SEPTEMBER 24, 2013
THE COMING HILLARY CLINTON TRAIN WRECK
Do people really think that a Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign is a good idea—for the Democratic Party, our collective sanity, even for her? Maybe it doesn’t matter; some political locomotives just move ahead, even if the wreck is predestined, and her campaign is now coming around the bend. There is talk of the real rollout beginning this week, which may make for slightly odd timing given that a better focus might be on introducing Obamacare, aspects of which go into effect October 1st. Bill Clinton is supposed to be helping with that. Then again, it’s also the week of the big Clinton party, the Clinton Global Initiative summit, with all sorts of worldly people in town for the General Assembly, too. That could help Hillary, who will introduce her husband and Obama at the summit tonight, and whose name, with her daughter’s, has been added to the name of the Foundation. But there are also two new magazine stories out, at least one of which won’t help her at all.
New York has a big profile, by Joe Hagan, all about Hillary Clinton as her own powerful person—after Bill, after the First Lady stint and all those Clinton scandals, the woman in the plane with the BlackBerry and her own relationships with world leaders. She visited a lot of them, as Secretary of State. And while many don’t think she had particular big ideas (“For foreign-policy critics, some of this could look like wheel spinning”), her allies tell the magazine that’s just because they haven’t properly theorized the making of connections itself:
Clinton’s State team argues that Clinton was a great stateswoman, her ambition to touch down in as many countries as possible a meter of how much repair work she did to the nation’s image abroad.
There could be something to that—but whose image, and, one might add, whose connections? What is striking is that the Hillary-at-State philosophy is awfully like the one practiced by Bill at his foundation, though money is more openly on the table there. During an official visit, when the plane lands and the dinner with local influential figures begins, the material aspect is merely implied. In both cases, good can come of it. And for an idea of the unpleasant places the solicitation of donors can lead, read Alec MacGillis’s New Republicpiece on Doug Band, one of Bill Clinton’s key aides and the man whose job, in part, seems to have been translating dollar figures into Clinton access. There were a lot of rides on private and corporate planes, and other favors that Band helped broker, but the Clintons received. “By his tally, he has accompanied the former president to nearly 125 countries and 2,000 cities,” MacGillis writes. (Hillary visited a hundred and twelve countries during her Secretary of Stateship.) But, her aides tell New York, each of those miles marked distance from Bill—toward her own ends: he was
“Not a presence,” says a close State aide. “And I don’t mean that just literally. But not someone who was built into the system in any way. He had a very minimal presence in her time at the State Department.“It’s kind of jarring when she says ‘Bill,’ ” this person adds, recalling meetings with Hillary Clinton. “Well, who’s Bill? And then you realize that she’s talking about her husband. It happened so infrequently that you were kind of like, Oh,the president.”
That’s their story, anyway. And yet, in the past few years, Bill and Hillary have both met a lot of powerful people, the same or in the same circles—she projecting present power, he, with his own stature and force, facilitating good but also collecting an awful lot of money. Has anyone made a serious effort to map her travels as Secretary of State against the activities of the Foundation and the donations it’s received?
The Band piece is full of crass vignettes of corporations and wealthy foreigners pretty straightforwardly purchasing access to Clinton with donations to the Foundation. They also, increasingly, gave money to Band, through the sideline company he set up, Teneo, and several other even less transparent partnerships. (MacGillis: “One month before the Rockefeller Foundation presented Clinton with an award for philanthropy, it gave Teneo a $3.4 million contract to propose ‘tangible solutions to global problems.’ ”) For a while, Bill Clinton was a paid adviser, making one wonder if part of the company’s function was to absorb money directed at the family that the Foundation couldn’t. Band eventually alienated the Clintons, or at least Hillary and Chelsea—Bill has been out defending him—in part for being a little too embarrassingly obvious. Also, for forcing them to have conversations like this one, which MacGillis recounts:
The second person close to the foundation says that one major donor complained directly to Clinton that he had been writing large checks to Band and was upset that his access to Clinton had decreased. “The president was furious.”
Was the problem writing a check for access, or just writing it to the wrong person?
No matter how brutal and detail-rich they are, this and other big pieces related to the Foundation—like one this summer in the Times—have read less like definitive takedowns than like a to-do list for an investigative-reporting assignment desk. (The hundred and six million dollars Clinton has received in speaking fees is mentioned only parenthetically.) There is so much there. Band comes across not as a loose end but as a particularly shiny thread as woven as any into the Clinton cloth. (Another one is Huma Abedin.) It is being laundered and brushed and ironed and internally audited for 2016, with Chelsea reportedly making herself busy over there, at the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. And is Chelsea’s role supposed to make people who have reservations about dynasties in American politics feel better?
All that just makes its activities more relevant to a Clinton campaign. This is not a matter of a woman in politics being unfairly asked about her husband’s business. Saying that her position as Secretary of State was not part of the bundle of power and what might be called glamour that the Foundation offered is not a serious proposition. And by adding her name at the moment she, to all appearances, is getting ready to run, she has effectively made future influence part of the Foundation’s prospectus. From New York:
On her first major public stage since leaving the State Department, Hillary told the crowd that the foundation will be a “full partnership between the three of us,” including her daughter, Chelsea. But this was clearly Hillary Clinton’s show.
And:
“It’s all people jockeying for position,” says a person with close ties to the foundation. “This is an operation that runs on proximity to people. Now there are three people. How does all that work?”
How does it work? The Foundation may do a lot of good. And the Clinton Presidency, those years in the nineties, was a time when the economy and life looked good. It would be so important to have a woman as President. But the dread that one feels at the thought of having to listen to one more word about Vince Foster, if Hillary gets the Democratic nomination, is exceeded by the thought of stories on whatever has been going on at the Foundation. She lost in the 2008 primaries to a candidate no one thought had a chance, who was able to move to the front in part because she had taken care to push others out early; we never saw what a Republican attack would have looked like. (There was a peek, around Benghazi, both of the unhinged hate and her own capacity for missteps.) That sort of trouble and noise would not be an unfair revival of ancient Whitewater-Monica-Ken Starr-vast-right-wing-conspiracy history. It doesn’t even encompass Bill’s social life, or Hillary’s own shortcomings as a campaigner. It has to do with debts Hillary Clinton and her family have taken on, and might be asked, with currency voters give them, to pay back.
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.
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