God and Hillary Clinton (23 page)

The
Times
quoted Mrs. Clinton herself: “It would be a shame if we stayed at home this Tuesday,” she shouted into a microphone from the pulpit of the massive Allen AME Church in Queens. As she finished her political sermon, the reporter watched her grin, set down the microphone, and shrug, “One more church, one more rally.” The reporters smiled as well, as did the beaming Reverend Charles E. Betts Sr., who raised his hands to proclaim to the heavens, “God is raising up another woman of God.”
³¹

New York Times
reporter Adam Nagourney recorded the “rustle of excitement and raised hands and swell of organ music and gospel song” that accompanied Mrs. Clinton at the worship services. The
Times
even ran a photograph of an African-American woman from a Bronx church holding a sign that read, “All Souls to the Polls.”

Not a single
New York Times
editorial or columnist expressed outrage at the “misuse” of religion. Given that many in the media were used to similar appearances by Bill Clinton, their inaction was hardly surprising. Hillary had learned the craft at the side of the master, and trusted the press to keep silent on this politicization of faith, so long as the tactic helped the Clintons and Democrats get elected.

The Other Clinton

As Rick Lazio closed within single digits of Hillary's lead, she narrowed her focus even more intently on the African-American vote.
³²
In 1992 and 1996, her husband had received 83 percent and 84 percent, respectively, of the black vote. In the last presidential election, 1996, Bill Clinton actually lost white Americans 46 percent to 44 percent, making his biggest gains among the black community, which he won 84 percent to 12 percent.
³³

Thus, Mrs. Clinton and the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Al Gore, needed similar numbers for 2000. The Gore campaign, which trailed George W. Bush in all but one major poll the day before the election and nearly all of the previous two weeks, decided that they needed an unprecedented mobilization of black voters to give their guy a chance at the overall popular vote, a brilliant analysis that turned out to be absolutely accurate, and was the unforeseen reason in Gore securing the popular vote in 2000, contrary to the prior expectations of nearly all pollsters.
³⁴

To mobilize that black vote, Bill did his part, appearing in African American churches throughout Hillary's new territory. For instance, he hit a black church in New York City on October 31, 2000, the Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ in Harlem. As in most such talks, he was joined by a contingent of fellow Democratic politicians. He began by reminding congregants why they were there:

As was common for Bill, he made appearances such as this throughout the campaign season. Just two days earlier, on October 29, the president campaigned in two churches at two different Sunday services, on these occasions for the purpose of rallying votes for Vice President Gore. Speaking to the congregation of Alfred Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, Clinton employed a Bible verse as justification to head to the polls: “The Scripture says, ‘While we have time, let us do good unto all men.' And a week from Tuesday, it will be time for us to vote.”
³⁶

Clinton was joined at the Alexandria church by a prominent collection of Democratic politicians, including U.S. Representative Jim Moran (D-Va.), who was up for reelection. That talk came at 12:40
P.M
. Earlier, at 9:40
A.M.
, he squeezed in another campaign talk to the congregation of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., which included, as he openly admitted, “so many members of the White House staff,” apparently too many for him to get an accurate snap count, as well as the D.C. delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton. Clinton gave a pitch for various types of federal legislation, including the D.C. College Access Act, and blasted Republican-proposed tax cuts, before closing by urging the worshippers to get out the vote on Election Day.
³⁷

The speeches in these churches had little, if anything, to do with religion. When Scripture was mentioned, it was usually for strictly political purposes.
³⁸
And, to that end, as he told a congregation in Newark, Bill Clinton believed that he and fellow Democrats were doing the Lord's work: “God's work must be our own.” That, said the president, was a central motivating factor in both the “last presidential election of the 20th century, and the first presidential election of the 21st century”—in other words, in choosing Bill Clinton over Bob Dole in 1996 and ultimately Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000.
³⁹

Overall, Bill Clinton spoke in churches twenty-one times as president, more than half of which occurrences (twelve) came in election
years.
⁴⁰
(By comparison, the
Presidential Documents
list three incidences of President George W. Bush speaking in churches through his first three years in office—none for the purpose of campaigning.
⁴¹
) Hillary quickly surpassed that: She did twenty-seven churches in just two months, and had not even been elected yet.

 

Along with Vice President Al Gore, who also barnstormed churches, the Clintons helped form a kind of a political trinity for the Democrats in 2000, the party's three standard-bearers, its three top political figures, discipling to the faithful, offering political salvation inside the churches of their most devout constituency. They ministered to a voting bloc that gave them almost total political devotion, a group that gave them their vote with a religious reliability, unquestioning the three's moral soundness.

To be fair, Hillary and Bill were much more cautious with their words and appearances than Vice President Gore, whose campaign talks in chapels from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and Detroit to Memphis seemed more like scare tactics designed to frighten African-American worshippers into thinking a George W. Bush presidency might bring back Jim Crow laws and possibly even lynchings.
⁴²
In Philadelphia two days before the election, Gore appeared with the sister of James Byrd, a black man who had been dragged to his death by racists in Texas, where Bush was governor. Gore described in vivid detail Byrd's mutilation, a graphic moment described by the
New York Times
as “the emotional high point” of Gore's day. Why was Gore reminding African Americans of this horrible incident? The
Times
explained: The Texas murder during Bush's governorship was how Gore “rallied his base.”
⁴³

In addressing the congregation in Memphis, Gore boiled down the choice between him and George W. Bush as one between good and evil. “Deep within us,” said Gore, “we each have the capacity for
good and evil. I am taught that good overcomes evil if we choose that outcome. I feel it coming. I feel a message from this gathering that on Tuesday we're going to carry Tennessee and Memphis is going to lead the way.” It was up to the worshippers to ensure that evil—a Bush victory—would not prevail.
⁴⁴
Befitting one of the legs of the political trinity, Gore possessed the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see into a man's soul, and to judge and recognize good and evil.

These resonant images seemed to be working beautifully for Gore. After hearing the vice president speak at their church in Pittsburgh, twenty-three-year-old Raushana Ellison of Pittsburgh's Hill District and sixty-seven-year-old Willa Mae Tot of the Overbrook section of Pittsburgh said they were scared.
⁴⁵
They would be voting for Vice President Gore.

To her credit, Hillary Rodham Clinton did not descend as low as Gore, even as some of the ministers who hosted her went way overboard. Such depths were out of her range in the 2000 campaign.

It is also worth noting that Hillary is consistent and not hypocritical on the subject of church appearances: She has never stated that politicians, Democrat or Republican, cannot or should not campaign in churches. During this campaign, she used her faith in a way that many Republicans never have the opportunity to, and she used this ability to its fullest. Because she had the freedom to campaign in the churches themselves, she was able to proclaim her faith directly to the people who would care about it most. Instead of seeking out alternate venues that are sympathetic to religious discussion, Hillary was able to go straight to the source to demonstrate the extent of her piety. It gave her a decided advantage, and it seemed undeniable that the media made this possible.

No matter how one feels about politicians campaigning in churches, this much is certain: The strategy—risk-free, thanks to a passive press—was working wonders for Mrs. Clinton's first bid for elected office, and thus one could expect more in campaigns ahead.

On November 7, 2000, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton became Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), whipping Republican challenger Congressman Rick Lazio by a vote of 55.3 percent to 43.0 percent, winning the ballots of 3,747,310 New Yorkers.
¹
As for her husband, he was term-limited out of the presidency, and his vice president, Al Gore, the third leg of that triumvirate, lost his bid to succeed Bill Clinton in one of the closest, most divisive presidential contests in history. Gore was bitter over the defeat, having lost the electoral college but not the popular vote. Bill Clinton, however, was very gracious, as was evident during the January 20, 2001, inaugural, where the outgoing president sat next to his wife, the incoming senator for the state of New York.

The next time the three were seen together by so many eyes came on September 14, 2001, three days after one of the most dreadful days in American history. Hillary was obviously outraged by the attacks and condemned them and their perpetrators. But because she allegedly feared being heckled, as she was such a polarizing figure and
had not been received warmly (actually quite harshly) by New York City police and firefighters, she reportedly did not attend any of the hundreds of funerals stretching out over the next several months for the nearly three thousand victims, largely remaining in Washington, according to biographer Christopher Andersen in his highly critical book on Hillary. To the contrary, the other Democratic senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, showed up at a dozen funerals, and Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani paid their respects more times than anyone could count.
²

For someone who had recently found herself in churches multiple times per day during the political season, this was an about-face that did not go unnoticed. One service that she did attend, however, was the official memorial at the majestic National Cathedral, held September 14, 2001, a day that President George W. Bush had declared a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. Bush personally organized the service, even picking the music and speakers, including a multicultural gathering that featured a woman bishop, two black ministers, a rabbi, a Catholic bishop, and a Muslim imam. This inclusiveness was deliberate, particularly the inclusion of Imam Muzammil Siddiqi of the Islamic Center of North America.
³
The seventh and final religious figure to speak, before Bush rose, was an eighty-two-year-old Billy Graham.

Bush ensured that the Clintons sat in the front pew. Typical of the two, Hillary was unemotional, almost expressionless, whereas Bill was just the opposite. Throughout the service, he wore his heart on his sleeve, tears at times streaming down his cheeks during hymns. Breaking protocol, his emotions got the best of him as he jumped up and led a standing ovation when the aged Billy Graham finished talking. It was classic Bill.

Shortly after September 11, Hillary supported President Bush's use of military force in Afghanistan in subsequent weeks as well as his pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. About a year later, she would vote to authorize President Bush to wage war in Iraq.
Throughout her first term in the Senate, she worked hard to separate herself from the party's hard left on Iraq and the War on Terror. She visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, proposed pay increases for soldiers and better health benefits for the National Guard, and forcefully opposed a number of base closings.

To her credit, she has not inappropriately inserted Jesus into the war debate, as have many figures on the religious left, such as the group Religious Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which in December 2002 placed an ad in the
New York Times
that judged, “President Bush: Your war would violate the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
⁴
Hillary seems to have realized that it would be a bit rash to presume to know the Lord's divine thinking on whether U.S. Marines should have pursued Saddam Hussein.

While these decisions and others like them led her to position herself successfully as a moderate on defense issues, it was the economic and social issues that continued to endear her to much of the Democratic Party, even as her religious traditionalism forced her to deviate on the issues of gay marriage, “the culture of violence and sex in the media,” and her longtime favoring of abstinence as a means to prevent teen pregnancy. Of course, the vast majority of Americans and members of Congress oppose gay marriage and raunchy movies, and support teen abstinence, meaning that Mrs. Clinton's positions in these sensible areas did not nudge her to the right so much as they took her out of the fringe minority.

Nevertheless, supporters in the press did their best to portray her as a pragmatist seeking the middle ground, a picture that best served her electoral prospects. The Associated Press dubbed her “a Northeastern centrist.” Likewise, the
New York Times
proclaimed that Mrs. Clinton “has defied simple ideological labeling since joining the Senate, ending up in the political center on issues like health care, welfare, abortion, morality and values, and national defense, to name a few.”
⁵

Though the Associated Press and the
New York Times
purport to be
nonpartisan, or at least more objective than a conservative newspaper like the
Washington Times
, it was the
Washington Times
that assessed Mrs. Clinton's alleged centrism in a quantifiable, objective manner, drawing from ratings from various groups, left and right, that rank the liberalism-conservatism of politicians. The
Washington Times
compared Mrs. Clinton's rankings to the ultimate noncentrist from the Northeast, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Here is what it noted:

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the liberal watchdog that rates members of Congress according to their voting patterns, assigned Hillary a near-perfect 95 percent liberal quotient for each of her first three years in the Senate, close to the perfect 100 percent of Ted Kennedy for 2001 and 2002 and Kennedy's 95 percent for 2003. The American Conservative Union, ADA's counterpart, gave her an 11 percent conservative ranking for the same period, compared to a 5 percent for Kennedy. Another left-leaning group, the AFL-CIO, gave Senator Clinton a 93 percent, precisely the same score as Senator Kennedy. Among conservative organizations, the National Taxpayers Union gave Hillary an average annual rating of 14 percent over her first three years, compared to 13 percent for Kennedy, and the National Tax Limitation Committee gave both a zero for the 107th Congress.
⁶

National Journal
, a nonpartisan source known for its ratings, found that in 2002, not a single U.S. senator was more liberal on economic and social matters than Mrs. Clinton, and in 2003, no senator surpassed her liberal ranking on social issues. And while
National Journal
ascertained that she was not the most liberal senator on economic matters in 2003 as well, she still ranked very high at 90 percent. Her composite liberal score was 88.8 percent, compared to the scores of two true centrists, Maine Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who rated as nearly perfectly middle as one can get at 50.5 percent and 50.8 percent, respectively.
⁷
Only on defense and foreign policy issues has
National Journal
ranked Hillary as more conservative than most of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate.
⁸

On the religious/social-conservative front, Clinton and Kennedy received zeros from the Christian Coalition and the National Right to Life Committee, while both received over the same period perfect 100 percent rankings from NARAL.
⁹

Another interesting comparison was done by the New York
Daily News
, which compared Mrs. Clinton to Howard Dean, whom
The New Republic
called “one of the most secular candidates to run for president,” a former Congregationalist who, as the
Washington Post
put it, “rarely attends church services, unless it is for a political event.”
¹⁰
As the
Daily News
pointed out, Dean has often been openly scornful of the religiosity of Republicans, dubbing the GOP “a white Christian party,” while also judging Republicans “evil.” And yet, noted the
Daily News
, Mrs. Clinton has likewise leveled some harsh charges at those on the other side of the aisle, in one instance stating that “some” Republicans “honestly believe they are motivated by the truth,” and that “they are motivated by a higher calling, they are motivated by, I guess, a direct line to the heavens.”
¹¹
The religious sarcasm seemed to thrill her devout secular base as she struck a tone resonant of Dean, if not quite as harsh; however, statements such as these overlook the fact that she, too, has drawn a direct connection between her own politics and motivation from a higher calling.

Nonetheless, the first-term senator looked to steer toward the middle on some hot-button domestic issues—many of which were linked to a religious component.

The Abortion Votes

With a conservative Republican president replacing Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, pro-life congressional Republicans were invigorated. In 2001, they had been delayed by the events of September 11 and subsequent war in Afghanistan, but by mid-2002, they began launching major bills aimed at curtailing abortion. As they did, the pro-
choice lobby knew it had a reliable ally in the senator from New York.

On June 21, 2002, the Senate voted fifty-two to forty to ban abortions in military medical facilities. Mrs. Clinton voted against the ban. On March 12, 2003, in an especially important symbolic gesture, the Senate voted fifty-two to forty-six in favor of the Harkin Amendment endorsing
Roe v. Wade
, which stated, “It is the sense of the Senate that the decision of the Supreme Court in
Roe v. Wade
(410 U.S. 113 (1973)) was appropriate and secures an important constitutional right; and such a decision should not be overturned.” The amendment was supported by nine Republicans, forty-two Democrats, and one independent, and was rejected by forty-one Republicans and five Democrats. Mrs. Clinton voted for the amendment.

The next day, on March 13, 2003, came another significant abortion vote, and this one proved a major blow to Mrs. Clinton's ability to position herself as a moderate: She voted against a ban on the grim procedure of partial-birth abortion, which the
New York Times
euphemistically calls “a certain kind of late-term abortions,” and the Associated Press (for some reason) has felt the need to qualify as “what critics call ‘partial-birth abortion.'”
¹²
Hillary herself called the procedure “partial-birth abortion” (which is the proper term), and also labeled it “horrible.”
¹³

The language and categorization of this procedure signals the trouble Mrs. Clinton faces in voting against the ban: Even the legendary New York Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who preceded Hillary, called partial-birth abortion “infanticide.” Another major Democrat, former president Jimmy Carter, said of the procedure: “late-term abortions”—“where you kill a baby as it's emerging from its mother's womb.”
¹⁴
That is precisely what happens, as the baby is partially delivered just far enough that a suction can be inserted into the base of the skull to remove the child's brain before full delivery.

In a debate with Rick Lazio during her 2000 race, Mrs. Clinton had retreated to her husband's position on the issue: “I have said many
times that I can support a ban on late-term abortions, including partial-birth abortions,” said Hillary, “so long as the health and life of the mother is protected…. Of course it's a horrible procedure. No one would argue with that. But if your life is at stake, if your health is at stake, if the potential for having any more children is at stake, this must be a woman's choice.”
¹⁵

This was the reason cited by President Clinton for twice vetoing the ban passed by the Senate during his presidency. In response, evangelicals were livid. James Dobson of Focus on the Family stated, “Clinton's hands are stained with the blood of countless innocent babies. By twice vetoing a bill that would have banned partial-birth abortion, he almost single-handedly preserved a barbaric procedure by which fully viable and un-anaesthetized infants, each fresh from the Creator's hand and brimming with life, were murdered during the final moments of delivery.”
¹⁶
Mrs. Clinton's supporters can expect that Dobson's tough language will likely find reincarnation in the direction of Hillary as she runs for president.

Likewise Mrs. Clinton, her husband, and groups such as NARAL all argued in opposition to the ban, but their wisdom has been disputed in testimony by medical professionals, including the former president of the American Medical Association, Daniel Johnson, who stated in the
New York Times
that the procedure is never medically necessary and is never needed to save the life of the mother nor to ensure her health.
¹⁷
Supporters of a ban on the procedure also believed that the “mother's health” exemption being demanded by abortion rights activists would be abused by mothers and abortion doctors to the point that partial-birth abortion could and would always remain a legitimate abortion option, thus rendering the ban ineffective.
¹⁸

Despite the passion of their argument in opposition to the ban, the Clintons have shown themselves to be sensitive to criticism on this issue, especially Bill. A dramatic, unreported illustration took place at a Christmas Eve service at the National Cathedral after Bill's first veto of the partial-birth abortion ban.
¹⁹
Reverend Rob Schenck, a leading
pro-life activist, was approaching the Communion rail along with a small group of clergy. As Schenck walked past a seated President Clinton, he whispered, “Mr. President, God will hold you to account for the babies.” In response, an incensed Clinton ordered the Secret Service to apprehend Schenck and search and interrogate him, which it did. To this day, he remains on a “flag list,” meaning that various security details frequently deny him access to Washington events to which he is invited.
²⁰
While Schenck insisted that he addressed Clinton in a nonthreatening way, it could have been Clinton's conscience that felt threatened, perhaps harking back to those heart-to-heart discussions with Reverend W. O. Vaught in the early 1980s.
²¹