides insist she
added to the speech spontaneously-and which left some of them
aghast-Hillary turned to her husband and said, "I would not be
standing here tonight if it were not for Bill."
At a commencement speech at Carleton College in June, an aide
slipped the president a note saying that Syria's Hafez Assad had
died. Clinton rubbed his eyes, deep in thought. For that moment
he was leader of the world. Ten minutes later he was something
else: a politician so repellent that one young woman walked
straight past the outstretched hand he extended to each graduate.
The woman said later she cannot abide Clinton. The president,
confidants say, especially hates it when young people reject him
(a year before when several graduates at the University of
Chicago would not shake his hand, aides say, he stewed for days).
These jarring contrasts come all the time. One Monday afternoon
came news that a legal ethics panel in Arkansas had announced it
would seek to have Clinton disbarred for his misleading testimony
under oath in the Paula Jones case. On Wednesday came triumph:
Clinton had succeeded in his top legislative priority of the
year, when the House of Representatives deferred to his request
to give permanent trading status to China. And that night came
eulogy: 13,000 Democrats gathered at MCI Center for a massive
fundraiser and a celebration of his legacy.
If everyone could agree that Clinton is a talented, and lucky,
rascal who screwed some things up and did pretty damn well with
others, we probably could agree to end our national argument over
him. The Clintons believe it is the right wing that won't let the
argument die. But the hagiographic video tribute at MCI Center
made clear how incapable Clinton himself is of calling a truce.
The president can't be a decent guy, he must be a saintly one.
His achievements can't be scattershot and satisfactory; they must
be epochal. So the debate drones on, and Clinton wears a halo one
moment and horns the next.
These days, the prospect of being stripped of his law license
horrifies him. For several days before the judicial ethics
committee's decision to pursue disbarment came down, Clinton had
been predicting the very action the panel took (its
recommendation has forced a trial scheduled in Little Rock for
later this year). The panel was biased, he told aides, since
everyone on the panel who knew or had supported him had been
hectored into recusing themselves from the vote. "This is a setup
deal," Clinton insisted, according to a friend who talked with
him.
On the day the ethics panel's decision came, Clinton was set to
talk with NBC's Tom Brokaw. In the space of just one answer,
Clinton displayed the full rainbow of his self-justifying
strategies. First came denial, as Clinton reiterated that he
never lied in the Paula Jones case. Then selflessness: He knew he
would "always be at a severe disadvantage" defending himself
"because I will not personally involve myself in any of this
until I'm no longer president." In fact, "the only reason I
agreed even to have papers filed" by lawyers was to uphold
precedent. Finally, victimhood: Other cases involving "more
significant kinds of conduct" than he engaged in had led to
"nowhere near this kind of decision."
He came into office as the Man From Hope, and Clinton plainly
hopes to leave that way as well. But there is one theme that has
snaked darkly around and under the optimistic image Clinton seeks
to project to the world. It is grievance.
In September two years ago, Clinton summoned his Cabinet to
apologize for the Lewinsky affair, and he made a startling
admission: He had been angry nearly every day of his presidency.
I told him in our interview that I was astonished to learn that
he had harbored this much resentment, and asked him if he did
still. "I'm not by nature an angry person," he said, adding, "I
work on it all the time."
Then he launched into the second unprompted discourse on the
Whitewater scandal in the interview. "I think that this whole
Whitewater business will be looked upon by any rational observer
in history as an absurd episode in American history which didn't
amount to a hill of beans," he said. "And that the coverage of it
as if it were serious required people essentially to suspend all
ordinary notions of proof and common sense . . . And now we know,
after all this time, that Whitewater thing was a total sham."
The specificity with which loyal Arkansas friends detail
years-old resentments suggests something of Clinton's view. In an
interview, Jim Blair, the Clinton friend who got unwanted fame as
the person who helped Hillary with her commodities trades,
dissected New York Times articles that ran more than eight years
ago.
White House aides say Clinton himself still engages in similar
exercises. Earlier this year he knew all the best nuggets in a
book by Jeffrey Toobin that was critical of Ken Starr. And when
The Washington Post assigned a writer from the anti-Clinton
American Spectator to review the book, he howled indignantly in
conversations with his press secretary, Joe Lockhart, and
political consultant James Carville. "What more do you need to
know?" said Clinton, who with Hillary has long believed this
newspaper has a vendetta against them over Whitewater.
One former aide who remains on good terms with Clinton says it is
nearly impossible to overstate the sense of victimhood he feels.
He loved the revelations about Newt Gingrich's affair, not out of
any special animus toward the fallen speaker, but as proof of the
vast hypocrisy he sees all around him in Washington.
"I think it still bothers him," says Paul David Leopoulos, an old
Arkansas friend. "He was not allowed to be president. They
changed all the rules for him."
His eruptions, however, come with less vehemence than before.
Every aide and confidant interviewed for this article said
Clinton seems far more at peace.
"I think he believes people are starting to understand him more
and give him credit," says Rahm Emanuel, a former aide still in
steady touch with Clinton.
Clinton said his sense of grievance is abating, in part because
of the spiritual counseling sessions he attends. And he is
becoming philosophical about one of the abiding mysteries of his
career: Why should a centrist politician, whose first instinct is
to try to get along with everyone, inspire such hostility? "It's
not the dislike, it's the intensity factor," says Blair,
recalling the pattern established when Clinton was first elected
in Arkansas. "He does not understand it, and it has always
bothered him."
Clinton's usual answer is that conservatives are envious of his
success. "They railed against entitlements, but they thought they
had an entitlement to govern," he said. I've heard him give this
explanation dozens of times, but in our interview he offered
other theories that showed more detachment. Some of the criticism
of him is "based on a certain critique of the '60s . . . I think
a lot of them genuinely felt that I represented a lot of things
in the culture that they didn't like." He can joke about it now,
saying he sometimes feels like the guy who slips and falls off
the edge of the Grand Canyon, goes to Heaven and asks God, "Why
me?" And God replies: "Son, there's just something about you I
don't like." Clinton laughed. "So you've got to allow for that."
Clinton can allow for it, friends say, because there is something
liberating about full exposure. After all, what can people say
about him now? That he's having sex with an intern? What can they
do about it? Impeach him?
Clinton acknowledged as much. "I think part of it is-when you go
through any difficult period it either breaks you or makes you
better," he said. "I just wake up every day with this enormous
feeling of gratitude. I'm grateful-I'm grateful to my wife and to
my daughter. I've got my family back. I'm grateful to the people
who work with me, who stuck with me. And I'm enormously grateful
to the American people for continuing to support what I was
trying to do for them. To me, every day is a gift now."
When White House aides bring family and friends to tour the West
Wing-which they are allowed to do after 8 p.m.-it is not uncommon
for the president to still be there, shaking hands with some
aide's aunt from Moline, or some intern's college roommate from
Durham. When Clinton is not there, it usually means he is out.
Several times a week, his motorcade cruises through Washington on
its way to some fundraiser; often there are two or three
fundraisers on a single night.
Still, a former close White House aide to Clinton, contemplating
the empty house that greets the president at the end of each
workday now that his wife is in New York, surmises, "I think he's
really lonely."
If so, it is not the loneliness of solitude, or of Nixonian
confessions to the portraits in the White House hallways. In his
determination to squeeze all out of this final year, Clinton has
apparently resolved to never be by himself.
Many close friends and loyal aides are gone, no longer close or
no longer loyal. But Clinton is surrounded by new friends and
aides, a great many of whom, like fundraiser Terry McAuliffe, he
did not even know when he became president. "I really don't think
Bill Clinton has any true friends," says one person who has known
and worked with Clinton for two decades. Instead, by this
reckoning, he has a constantly shifting universe of companions.
Even those who have remained, like his Arkansas chum Leopoulos �
who on a White House visit this spring stayed up talking with
Clinton until 5 a.m. � say he can be marvelous company, but
almost never shares what is really going on inside his head.
The ebullient McAuliffe, one of the world's most upbeat men, is
perhaps Clinton's most frequent companion these days. He may talk
to the president more than any person save Hillary. They stay up
late watching movies, or talking until 2 a.m., as they did one
night in July, about plans for the Democratic National Convention
in Los Angeles, for which McAuliffe was the chairman.
And even when he is alone he is not. There is still the phone. He
tracked down Skip Rutherford, an Arkansas crony helping organize
the Clinton library, on his cell phone while Rutherford was
driving to a Little Rock mall. He tracked down Rahm Emanuel on
the beach-by calling his wife's cell phone. No explanation of how
the operators got the number. When the phone rings at 11 p.m. or
midnight, or later, Clinton's friends know who it will be. Bill
Daley, Gore's campaign chief and an early-to-bed type, says that
when Clinton wakes him up at 11 p.m., "I can't remember the next
day what I said."
The fact that Clinton is never alone, however, does not demolish
a theory held by many of the friends and aides: They believe he
is in many ways a solitary man.
"All the activity is his way of coming back" from the shame of
scandal, says a longtime aide. "It's his way of getting back up
in his head, where he's happiest, and not having to confront the
way he feels."
"He's always been like that," says Leopoulos. Though he was
constantly in Clinton's home growing up, it was not until he read
a magazine article in 1992 that he learned that Clinton's
adoptive father was an alcoholic who sometimes turned violent.
Why didn't you ever say anything, he asked Clinton. "This is for
me to deal with," Clinton replied.
Other people point to the fluidity of his inner circle. Why is it
that someone like McAuliffe, who never knew Clinton before he
became president, should be his best friend? Why is it that there
are so many people to whom Clinton was once close, whether George
Stephanopoulos or Dick Morris, who now have no relationship with
him at all?
In fact, it is rare for someone to drop out of Clinton's universe
completely. But people move constantly between inner and outer
orbits. Bruce Lindsey, the Arkansas aide who was the keeper of
all secrets during the early days, is still at the White House
but less frequently by Clinton's side. The Lewinsky scandal
changed many dynamics. Vernon Jordan, while still friendly with
Clinton, is hardly the omnipresent figure he used to be, say
White House officials. Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff
who was deeply shaken by Clinton's lie to him about Lewinsky,
fell a notch or two last year when he told the Clintons he would
not help them finance their new house in Westchester County.
Instead, McAuliffe stepped in with last-minute help to secure the
loan.
All the motion of Clinton's last year, some believe, masks a
certain sorrow. "There's clearly a sense of melancholy about
leaving" the White House, says Sen. Christopher Dodd of
Connecticut, who is among the senators closest to Clinton. "He's
counting the days, not because he's looking forward to the end."
Dodd recalls watching Clinton nervously at an Irish American
dinner Dodd hosted a couple months ago, not wanting the president
to get trapped for long at an obligatory event. Then it became
clear: "He did not want to leave," Dodd says. "He stayed for
three hours."
"History," said the historian Pieter Geyl, "is an argument
without end." If so, the argument over Bill Clinton will be
continued for many years on the banks of the Arkansas River in
Little Rock. It is there that Clinton intends to build the
Clinton Center, the library with his presidential papers. And
there will also be an apartment where he says he plans to spend
perhaps a third to half his time. There will be programs to
stimulate debate and new ideas about issues Clinton cares about,
from race relations to peacemaking to youth service. The place is
expected to cost $150 million to build, a large chunk of which
has already been raised in undisclosed large pledges collected by
Clinton and McAu-liffe from wealthy donors. Not surprisingly,
perhaps, the people Clinton has recruited for work on the center
are the die-hard defenders-secret-keepers and loyalists like
McAuliffe and Lindsey and Cheryl Mills, the young African
American lawyer who argued Clinton's case against conviction on
the Senate floor.
Mostly, though, the Clinton Center is the place from which Bill
Clinton will launch his next campaign, the one to win the
ex-presidency. Skip Rutherford, the Little Rock public relations
man who is serving as a principal organizer for the center,
predicts Clinton will begin the next phase of his career just as
he began his terms as governor and president: by overdoing it.
"He will travel, he will write, he will speak, he will campaign
for people," Rutherford says. "Forget prioritizing-he'll try to
do it all."
As he has studied the ex-presidency, aides say, Clinton has tried
to become closer to a man with whom his relations for a variety
of reasons have long been tense, Jimmy Carter. Carter, Clinton
now believes, has had the most worthy post-presidential career.
Last winter, Clinton invited the Carters to a private dinner at
the White House.
But as a younger and more vigorous man than the other living
ex-presidents, Rutherford contends, "he will dominate the group."
It is appropriate that the Clinton Center will take root on a
patch of land sorely in need of reinvention. Right now the site
is a litter-strewn lot adjacent to some dingy warehouses. But it
is only a quarter-mile or so down the street from the old Capitol
building where Clinton twice claimed election-night victories for
the presidency. While the center is being built, Clinton's papers
will be stored in a former Oldsmobile dealership nearby.
It is appropriate, too, that the Clinton Center be in Arkansas.
It is the place where all roads, smooth and rocky, seem to lead
in Clinton's life. The place of sentimental homecomings-like the
kind the Clintons had in July, when they returned to
Fayetteville, the first place they lived after their marriage,
for an emotional memorial service for Diane Blair. And the place
of constant indignities, where the disbarment trial looms and
where some dimly remembered name can spring forth to accuse
Hillary of antisemitism or Bill of sexual assault. Friends like
Jim Blair and Leopoulos, outraged at how Arkansas is treating its
native son, say they've encouraged Clinton to say the hell with
it and move his presidential papers to Georgetown University. But
he says he's not interested in such payback.
In the meantime, there is a race underway � not Gore against
Bush, but Clinton against the clock.
Air Force One was on the tarmac, and aides were hovering for the
interview to end. I asked Clinton a last question: Did he think a
successful close could cleanse the stains of 1998?
"No," he answered. "I think that the only thing that can cleanse
a mistake ever is an apology and an atonement." Clear enough. But
then he added: "To the extent that the promise I made to the
American people to work like crazy for them every day I was
president is a part of that, I think that the answer to your
question may be, yes."
� 2000 The Washington Post Company
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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