Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (14 page)

As the person chosen to deliver the nominating speech, Clinton seemed to have an assignment that was simple enough: to cast Barack Obama as a great president who deserved to be reelected so that he could finish the job he had begun. But Clinton’s task was complicated by an uncomfortable truth: he believed just the opposite of what he was assigned to prove. In his estimation, Obama was a weak president who had failed to earn the right to remain in office.

Less than a year before, when Clinton assembled a few old friends in the red barn in a futile effort to convince Hillary to challenge Obama for their party’s presidential nomination, he made his true feelings about Obama clear. Clinton tore into Obama’s jobs and tax proposals. He said that Obama had made a huge mistake by attacking Wall Street executives, who had pledged to pay more taxes to help cut the deficit, and many of whom were Bill’s personal friends.

“The economy’s a mess, it’s dead flat,” Clinton said at that time. “America has lost its triple-A rating. Hillary, you have years of experience on Obama. You know better than Obama does, and far better than those guys who are advising him. They don’t know what they’re doing. . . . Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. . . . Barack Obama is an
amateur
!”

It was Bill Clinton’s characterization of Obama as an “amateur” that gave me the title for my 2012 book about Obama. And it was his hypercritical assessment of Obama that left Clinton in a quandary when he now took up his pencil and faced a blank page: the only way he could possibly reconcile his speech assignment with his deeply held feelings was to distort the truth about Obama and indulge in a bold and extravagant illusion.

The illusion was imbedded in the portrait of Obama that gradually took shape on the pages of Clinton’s yellow legal pads. Little by little, Clinton created an Obama who bore only a passing resemblance to the man who occupied the Oval Office. Clinton transformed Obama from a tax-and-spend liberal into a centrist Democrat who believed in the virtues of opportunity, responsibility, and community.

Clinton had performed this repositioning task once before. Back in the late 1980s, after the Democratic Party had lost three presidential elections under ultra-liberal candidates George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis, Clinton had championed what he called “the Third Way,” a synthesis of conservative economic policies and progressive social policies. Clinton had defined himself as a “New Democrat” who challenged the old liberal orthodoxy on such matters as welfare reform, community policing, charter schools, government reinvention, free trade, and a balanced budget.

From the first draft of his speech, Clinton never strayed from the theme that Obama was, like Clinton himself, a “New Democrat” who believed in the middle-class values of working hard,
playing by the rules, and taking individual responsibility. He completely ignored the fact that Obama had never met an entitlement program he didn’t like and that Obama didn’t seem to mind blowing a $17 trillion hole in the national debt.

Was Obama a paleo-liberal who promised to tax the rich, return to class warfare and identity politics, and hold the Democratic coalition together by handing out free stuff to more and more people?

Not according to the word portrait that Clinton was creating.

Was Obama a big-government redistributionist who lashed out at “fat cat” bankers and “the 1 percent”?

You wouldn’t find any reference to Obama’s us-versus-them populist policies in Clinton’s speech.

Did Obama distrust free-market capitalism and sound as though he belonged to the Occupy Wall Street movement?

No mention of any of that was in Clinton’s various drafts.

“Bill’s thinking was that Obama had never had a Sister Souljah moment, where he repudiated the extremist elements in his base and the message of racial hostility,” said a Clinton associate who helped him shape the convention speech. “Bill told me, ‘Obama handed the keys over to his base; on healthcare, he handed the keys over to [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid. That’s Obama’s style of leadership. He’s a traditional liberal Democrat. You can’t change him, but you can reposition him.’ So Bill made a strategic judgment,” this person continued. “He would do what it took to reposition Obama with voters so that in their eyes he’d become an acceptable centrist politician, not far, far to the left.”

As Clinton dashed off his thoughts, revision followed revision. He scratched out whole sentences, inserted stronger adjectives and verbs for weaker ones, and used the Sharpie markers to move paragraphs around. While he was in the throes of writing, he was visited by a friend, who later described the scene to the author. Torn pages from the former president’s yellow legal pads cascaded down from the desk, some of them settling on Seamus, forcing the dog to get up and slink away.

Clinton received talking points from David Axelrod, his designated convention contact in the Obama campaign. Axe sent suggestions about what the Obamans wanted Clinton to say and how long they wanted him to say it. They were allotting him about twenty-five minutes to blast the Republicans and Mitt Romney and convince the American people that Obama was a competent steward of the American economy. Clinton read Axe’s suggestions and tossed them into the wastepaper basket.

As the date of the convention drew near, Axe grew anxious to see a final draft of the speech, and Clinton just as insistently refused to show it to him. He wasn’t going to give the Obamans the time and opportunity to rewrite the words he had so painstakingly put together. As a result, just days before the convention was due to open, no one in the Obama camp had the faintest idea what was in Clinton’s speech.

“Former President Bill Clinton is slated to give what could be the most important speech of the Democratic National Convention
in two days,” the website BuzzFeed reported from Charlotte, “but nobody here knows what he’s going to say. Clinton is the only major speaker yet to submit his address to the typically painstaking vetting and rewriting that typically accompanies major convention addresses, provoking a mild and growing dose of nerves among senior Democrats.”

“If I were you,” Valerie Jarrett told Obama as the president prepared to leave Washington for Charlotte and the convention, “I’d wake up at night in a cold sweat wondering what surprises Clinton is coming up with.”

“Obama engineered this reconciliation [with Clinton], and I think the whole time he was, like, ‘Why do I have to do this?’” said Neera Tanden, president of the ultra-liberal Center for American Progress. “He did it because he wanted to win, and this was the way to do it. But in the process, [he risked making] Bill Clinton king of the world.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE STORY OF A LIFETIME

D
espite all the time and effort he put into getting the right words in the right order on his yellow legal pads, Bill Clinton’s speech was still a disorganized mess when he arrived in Charlotte on the sweltering evening of September 4, the first day of the Democratic National Convention. The next morning, in his suite at the Hilton, he assembled a brain trust of his former aides to help him wrestle his pile of notes, musings, and thoughts into shape.

While Clinton and his trusted aides worked feverishly on the speech, which he was scheduled to deliver later that night, the convention hall in the Time Warner Cable Arena descended into disorder and confusion. It had been hijacked by the left wing of the party—the very faction from which Clinton intended to distance Barack Obama.

Proving just how far the party had strayed from the vital center of American politics, the leftists at the convention deleted any mention of God from their party’s forty-page platform and removed the 2004 and 2008 platform recognitions of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. These glaring omissions resulted in a public relations nightmare for the Democrats; it made them look woefully out of step with mainstream American values.

The job of cleaning up the mess fell to Antonio Villaraigosa, the charismatic mayor of Los Angeles, who was the chairman of the convention.

“Jim Messina and David Axelrod picked me to chair the convention for a number of reasons,” Villaraigosa told me during an interview that I conducted in his mayoral office some months later while scouting a story for
Vanity Fair
magazine. “When I was the president of the Conference of American Mayors, I was the most forceful advocate for President Obama’s agenda. On more than one occasion, he asked me to come to Washington to speak in favor of his agenda on such things as infrastructure. I spoke at the White House a number of times. In addition to that, they picked me because I am a Latino, and they obviously wanted to court the Latino vote. Furthermore, as the former speaker of the California State Assembly, I know how to bang the gavel under the heat of the world watching.”

After Villaraigosa accepted the job of being chairman, the Obama White House sent him several talking points to use at the convention. Among other things, the Obamans wanted him to knock private equity. He refused to use their left-wing talking point, arguing that to do so would put him in an untenable position.

At 3:30 in the afternoon on the first day of the convention, Villaraigosa got a call from a political operative in the White House, whom he refused to identify by name.

“The president is apoplectic about the absence of the words ‘God’ and ‘Jerusalem’ in the platform,” the White House operative said. “He wants them put back in right now. In order to change the platform, you’re going to have to suspend the rules.”

“I know all about that,” Villaraigosa replied. “I was the speaker of the California State Assembly, and I’m aware of such rules. But when you suspend the rules, you make it possible for anyone to put anything on the agenda, and that can be dangerous.”

“We don’t want to bring this to the attention of the media,” the White House operative said. “We want this thing to go away!”

As soon as Villaraigosa hung up, he got a call from Jessica Yellin, the chief White House correspondent at CNN.

“Mr. Mayor,” she said, “I’m hearing that ‘God’ and ‘Jerusalem’ have been left out of the platform.”

Villaraigosa immediately called back his contact at the White House.

“You just told me you don’t want to alert the media, but they already know about it,” he said. “As I told you, I used to be the speaker of the California Assembly, and if you want to get this done properly, you will need to take a vote. But first you’ve got to whip this [count the votes]. You don’t take a vote without knowing the outcome first. After I whip this and feel confident that I have the votes, I want to announce that the chair is asking
for an aye vote in favor of putting ‘God’ and ‘Jerusalem’ back into the platform.”

“You can’t do that, that’s undemocratic,” the White House operative said, ignoring Villaraigosa’s sound advice and insisting that, instead of calling for a collective shouted aye or nay, Villaraigosa conduct roll call votes of the delegates.

“So,” Villaraigosa recalled, “the next day I get up there on the platform of the convention, and I call on former governor Ted Strickland of Ohio to make an amendment to the platform, which would require a two-thirds vote to pass. Now, what I want to do is ask for a vote in favor, but the White House is telling me I can’t do that, that it will be undemocratic, so I say, ‘All in favor say aye and all against say no.’ And a lot of people, both in the convention hall and at home watching on television, heard more ‘nos’ than ‘ayes.’”

A second vote of delegates resulted in equally loud “ayes” and “nos.”

“You’ve got to rule, and then you’ve got to let them do what they’re gonna do,” the convention’s parliamentarian advised Villaraigosa.

“I guess I’ll do that one more time,” Villaraigosa could be heard saying over the public-address system.

After a third futile attempt at getting more “ayes” than “nos,” Villaraigosa declared that the amendment had passed.

“In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds have voted in the affirmative,” he said, drawing large boos and shouts of objections.

The spectacle of a crowd of red-faced partisans bellowing their objections to “God” and “Jerusalem” resulted in a black eye for
the Democratic Party—and, fairly or not, for Antonio Villaraigosa.

“That night,” Villaraigosa said, “I was backstage with Obama, Michelle, Vice President Biden, Mrs. Biden, and Bill Clinton. Biden threw his arms around me and hugged me. Then he turned to the president and said, ‘Mister President, this is a man with a steel spine and brass balls.’ The president looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, Antonio, this will only be a one-day story.’ And I said, ‘Mister President, it will be the story of my lifetime. But when the president asks me to put “God” and “Jerusalem” back in the platform, I do it.’