Whatever the controversy before she went, Hillary"s trip to China was her most important success of Clinton"s first term. Her speech, a clarion call for justice for women throughout the world, not only electrified the conference, but it served as a broad and encompa.s.sing statement of women"s rights as human rights, including a condemnation of the murder of female babies, global forced prost.i.tution, the burning of brides because their dowries were too small, rape "as a tactic or prize of war," domestic violence, genital mutilation, and forced abortion or sterilization. Hillary was magnificent!
To come back from her own crushing personal defeat in the health care reform debacle, Hillary needed a master stroke, a moment of high drama to summon her supporters and display what she could mean to the women of the world. China did that for her. It was her moment of redemption.
The political lesson of the South Asia and China trips was that travel pays. Until Monica Lewinsky dragged her back into her husband"s own particular brand of h.e.l.l, Hillary would find her political role in travel abroad, where she could be a spokesperson for women - and a symbol of their potential.
In Living History, Hillary cites trips to seventy-eight foreign countries, saying that the travel helped "to open my mind and my heart."
She doesn"t mention that when she traveled she brought with her a small army. During Hillary"s second term alone, the first lady"s foreign travel cost the taxpayers $12 million. Her most expensive trip - a March 1999 twelve-day tour of North Africa with Chelsea, safari included - cost $2.3 million.
HILLARY MOVES TO THE CENTER.
Back home, while Hillary was traveling the globe, President Clinton was facing an increasingly acrimonious showdown with the new Republican majority in Congress. Determined to slash federal spending, the Gingrich crowd pushed for major across-the-board cuts in social programs.
Clinton decided to take them on in four areas, condemning their reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. He said that the Republicans were just using the deficit as an excuse to slash programs that they had always wanted to cut anyway.
As long as the Republicans could say that their reductions in spending were vital to eliminating the deficit, though, they would win the argument. What Clinton had to show the nation was a way to balance the budget without sacrificing these vital programs.
The president"s economic advisors were strong supporters of deficit reduction. But Leon Panetta and the more liberal White House staff were against Clinton preparing an alternative path to a balanced budget. They said that Clinton would have to embrace at least some cuts in vital programs in any plan he might offer, and that this would throw away the Democrats" best issue.
Which way would the president go? It was the key question throughout all of May and June 1995. The push/pull between the moderates (Vice President Gore and Deputy Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles) and the liberals (Panetta, Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, and George Stephanopoulos) dominated every political strategy meeting.
Hillary was no stranger to the left, but in this case she went up the middle, taking the New Democrat tack and urging Bill to submit his own balanced budget plan to the Congress and the public. She also made known her opposition to the Gingrich budget priorities. To this day, Hillary is a vocal critic of the growing deficit, eager to cite the Clinton administration budget surplus at every opportunity as an eviscerated achievement of her husband"s rule. On this issue, she was no liberal.
Clinton laid out his alternative plan in a nationally televised prime time speech in June 1995, taking the balanced budget issue away from the Republicans for all time. Hillary had urged him to give the speech, and cheered him on every step of the way. But she doesn"t mention much about her intervention in her memoir, probably because HILLARY must tack more to the left while she"s representing liberal New York. Nor does her account of her husband"s strong stand against the Republican budget cuts, and the government shutdown, mention what she knows is the key point: that Bill Clinton won his face-off with the Gingrich-Dole forces in Congress through ma.s.sive use of paid advertising, unique in the history of presidential politics.
As the unthinkable began to become the inevitable, it became obvious to the Clinton White House that the president was about to enter a game of chicken against the Republican leadership of Congress. They would let the government run out of money and refuse to authorize additional spending - thus closing down the government - unless Clinton accepted their draconian budget cuts.
The question we all asked was "would Clinton flinch?" If he had the public with him, I knew he wouldn"t. So I proposed, again with Hillary"s support, a ma.s.sive program of paid advertising to bring our case directly to the voters.
But the president was afraid to advertise because he said it would look too political. No other president had ever used paid advertising in his battles with Congress eighteen months before an election. "We"ll keep it secret," I said.
"How in the world do you plan to do that?" he asked. "Run ads on television and keep them secret at the same time?"
"We won"t advertise in New York City or in Washington, D.C. That"s where all the reporters live," I replied.
Following the plan, we advertised in half the country for six months, but never ran an ad in either of these two cities. It worked perfectly. Very few articles appeared in the media about our ads, and those that did were buried inside the newspaper. Here we were, speaking to half the nation an average of three times a week for a year, and the New York-Washington media was so introverted and elitist that it never noticed!
The most important indication of Hillary"s emerging centrism was her strong support, opportunistic or not, for the historic Welfare Reform Bill of 1996, the most significant and successful piece of domestic legislation since the 1964-1965 Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
Hillary proudly reports the bill"s success in her memoir: It cut welfare rolls by 60 percent, and helped reduce child poverty by about one quarter during the same period. Indeed, recent indications suggest that even in the Bush recession and its aftermath welfare rolls have continued to decline.
But at the time, her support of welfare reform alienated many of her most liberal friends. In Living History she writes of the contrast between her pragmatism on welfare reform, and her att.i.tude during the health care debate: "I remembered all too well the defeat of our health care reform effort, which may have happened, in part, because of a lack of give and take." Indeed.
Hillary correctly notes that Clinton had to veto two welfare reform bills that contained caps in Medicaid and cuts in food stamps and other nutrition and child safety programs. She can be forgiven some posturing here. When the Republicans pa.s.sed their first welfare reform bill, she writes, "Some in the White House urged the President to sign whatever reform the Congress sent him." But "I told [the president] and his top staff that I would speak out against any bill" with these cuts, she writes, even if the president signed it.
In fact, no one in the White House wanted Clinton to sign these bills. But the third welfare reform bill Congress pa.s.sed was a different story. This bill was different. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had compromised dramatically to try to get Clinton"s signature on the legislation. He dropped the Medicaid caps, restored the food stamp ent.i.tlement; added day care and job training, and eliminated the block grants that would have capped money to fight child abuse and neglect.
But the bulk of the White House staff still wanted the president to veto the new bill. They cited the cuts in legal-immigrant aid the Republicans had included, but their real reason was more basic: None of them wanted to end the fundamental ent.i.tlement to benefits welfare recipients enjoyed.
I met with Hillary to listen to her strong objections to the immigrant aid cuts, and pointed out that these reductions could be rescinded by a Democratic Congress. Stressing the importance of the bill to Clinton"s re-election, I told Hillary bluntly that I thought a veto would cost us the victory.
At the time, my house was being painted by a tribe of finicky women whose work might have qualified them for a place alongside Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel ceiling. They inspired the metaphor I used to explain my views to Hillary.
"Hillary, we"ve worked together long enough so you know that I"m like a house painter," I said, making a painting motion with my hand. "Every four years the house has to be painted. So I come in and move all the furniture to the center of the room. The center. And I paint the walls. When I"m finished, I go home and you can rearrange the furniture anyway you like."
"You silver-tongued devil, you," she replied with a smile.
In Living History, Hillary candidly discusses the political considerations that entered into her calculus. "If he vetoed welfare reform a third time, Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall." Clinton signed the bill, and the offensive cuts in aid to legal immigrants were repealed the very next year.
When Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Law, he effectively doomed Republican attempts to oust him in the 1996 elections. Signing the centerpiece of the GOP program - albeit with Democratic alterations and additions - took away the GOP"s best issue. It is a credit to Trent Lott that he acted to pa.s.s a bill so manifestly in the nation"s interest, even though it pulled the rug out from under Bob Dole, the Republican candidate for president. (It also helped Lott preserve the Republican majority in the Senate.) But the salient fact remains: Hillary backed the two measures that were most important in her husband"s move to the center - the balanced budget and welfare reform. That these are his two leading achievements as president is further reason to give her credit. Hillary, no less than Bill, had learned the lessons of 1994 and moved to the center as 1996 approached.
So which is she - a liberal or a moderate? A New Democrat or an old-fashioned one? The answer is pretty easy to trace: Between 1980 and 1990 she was a moderate. From 1991 until 1994 she was a liberal. In 1995 and 1996, she moderated as Bill sought re-election. Fighting her husband"s impeachment in 1997-1998, she veered left to keep the loyalty of the Senate Democrats who controlled her husband"s fate. Running for the Senate in 1999-2000, Hillary moved back toward the middle to get elected.
Growth? Or opportunism? My bet is that it was just a liberal always looking for an opening.
1996: CLINTON"S RE-ELECTION.
Despite Hillary"s successful trip to China and the favorable coverage of It Takes a Village, the bad taste of health care reform lingered in the public"s memory. The constant scandals whirling around Hillary made for daily negative media coverage that did nothing to improve her image.
As Bill girded for his re-election battle against Bob Dole, Hillary began to focus on the upcoming Democratic National Convention as a way to rehabilitate her image. Here she would be able to command a national television audience for an hour-long speech to the gathering - the ideal way to reposition herself.
In helping the Clintons plan the Democratic Convention, I couldn"t help noticing a growing paranoia in Hillary"s att.i.tudes. She hunkered down into an us-versus-them posture that I found downright scary. I remember thinking: This must be how it was to be around Nixon during his presidency.
Hillary had always been partisan, and lately a little moralistic as well. Until now, though, I had never found her to be paranoid. But even paranoids have real enemies, and Hillary"s had been attacking her for four years. It"s not surprising that her personality showed the results. Two examples stand out in my mind, one involving the Secret Service and the other concerning tickets to the convention.
We arranged for the president to arrive at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago by train, stopping at all the swing states en route. Originally, the idea was to begin the train trip in Pittsburgh and wind our way through Ohio and Indiana, ending up in Chicago. Virtually every swing state Clinton needed to carry the election was located within five hundred miles of the convention hall, so we wanted to make a big production of the president"s arrival by campaigning in as many of those key states as possible.
While we were preparing the trip, though, we learned that the Secret Service would want to shut down rail travel in the cities through which the president was to pa.s.s. This caused a specific problem in Pittsburgh, which turned out to be the hub of commercial rail travel in much of the United States, so we had to cancel the plans to begin the trip there. In the process, I learned a great deal about Hillary"s att.i.tude toward the Secret Service.
In her memoir, the former first lady strikes the gracious and generous pose toward the Secret Service that one would expect from the HILLARY brand. "The Secret Service adapted to our needs, and we to theirs," she writes. Hillary describes the "tone of cooperation and flexibility that came to characterize our relationships with the agents sworn to protect us."
As we planned the train trip, though, the friction between the Service and the first lady was palpable. During a meeting in the White House Map Room, Hillary warned that the Secret Service "will shut down the entire Eastern Seaboard just to embarra.s.s us if we give them the excuse [by going to Pittsburgh]. How will it look if all trains are shut down? They do this to us all the time. They"re mainly Republicans. They hate us. They always take the most extreme option just to cause us embarra.s.sment. We enter a city and they close down all traffic. We can"t go to Pittsburgh."
A second example of Hillary"s growing paranoia came a few weeks before the Democratic Convention. Bill had recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday at Radio City Music Hall to raise funds for the party. Hecklers from the radical gay group Act Up interrupted the president"s speech with catcalls, demanding more action on gay issues. As they were hauled out by the police, Clinton interrupted his speech to urge the cops to be careful and remember that the demonstrators had rights, too.
In a meeting to plan the convention, Hillary alluded to the Radio City experience and pointed out that they had been sitting in the most expensive seats nearest the podium. "How could they afford five-hundred dollar tickets?" she demanded. She said she was sure that the Republicans had paid for the seats for the demonstrators and said she expected them to use similar tactics at our convention.
Her solution? "I want tight control on who gets tickets and screening to keep out protesters," she proposed. "I want us to know who goes into that hall and where they come from." I had visions of the news stories likely to result from such a public show of both paranoia and vulnerability. When I raised my concerns with the president later, he told me he"d heard nothing about Hillary"s idea and a.s.sured me he wouldn"t do anything like she suggested. There were no hecklers at the convention, and no screening either.
Time and again, Bill Clinton would leaven Hillary"s paranoia and allow us to overlook her more brazen attempts to exert control and stifle criticism. Hillary"s outbursts were never the final word. A cooler head with a more detached, professional outlook, Bill would make the final decisions. In a Hillary presidency, however, the roles would be reversed. With Hillary making the decisions, Bill Clinton might be reduced to sending impotent alarms whenever disaster was near.
If the 1996 Chicago convention was a theatrical production, Hillary was starring in the role of hometown girl. She arrived at the convention several days before Bill so she could accompany reporters to all of the sites with which she was familiar as a child.
Some of us in the campaign worried about holding the convention in Chicago in the first place. The comparisons with the 1968 convention - with its tear gas, night sticks, and blood - could hurt our attempt to moderate the Democrats" image. On the other hand, Hillary loved having it in Chicago, a city where she could play a featured role.
But HILLARY is a New York brand, so in Living History she gives the city of her childhood short shrift. "I arrived in Chicago on Sunday, August 25, three days ahead of Bill," she writes. "Betsy Ebeling had organized a gathering of my family and friends at Riva"s Restaurant, which sits on Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. I quickly caught Chicago"s excitement about hosting the convention."
And that"s it. As she reinvents herself as a New Yorker, Chicago seems to have become a distant memory. At the time, though, her trip back to her childhood haunts loomed large to her, and became central to our plans to carry the swing state of Illinois.
Hillary focused intently on her speech to the convention. Her first appearance on the national stage since the 1994 elections, it was a vital opportunity to reinvent herself as an education and child care expert and distance herself from the health care debacle.
Like most people, I was always very impressed with how Hillary protected Chelsea from the media. She realized that if she and Bill put Chelsea out there, the reporters would take shots. But if they avoided trying to exploit her too overtly, she would remain more or less off limits.
Of course, Hillary took her daughter with her whenever she could on her trips, but the press seemed to feel that her mere presence at Mom"s side was all right.
Before the convention, I called Hillary to suggest that Chelsea second Bill"s nomination. "That isn"t going to happen," she said flatly. "And I don"t want to hear anything more about it from you or anyone else."
Okay. Got it.
And yet, when it came time to give her speech, Hillary invoked Chelsea"s name no less than six times - and often unnecessarily. Indeed, throughout the speech Hillary sought to ill.u.s.trate each of the points in her husband"s program with examples from Chelsea"s life, giving the address a distinctly Ozzz"e and Harriet feel: - "Our daughter, Chelsea, will graduate from college in 2001, at the dawn of the next century."
- "It is hard for any of us to know what the world will look like then, much less when Chelsea is my age, in the year 2028. But one thing we know for sure is that change is certain - progress is not."
- "And Bill was with me when Chelsea was born, in the delivery room, in my hospital room, and when we brought our baby daughter home."
- "You know, Bill and I are fortunate that our jobs have allowed us to take breaks from work not only when Chelsea was born, but to attend her school events and take her to the doctor. But millions of other parents can"t get time off."
- "Chelsea has spent only one night in the hospital after she had her tonsils out, but Bill and I couldn"t sleep at all that night."
- "Sometimes, late at night, when I see Chelsea doing her homework, or watching TV, or talking to a friend on the phone, I think to myself, her life and the lives of millions of boys and girls will be better because of what all of us are doing together."
Was Hillary protecting Chelsea or just keeping her for her own political use?
With Chelsea"s help, Dr. Hillary yielded to Professor Hillary, as she succeeded in burying health care in her past. Her speech was a great success. It moved her husband up two points in that night"s postspeech tracking poll - the yardstick for virtue in those days.
It was a great kickoff to the campaign. And yet, once again, Living History makes no mention at all of her role in the general election of 1996. The text goes directly from her convention speech to election night in less than a page. What happened to the intervening two months? Why no discussion of the dozens, if not hundreds, of speeches she made on her husband"s behalf?
In particular, Hillary never mentions her role in campaign fund-raising. Yet it was almost as extensive as Bill"s. In early 1996, President Clinton angrily told me: "You want me to issue executive orders and make speeches, but all I have time to do is to raise the money for your television ads. I can"t think. I can"t act. All I do is raise money. And it"s all Hillary does, all Al [Gore] does, all Tipper does."
Few politicians like fund-raising; it"s time-consuming and often demeaning. It"s understandable that HILLARY might want to forget how much effort Hillary put into it. Understandable, but not exactly candid.
Election night was a bittersweet experience for the Clintons. Upbeat as always in her memoir, she writes: "I felt it was more than a victory for the President; it was a vindication of the American people."
Nice spin. But the fact that the Republicans retained their control of Congress (thanks to Trent Lott "s late session pragmatism), even as Dole was getting trounced, bespoke a lack of real trust in the Clintons and an ardent desire to maintain healthy checks and balances in Washington. While the president was re-elected by "a solid eight percentage points" (Hillary"s phrase), a Republican Congress meant that Hillary and Bill could look forward to more committee hearings, investigations, and problems.
Bill was upset that he did not win a majority of the vote, falling short by a few tenths of a percent. The key reason was that the Clinton campaign ended the 1996 election in a nose dive, driven down by the growing scandal about their fund-raising tactics and the possible involvement of money from sources connected to the Chinese government.
As Hillary sets the stage for the second term in her memoir, she focuses on her shift "from a highly visible role as Bill"s chief health care advisor ... to a more private - but equally active - role during the two years following the mid-term elections in 1994."
But Hillary realized there was a hole in her CV. As she looked toward her own future, she knew that a record of public advocacy alone would not be enough to lay the basis for a Hillary candidacy - a lesson she"d learned back in 1990, when our polls revealed that Arkansas voters still saw her as a subset of her husband.
And so, in Living History, Hillary takes pains to let us know that she really had power on the inside all along. The HILLARY brand requires a resume of public achievements to put forward - and since she can"t quite muster that on her own, she uses Bill"s. She may have hidden it at the time, but the HILLARY of Living History was at the center of the action all along.
"I had begun working inside the White House," she writes, "and with other Administration officials to save vital services and programs targeted by Gingrich and the Republicans. I also spent two years helping the President"s top advisors refine welfare reform and stave off cuts in legal services, the arts, education, Medicare, and Medicaid. As part of our continuing effort on health care reform, I lobbied Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill to initiate a comprehensive program to make vaccines available at low or no cost for children."
Fact check: Hillary did, indeed, play the key role in the vaccination program and was important to welfare reform. But the rest of this account reads like a how-to manual on padding a resume.
Her role in the budget fight with the Republicans was minimal, although she was strongly committed to the president"s position. By this time Hillary recognized that she was like a red cape to the Republican bull, so she stayed largely out of sight, anxious not to inflame an already tense situation. She was involved in neither the negotiations with Congress, nor the design or content of Clinton"s speeches during the period. She had little input even in the 1995 and 1996 State of the Union speeches, which I helped the president prepare. (I still have my typed copies, with his neat handwritten inserts.) Within the administration, Hillary was a voice against compromise on vital programs, and for her private advocacy of the White House balanced budget plan she deserves special credit. Instead, though, the HILLARY brand is eager to take credit for advances she had little to do with.
The most important result of this series of ideological shifts, of adaptations in service of opportunity, and, yes, of newly mastered skills, is that Hillary Rodham Clinton became a political professional. The sudden need to manage her husband"s career after his 1980 defeat; the experience of formulating and pa.s.sing education reform in Arkansas; her shock at discovering that the state"s voters nevertheless saw her as Bill"s surrogate, not yet as her own person; her disastrous handling of health care reform once her husband reached the White House; the strategy of shifting her energies from backroom activism to public advocacy; the need to focus on incremental improvements rather than unreachable solutions; her use of foreign travel; and her balancing of the traditional with the novel in the first lady"s role: All have come to define the politician that she is today.
But there was another side to Hillary"s experiences during her husband"s first term. Constantly, continuously, she was under fire for scandals that were laid at her doorstep. Weary of rehashing the controversy of that period, one is tempted to pa.s.s it by, simply to forget about it.
HILLARY hasn"t forgotten the controversy. But neither has she remembered it... not accurately, anyway. Instead she stoutly defends her innocence, a.s.sails her critics, and continues to misrepresent the facts. Perhaps she is just trying to salvage what she can from a series of unfortunate episodes. But it seems equally likely that she has really not learned from them. To understand the significance of her lapses of memory, to help us judge whether Hillary"s ethical boundaries remain as porous today as they have proved in the past, we must examine the record of how HILLARY has hidden Hillary"s more worldly - not to say acquisitive - face.
HIDING HILLARY: THE MATERIAL GIRL.
Future generations, when asked to free-a.s.sociate the words "Clinton" and "scandal," will probably summon up only the name "Lewinsky," since that particular outrage led to the historic impeachment of a president. But the string of Hillary-generated scandals during the two Clinton administrations is stunningly impressive on its own.
The Whitewater investment; the firing of the White House Travel Office employees; the legal work for the Madison Bank; the hide-and-seek game with billing records; Vince Foster"s suicide; the misuse of FBI files; the source of payments to Webb Hubbell: Every one of these was a Hillary Clinton scandal. Even the wanton award of presidential pardons during the last days of the second term, which can be laid at Bill Clinton"s feet, weren"t his work alone: Among the recipients were her brothers" clients, and some of her most ardent supporters.
Echoing through all of Hillary"s scandals - and distinguishing her troubles from the ones that nearly brought down her husband - is the sound of money. Bill had his scandals; Hillary had hers. George Stephanopoulos puts it this way in his memoir, All Too Human: "On [Whitewater], Clinton wasn"t commander in chief, just a husband beholden to his wife. Hillary was always the first to defend him on bimbo eruptions; now [on Hillary"s financial scandals] he had to do the same for her."
At first, one is inclined to forgive Hillary"s financial misdeeds. After all, the amounts involved were not large and Bill and Hillary were not wealthy. Sandwiched in between the millionaire presidencies of Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Bush, the Clintons" willingness to cut corners to salt away some savings is not necessarily grounds for outright condemnation.
But as the Clintons have ama.s.sed great wealth through their $18 million in book deals and Bill"s $10 million annual income, Hillary"s avarice has not abated. Her recent conduct suggests that her insensitivity to conflicts of interest and ethics rules, so much in evidence during her Arkansas days, has not changed. If anything, getting away with her past conduct seems to have emboldened her and desensitized her further to ethical lines.
And then there is Hillary"s book. If Living History is a window on the current evolution of Hillary"s ethical sensibilities, we are in for a very tough time if she ever becomes president. Hillary"s memoir is one continuous cover-up. Coming so gratuitously, almost four years after she left the White House, the cover-up is more disturbing than the scandals themselves. If Hillary truly believes what she writes about Whitewater, her commodities trading, the gifts, and such, she hasn"t learned a thing from her scandals - except to feel free to do it all again.
But what can she say? you may ask. She can"t very well reverse her statements over the decades and admit fault, can she?
Perhaps not. At the very least, though, she could indicate in general terms that she has learned from her experiences. But she doesn"t do that. Instead, to preserve HILLARY"S reputation, she rea.s.serts her innocence at the top of her lungs, twisting and spinning the evidence to her advantage, determinedly absolving herself of any blame for anything.
Has she learned? Her account of each of the Hillary scandals in Living History suggests not.
It"s not terribly difficult to find the source of Hillary"s early financial scandals. From the start of the Clintons" political career, Hillary claims that she was in a chronic state of financial insecurity, citing Bill"s $35,000 salary as governor. With everything in her husband"s life subordinated to the search for political power, according to her, it was her job - and her burden - to care for the Clinton family"s material needs.
In Living History, she repeats the family mantra: "Money means almost nothing to Bill Clinton. He is not opposed to making money or owning property; it has simply never been a priority. He"s happy when he has enough to buy books, watch movies, go out to dinner, and travel. . . . But I worried that because politics is an inherently unstable profession, we needed to build up a nest egg."
Certainly $35,000 a year is no huge amount of money for a family of three, but it is misleading to compare Clinton"s salary as governor with a normal family paycheck. In the Arkansas Governor"s Mansion, the Clintons got free luxurious housing, furniture, meals, entertainment, transportation, babysitting, housekeeping, servants, state automobiles including fuel and insurance, chauffeurs, telephones, utilities, home repairs, health insurance, and homeowners" insurance. In addition to a substantial entertainment budget, the governor also received a food allowance of more than $50,000 per year. A state credit card paid for travel. And none of these perks was taxable. Indeed, about the only things the Clintons actually had to pay for were books, clothing, and restaurant meals. And, of course, Hillary was making substantially more than $35,000 per year.
Add it up: Combining Bill"s salary with her own and throwing in the food budget, the governor"s entertainment allowance, and the various free services that came with the Mansion, the Clintons were quite well off - and carried very few financial obligations.
Yet Hillary felt broke - so much so that, early in her husband"s political career, the Clintons actually donated his used underwear to charity two separate years to garner the tax deduction.
It was this mind-set - this combination of perceived deprivation with a sense of ent.i.tlement - that led Hillary to take extraordinary risks at the start of Bill"s governorship to make money. Whitewater, the commodities trading, and her representation of the Madison Bank were all indications of Hillary"s increasingly insatiable desire for money, always masquerading as a need for security.
And there was nothing the Clintons wanted that they couldn"t get somebody to give them. When Chelsea was young, Hillary wanted to build a swimming pool for her on the grounds of the Mansion. Determined not to pay for it herself, and savvy enough not to use tax money, she arranged for private donors - the same type of fat cat friends who would dominate their White House years - to chip in for Chelsea"s pool.
When she told me of her plans, I was astounded. I felt that voters of that very poor state would see the pool as a symbol of pretentious wealth, and hold it against the Clintons at the next election. And what special favors would the donors have gotten for their money, other than the satisfaction of knowing that Hillary could do her laps? "How could you even think of that?" I asked. "You"ll get killed."
"Well, it"s not really for us," Hillary replied evenly. "The mansion is for all future governors of the state; they"ll be able to use it."
"You"ll never be able to sell that argument," I shot back. "The next time you fly over Little Rock, look down and count the number of swimming pools." I asked her a pointed question: "The next time I do a poll, do you want me to ask whether people have swimming pools?"
That got her mad. "Why can"t we lead the lives of normal people? They can give their daughters swimming pools; why can"t we?"
"You can - you just have to pay for it," I muttered as she stalked off.