Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (5 page)

“I don’t think Michelle and Valerie think the Clintons are racists any more than other white people,” said one of Valerie’s closest friends and confidants, who is also an African American. “But they think Bill and Hillary both lack racial sensitivity. Michelle and Valerie will never get over Bill Clinton’s comment, after the 2008 South Carolina presidential primary, in which he dismissed Obama as just another black candidate like Jesse Jackson, who won in that state in 1984 and 1988. And they can’t forgive Clinton for saying on
Charlie Rose
in December 2007 that a vote for Obama was a ‘roll of the dice,’ and for calling Barack’s record opposing the Iraq War ‘the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.’

“One thing that sticks in Michelle and Valerie’s craw is how Hillary, at her Wellesley College graduation, attacked the commencement speaker, Edward Brooke, the first African American elected to the United States Senate in the twentieth century,” the Jarrett confidant continued. “That happened more than forty years ago, but it still rankles Michelle and Valerie. They think that what Hillary did was ugly and unnecessary. Ed Brooke was an historic figure. He was a war hero and a black pioneer, a great man, even if he was a Republican. He opened doors. Attacking Ed Brooke was like attacking Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. The man had a pretty sterling record, to use a phrase Bill Clinton would later apply to Mitt Romney.”

Michelle and Valerie had opposed Obama’s decision to offer Hillary the post of secretary of state, arguing that Hillary would prove difficult, if not impossible, to control. They didn’t buy the argument that Barack wanted to create a team of rivals; in their view, he was less a disciple of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
Team of Rivals
than he was of Mario Puzo’s
Godfather
: Barack wanted to keep his friends close, but his enemies closer. Just as they predicted, Hillary chafed at the restrictions imposed on her by the White House and gave free rein to her opinions in the Oval Office.

Some of Hillary’s arguments with the president actually turned physical. Once, according to a source close to Valerie Jarrett, Hillary jabbed Obama’s chest with her finger to make a point. When Obama reported the finger-jabbing incident to Michelle, he said that he couldn’t believe Hillary had done that to the president of the United States. He was more amazed than angry about the impulsive attack.

“It hurt,” he said.

Michelle, on the other hand, wasn’t amazed at all, but furious at Hillary’s effrontery.

It was no exaggeration to say that Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama would have liked to make Bill and Hillary Clinton disappear. It didn’t help matters that ex-president Bill Clinton was more popular than current president Barack Obama, and that Hillary regularly beat out Michelle in Gallup’s poll of the most admired women in the world.

“The Clintons were a problem that Valerie and Michelle hashed over and over in Valerie’s office in the West Wing and upstairs in the family’s private quarters after Barack retired for the evening to read and sign his daily pile of documents,” one of Jarrett’s close friends said in an interview for this book. “Before the Oval Office debate about using Bill Clinton in the upcoming presidential campaign, Michelle sat down with Valerie and, according to Valerie, held her hand and whispered to her, ‘Please make sure Bill Clinton doesn’t get too close to Barack and let him have too much influence with Barack. I’m leery about Bill and Barack becoming buddies and Bill making decisions for him.’

“Valerie took Michelle’s plea as a direct order that had to be carried out,” this person continued. “She swore to Michelle that she would take care of things and keep Clinton at arm’s length. And she swore that after the election, Bill Clinton would be shut out no matter what. She would personally see to it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CHICAGO WAY

D
avid Plouffe understood Valerie Jarrett’s concerns about Bill Clinton. Indeed, he shared many of them. But he also felt that Jarrett had a tin political ear and had given Obama boneheaded advice on many issues before—things like the Solyndra solar panel manufacturer that went bankrupt and the doomed effort to bring the Olympics to Chicago. In Plouffe’s opinion, Jarrett was even more out of her depth when it came to campaign strategy.

As Plouffe saw it, the constituent groups that he intended to assemble and mobilize into Obama’s coalition for the 2012 presidential election—African Americans, Hispanics, single women, young people, government workers, gays and lesbians, and educated professionals—all loved Bill Clinton.

“The former president is like an elixir with this emerging coalition,” he said during the White House confab over the virtues of using Bill Clinton in the upcoming election.

As the most admired politician in the country (his approval rating was an astonishing 69 percent), Clinton also appealed to the one constituency that gave Obama the most trouble at the polls—culturally conservative, white, working-class voters. These so-called Clinton Democrats had abandoned Obama during the prolonged recession, and Plouffe argued that Clinton, who presided over an era of prosperity during his presidency, could bring them back into Obama’s fold.

But Plouffe saved his clinching argument for last. He said he had received a report through the political grapevine that Bill Clinton was urging Hillary to challenge Obama next year for their party’s presidential nomination. The word was that Hillary didn’t want to risk such a run against a sitting president of her own party, but that Bill had commissioned a secret poll in which likely Democratic primary voters were asked whom they preferred—Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Bill was thinking of leaking the results of the poll, which showed that Hillary was far more popular among rank-and-file Democrats than Obama.

“We could blow this whole thing by keeping Clinton at arm’s length,” Plouffe warned Obama.

The president was stunned by the news that Bill Clinton had commissioned a secret poll showing that Hillary was more popular with Democrats than he was. In a later conversation with a friend, Jarrett said that Obama’s reaction was reflected
in the expression on his face. His sullen pout was replaced by a look of grim determination. Under stress, Obama’s lips pursed and his chin receded.

Valerie Jarrett could read Obama’s every facial tic, twitch, and tremor, and she could tell that Obama had been won over by Plouffe’s argument.

By now, in fact, Jarrett was pretty much the only one in the room or on the conference call who was still voicing major reservations about using Bill Clinton in the campaign. Jarrett had a clear choice: she could either continue arguing her case against Clinton, as she had promised Michelle, or she could end the standoff and fight another day.

She looked at her watch and got up from the sofa.

“Screw this!” she said. “Let’s just do it! Promise Clinton the moon. You’re the president. You don’t have to give him anything after you’re elected.”

With that, Jarrett walked over to an open door, where a group of her aides was waiting with urgent messages from far-flung corners of the government. She paused in the doorway for a moment, looked back, and saw the president nod. It was a signal that the meeting was over. Feelers would be sent out to Bill Clinton. The secret backroom plan hatched by David Plouffe would be set in motion.

It appeared that Plouffe had won the argument.

But that was not the way Jarrett saw it. She had no intention of disappointing Michelle and allowing the president to honor an agreement with Bill Clinton. As far as Jarrett was concerned, the president was under no obligation to go along with such a deal.

Like Obama, Jarrett was the product of Chicago-style politics. She had worked for Mayor Daley’s political machine, and when it came to dealing with Bill Clinton, Jarrett favored “the Chicago Way.” Let Obama pat Clinton on the back so he would know later where to stick the knife.

Trailed by her entourage, Valerie Jarrett disappeared into the West Wing, plotting her next move.

CHAPTER FIVE

TOP OF THE PECKING ORDER

S
hortly after the Oval Office showdown, Valerie Jarrett climbed aboard Air Force One along with Bo, President Obama’s Portuguese water dog; Bo’s $102,000-a-year handler; and a large detachment of Secret Service. During the Boeing VC-25’s 466-mile hop to Cape Cod, Jarrett made her way to Obama’s private compartment and, sitting across from the president, began to fill his ear with her scheme for dealing with Bill Clinton.

Jarrett reminded Obama that it didn’t matter what he promised Clinton in return for the former president’s cooperation in the coming campaign.
You are the president; you make the rules
, she said. In case Obama harbored any doubts about that, Jarrett told him that she had discussed the matter with Michelle and Michelle agreed with her.

“After you’re reelected,” Jarrett said, according to her account of the conversation that she passed on to a friend, “you don’t have to give Clinton anything. The thing to remember is you won’t owe him a damn thing.”

No one, except Michelle, spoke to the president that way. But when Jarrett was alone with Obama and out of earshot of others, she observed none of the usual presidential formalities. To her, he was “Barack,” not “Mr. President,” and they were on an equal footing.

As Jarrett made her case for double-crossing Clinton, the president listened but didn’t say much. Jarrett wasn’t sure that she had gotten through to him. When she felt that she had exhausted his patience, she changed the subject.

She would have to wait and work on him again later.

At the Coast Guard Air Station in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Obama was given a military reception. Then he and his entourage transferred to a fleet of red, white, and blue Coast Guard helicopters for the final leg of the trip to Martha’s Vineyard and the start of his annual summer vacation.

Michelle Obama, who often traveled separately from her husband and had racked up forty-two days of vacation in one year, was not part of the president’s retinue. Hours earlier, she and the Obamas’ daughters, Malia, thirteen, and Sasha, ten, had left the White House on a specially designed military aircraft along with their own staff and Secret Service detail.

Coming as it did in the midst of a prolonged and painful recession, and with the unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent,
the first family’s unnecessarily expensive separate exodus from the nation’s capital raised some critical eyebrows.

“Last year, it cost the British taxpayers $57.8 million to maintain its royal family,” wrote Robert Keith Gray in
Presidential Perks Gone Royal
. “During that same year, it cost American taxpayers some $1.4 billion to house and serve the Obamas in the White House, along with their families, friends and visiting campaign contributors.”