Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (28 page)

Grilled chicken and pasta jambalaya were served at the luncheon, which took place on the patio outside the Oval Office. When members of the White House press corps got wind of the al fresco lunch à deux, they wondered whether something far tastier had been on the menu, such as an Obama endorsement of Hillary’s much-buzzed-about 2016 run. The White House went out of its way to discourage such speculation.

“Over the course of the last four years,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest, “Secretary Clinton and the president have developed not just a strong working relationship, but also a genuine friendship. . . . So it’s not a working lunch as much as it is an opportunity for the two, who saw each other on a pretty frequent basis for the past four years, to get a chance to catch up.”

Bill Clinton didn’t see it that way. As far as he was concerned, Obama was playing games with them. Dinners, lunches, golf outings—they were all part of an act, an effort by Obama to defang Bill by being nice to Hillary. It was Obama’s
Godfather
shtick—keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Obama needed the Clintons, even if he only needed them to shut up and refrain from criticizing him.

Of course, Bill admitted that the Clintons needed Obama even more than he needed them. Bill hadn’t entirely given up on convincing Obama to make a solid pledge of support for Hillary, and he felt that the reason he wasn’t invited to the lunch was that Obama didn’t want to discuss the subject.

Hillary agreed. She told friends that Obama was intimidated by both of them, but that he was particularly thrown off his game by Bill, who had a way of getting in the president’s face.

As things turned out, the luncheon was a bust from the Clintons’ point of view. Every time Hillary tried to steer the conversation to 2016, Obama changed the subject. She came away empty-handed.

“He’ll throw us some crumbs, like letting us appoint a few friends to the DNC [Democratic National Committee],” Bill said. “But the problem is, Obama plans to stay on the world stage for a long time after he leaves the White House, and that makes the feud between us very personal.

“I’m going to campaign for his healthcare bill,” Bill continued, “but I’m not going to read any of the White House’s talking points. I’m going to tell people it’s a flawed bill and that it’ll take Hillary to fix it. I can sell the thing to the American people, while the Obamas can’t. In the end, I want Hillary to get credit for the whole thing, a workable law, because she’s been at it for twenty years and knows how it has to work.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE THINNEST OF RED LINES

B
arack Obama and Valerie Jarrett were in the Oval Office. She had made sure that all four doors of the room were closed so that no one could hear her deliver a stern lecture to the president of the United States.

“A
red line
!” she said. “Where did that come from?”

Obama had his feet up on the Resolute Desk. He was staring across the room, in the direction of Rembrandt Peale’s painting of George Washington, trying to avoid meeting Jarrett’s eye.

“You weren’t elected to be a
war
president,” Jarrett said, according to her recollection of the Oval Office meeting, which she passed on to a friend. “You were elected to
fix
things here at home. You have to row back that statement.”

Jarrett was furious at the way Obama’s “red line” and flip-flopping on Syria had exposed him to the wrath of the entire
Washington establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike. Even the normally docile mainstream media, which cut Obama masses of slack, were questioning the president’s competence.

Columnist Richard Cohen, a reliable voice of liberalism on the
Washington Post
’s op-ed page, declared that Obama’s Syrian policy was “both intellectually incoherent and pathetically inconsistent—a ‘red line’ that came out of nowhere and then mysteriously evaporated, and a missile strike that was threatened and then abandoned. It was a policy so wavering that if Obama were driving, he would be forced to take a breathalyzer.”

And
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, whose mordant sense of humor sometimes enlivened the Gray Lady, sighed: “Oh, for the good old days when Obama was leading from behind.”

Once again, through a combination of inexperience, ineptitude, and a misguided understanding of America’s role in the world, Obama had made the United States look like a paper tiger. And his bumbling leadership abroad reached a low-water mark at the same moment that the signature legislation of his presidency—Obamacare—started to unravel.

The president had promised that purchasing health insurance coverage on
HealthCare.gov
—the Obamacare website—would be as simple as “buying a TV on Amazon.” But from the moment of its rollout on October 1, 2013, the website proved to be a disaster. Data errors and repeated glitches made it virtually impossible for people to sign up. The website crashed continually. It
was full of incorrect information and error-ridden files. Early efforts to fix the problems failed. Months later, the website remained a mess.

To make matters worse, the president’s oft-cited promise—“If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it”—turned out to be false. Millions of people had their plans canceled because their old plans didn’t meet the new Obamacare requirements. The White House compounded the problem by putting out confusing explanations and issuing an executive order postponing the mandate requiring large employers to offer health benefits. But an investigation by NBC News reported that the Obama administration had known all along that between 40 and 67 percent of individual policyholders would lose their coverage. The question naturally arose: Why hadn’t the White House done something about it before?

“Another president might have had someone in the White House calling every day—no, twice a day—to make sure the [Affordable Care Act] was going to work,” Richard Cohen complained. “But no, it was a shock to everyone, and when the White House rolled out its gigantic cake—maestro, some music please—no one jumped out.”

The calamity known as Obamacare touched the lives of every American, and the embarrassment to Obama was deep and lasting. His credibility, already frayed by other broken promises, such as his pledge to close the detention camp in Guantánamo, took another hit. What’s more, the failure surrounding Obama’s national healthcare legislation—a centerpiece of progressive policy for nearly seventy years—called into question the very tenets of liberalism.

Bill Clinton wasted no time taking advantage of Obama’s vulnerability. In an interview with the new online magazine
Ozy
, Clinton called the Obamacare rollout a “disaster” and said that the president needed to deliver on his promise that the new law wouldn’t force Americans to change their insurance plans.

“They were the ones who heard the promise, ‘If you like what you’ve got, you can keep it,’” Clinton said. “I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to these people and let them keep what they got.”

The clear implication in Bill Clinton’s remarks was that Hillary wouldn’t have made such a mess of the healthcare project if she, rather than the amateur Obama, had been president.

Stumbling amateurism was also the hallmark of Obama’s handling of Syria.

Back in August 2011, Obama had declared, “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But Bashar al-Assad, the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator, paid no attention to Obama’s command. Thanks to his foreign patrons—Russia and Iran—Assad remained in power, and the Syrian civil war continued to claim ten thousand lives each month.

And Barack Obama did nothing.

A year later, in August 2012, Obama made an off-the-cuff remark during a news conference: he declared that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be a “red line” for
the United States. “That would change my calculus,” Obama said. “That would change my equation. . . . A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”

Even as Obama spoke, reports filtered out of Syria that Assad was using poison gas against his own people. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA director David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey all urged the president to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels who were friendly to the West and not aligned with al-Qaeda. And just before she left Foggy Bottom, Hillary told the
New York Times
that she had been an advocate of a more forceful policy.

And Barack Obama did nothing.

Now, in the summer of 2013—two long years since Obama had issued his “Assad must step aside” ultimatum—there came incontrovertible evidence that Assad had in fact used chemical weapons. Obama was under mounting pressure to make good on his red-line threat. There were renewed calls to arm the rebels . . . to impose a no-fly zone . . . to do something, anything, to stop the atrocities.

Among those raising their voices against Obama’s policy on Syria was Bill Clinton. Ever since Obama reneged on his implied promise to back Hillary for president in 2016, Clinton had been looking for an opportunity to retaliate and inflict some real damage on Obama’s second-term agenda. According to a member of the former president’s inner circle, Clinton’s intermediaries—Doug Band and Terry McAuliffe—had warned the White House that it faced “Clintonian headwinds” and that Clinton was determined to make Obama pay for his deception.

Clinton’s chance came at a closed press event sponsored by an institute associated with Senator John McCain. (The Daily Beast obtained a recording of portions of Clinton’s remarks.) Clinton said that Obama risked looking like a “wuss,” a “fool,” and “lame” by sitting on the sidelines in Syria.

And still Barack Obama did nothing.

During the four and a half years that Obama had been in office, Jarrett had never been as angry with him as she was at this moment. She confided to a friend that it was impossible to keep the president focused. He was invariably bored and wanted to move on to the next subject. He liked to surprise people with a display of his brilliant intellect. Maybe that explained where the red line came from: Obama’s sin of pride.

“But why,” Jarrett asked Obama, “did you make such an important statement without first consulting your advisers? Unscripted language always gets you in trouble.”

And indeed, the news from Syria—that Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed toxins to kill more than 1,400 civilians—complicated Obama’s life, which was already complex enough. His White House was mired in dysfunction, scandal, and a general air of malaise. The last thing he needed was a rancorous national debate over the use of military force.

The smell of failure hung over the White House. The
New Republic
, which could normally be counted on to dig up something positive to say about Obama, lamented the president’s predicament; the liberal magazine concluded that Obama was in danger of becoming “the lamest of lame ducks.”

At the recent reunion luncheon with her Wellesley College classmates, Hillary Clinton had used a colorful metaphor to describe the perilous state of the Obama administration. “The story of the Obama presidency,” she had said, was that there was “no hand on the fucking tiller.”

In an op-ed piece in the
Wall Street Journal
, Edward Kosner, who had served as the top editor of
Newsweek
,
New York
, and
Esquire
magazines and the
New York Daily News
, charged that Obama was a “failed manager.” Wrote Kosner: