American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (29 page)

Friends of the domestic diva were convinced Martha Stewart had been sacrificed for Hillary Clinton. “Everybody was squeamish about going after a former First Lady,” said someone close to the case. “But along came Martha….”

For more than a decade, Stewart had been one of Hillary’s most outspoken champions and contributed over $170,000 out of her own pocket to the Clintons and the Democratic Party. In 2000, she gave $1,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign, the maximum allowable to a single candidate under campaign finance laws. Like Denise Rich, Stewart hosted several high-profile events—including one at the Connecticut home of Miramax movie mogul Harvey Weinstein—that netted Hillary hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In return for her loyalty, Hillary invited Stewart to the White House on several occasions. Toward the end of their administration, the Clintons invited Stewart to bring television cameras into the Executive Mansion and film a segment for her series
Martha Stewart Living.
Stewart had even moved from Connecticut to Bedford in Westchester County, in part to be closer to her friends’ Chappaqua home.

Their mutual friend Sam Waksal was also a major Hillary contributor to the tune of $63,000, all but $7,000 of that made to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. When he was charged by a federal grand jury with insider trading, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, Hillary adamantly refused to join other Democrats who either returned Waksal’s contributions or gave them to charity. But after heavy criticism, she reversed herself and donated the $7,000 she directly controlled to charity.

Hillary’s kinship with Martha had everything to do with blond ambition. Both women believed they had suffered from the classic American double standard: a man who exuded confidence,
strength, intelligence, and chutzpah was a leader. A woman who possessed these same qualities was more often than not branded a bitch. It was a designation that had, rightly or wrongly, been frequently applied to both Stewart and Senator Clinton over the years. “You know, with Martha and me,” Hillary said of her friend, “it’s kind of a mutual admiration society.”

However strong the bond between them, Hillary’s relationship with Martha would be exceedingly problematic. The day after Sam Waksal’s arrest, Hillary canceled a $1,000-a-head Democratic fund-raiser Martha was throwing at the Manhattan headquarters of her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia empire. Hillary’s oft-used excuse for the sudden and inexplicable change in plans: “Scheduling problems.”

Hillary had decided to hold on to the $1,000 Martha gave her for the time being—“she has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing,” Senator Clinton argued—and went so far as to call her friend with words of encouragement. “She was one of the first people to call me,” Stewart later recalled, “and very nicely say, ‘You know, you just have to hang in there. It’s the process.’ ”

Once word of the phone call was out, however, Hillary began circling the wagons. The senator simply “made a call to a friend,” Hillary’s spokeswoman Karen Dunn said, “and has not commented on the ongoing investigation.” Was Hillary supportive? “I wouldn’t say either way,” Dunn replied.

Martha Stewart’s once-tidy world would come undone over the next two years. Briefly a billionaire after her corporation went public in 1999, she lost control of her company and hundreds of millions of dollars as the federal case against her dragged on. Many believed Stewart was being unfairly prosecuted because, like Hillary, she was a powerful, ambitious, often abrasive woman in the male-dominated world of business. The very same qualities that made Hillary an object of fear and loathing now threatened to put Martha Stewart behind bars.

After that early phone call, Hillary was nowhere to be seen. At first, according to friends of both women, Martha understood that Hillary could ill afford to be tied to a Wall Street scandal. There was little tolerance for corporate greed following the horrific collapse of Enron and WorldCom. So, as she plotted her own legal strategy, Martha resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn’t be hearing from either Clinton. “I think she felt it wasn’t important that Hillary gave her the silent treatment in the beginning,” said one doyenne of Manhattan society. “Martha is very savvy politically, and she didn’t want to harm Hillary’s career in any way. ‘I think Hillary would make as good a President as Bill—better, actually,’ she once told me. But I know she was confident Hillary would back her up if things got really tough.”

Meantime Hillary, who still ordered Secret Service agents to carry her bags as she shuttled between Washington and New York, continued to raise millions for her fellow Democrats running for office in 2002. Since taking up residence there eighteen months earlier, Senator Clinton had held no fewer than twenty-eight fund-raisers at Whitehaven, her mansion off Embassy Row. On two separate occasions, she held back-to-back receptions on the same night. Whitehaven had become, the
New York Times
declared, “a conveyor belt of fund-raising dinners and receptions that Democratic candidates are clamoring to climb aboard.” Hillary was doling out more money to Democrats across the country than any other senator, methodically shoring up support for her own run in the more distant future.

Giving the keynote address that July to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Senator Clinton eclipsed all of the 2004 presidential hopefuls in attendance—including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Connecticut Senator (and former vice presidential candidate) Joe Lieberman, and House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. In recent months, Hillary had held off on attacking the current occupant of the
White House. Under Bush’s leadership, Operation Enduring Freedom had brought an end to Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and the U.S. was aggressively prosecuting its war on terrorism at home and abroad. But the declining economy and a rash of corporate scandals—Enron chief among them—had left W vulnerable, and Hillary seized the moment.

Without mentioning Bush by name, Hillary made the all-too-familiar populist argument that Republicans were friends of the rich and special interests. She also implied that the Bush administration, which was aggressively prosecuting several insider-trading and accounting-fraud cases, was somehow responsible for the rise in corporate corruption. The Republicans’ attitude toward insider trading was, said Hillary, “Don’t ask, don’t tell…GOP used to stand for Grand Old Party, but more and more, it stands for Gloss Over Problems and pretend nobody notices!” The crowd leaped to its feet, applauding and cheering wildly.

“She’s more effective than pretty much anybody but her husband,” gushed council member Jack Weiss. “She’s just got it.” Maine State Representative Lisa Tessier Marrache echoed the sentiments of many party rank-and-file members. “I wish she would run,” Marrache said. “She’s very charismatic.”

Hillary’s give-’em-hell speech was especially audacious, since she had gladly accepted large contributions from such corporate train wrecks as ImClone’s Sam Waksal, Martha Stewart, WorldCom, Enron, and the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen. “That,” she explained, “was in the past….”

Hillary now actively encouraged her fellow Democrats to fire away at Bush’s integrity; in closed-door meetings she urged party operatives to dredge up Bush’s sale of Harken Energy stock in 1990. Back then, the Securities and Exchange Commission had looked into the transaction—which was executed shortly before Harken’s stock took a nosedive—and Bush’s failure to file the proper paperwork. The SEC ruled at the time that the case merited
no further action. Hillary, apparently giving little thought to her own precarious position and that of her friend Martha, felt Bush was particularly “vulnerable” in the current anti-big-business climate.

That summer, Hillary also had to deal with the news that her husband was in the midst of negotiations with NBC and CBS for his own syndicated daytime talk show. Their old Hollywood pal Harry Thomason was handling talks with network executives, demanding that the former President be paid $100 million to host the show for two years. After NBC backed out, Bill reportedly dropped his price to around $30 million a year.

There was the inevitable spate of headlines when news of Clinton’s talk-show negotiations were leaked to the press:
VIEWERS WOULD SNUBBA BUBBA, BOOB
-
TUBE BUBBA
, and
BUST
-
SEE TV: BILL SHOW A DUMB IDEA
. “You were leader of the Free World!” Rosie O’Donnell protested. “Don’t do a talk show, you moron! If he really does a talk show, I’m becoming a Republican. I swear to you—fully Republican. You’re going to see me all over the country campaigning for the Bushes. If it is true, I want to see if I can get any money I donated to him back!”

Bill’s wife was mortified. “Hillary was just really pissed off,” said a friend from Little Rock who had served in the Clinton administration. “Here she is running around the country trying to mobilize the party, and Bill is acting like he wants to be the next Jerry Springer. Hillary thought it was beneath him and it made her look bad, so she told him to knock it off.” Eventually, he would, but only because no network was willing to match his nine-figure asking price.

On Capitol Hill, Hillary continued to placate the Senate’s entrenched male leadership. At their regular Tuesday caucus meetings, said Louisiana Democrat John B. Breaux, “the thing that has most impressed me is sitting down and watching her get up to get coffee and ask the other senators whether she could bring them
back some coffee. She aggressively avoids the spotlight and intentionally holds back, while most of us try to do the opposite.”

On the stump, however, Hillary was once again the frequently ferocious partisan. “The stakes are so high in this election,” she said in late October, “I just have to impress upon you how critical this is. If we were to lose the Senate, there would be nothing standing between the Republican leadership and confirming the most extremist judges, in rolling back environmental regulations. And certainly, you might as well say goodbye to fiscal responsibility.”

At private fund-raisers, Hillary’s attacks on Bush and the Republicans were described by one
New York Times
reporter as far more “brutal and alarmist” than what she was willing to say in public. “We’re the party of the people, and they’re the party of the rich and the special interests—it’s really that simple,” she declared at one small gathering. At another, she said W was “much worse than his father, because he owes his soul to the far right.” She was also convinced that Vice President Dick Cheney, for whom she had long had a visceral dislike, was “really running the show.”

As the chances of a Democratic sweep began to fade, it became clear that Hillary—still one of the most polarizing figures in American politics—may have done as much for the Republicans as she had for her own party. In numerous contests across the country, the GOP ran television campaigns trying to link Hillary to various Democratic candidates.

In many cases, the ploy worked. So, too, did George W. Bush’s own campaign blitz across the country on behalf of Republican candidates. When the dust had settled, Democrats had suffered a stunning off-year defeat as Republicans regained control of the Senate and extended their lead in the House. Fortunately for Senator Clinton, the historic GOP victory was chalked up to George W. Bush’s continuing popularity, and not to an anti-Hillary backlash.

Undaunted, Hillary now focused her attention on 2004, and how that election might affect her own planned run for office in 2008. On
Meet the Press,
she repeated her assertions that she was “110 percent certain” she would not run for President during the next election. But when asked about 2008, she followed her husband’s example and parsed her words carefully. While not ruling it out explicitly, she said she had “no plans” to run in 2008.

“Hillary will be sixty-one in 2008, and even if she waits until 2012, she’ll only be sixty-five,” said one Democratic strategist. “Reagan was seventy when he was elected, and half the country will be baby boomers around her age anyway. So she has time.” By the end of the year, it appeared that Hillary’s denials had fallen on deaf ears. A CNN/
Time
magazine poll indicated that 30 percent of registered Democrats would vote for her for President, compared to just 13 percent each for John Kerry and Joe Lieberman.

One Democrat who had removed himself from the running, Al Gore, had done so in part because Hillary had made it clear she would not endorse him—at least not before the primaries. “If I had a really, really good friend—as you’ve described Al Gore to me,” Chris Matthews asked Hillary on WNBC’s
Hardball,
“a really, really good friend, and he was telling me I think I’m going to run for president…”

“He hasn’t said that to me,” Hillary replied.

When Matthews suggested that a real friend wouldn’t have to be asked, that she would say “I’m with you, buddy, all the way” beforehand, Hillary shrugged.

“He hasn’t talked to me about it…. No, you know, Chris, I don’t endorse in Democratic primaries.”

“Al Gore got the message loud and clear,” said a former member of the ex–vice president’s staff. “You know, it’s really a case of ‘with friends like that.’ Hillary is the most influential person in the party right now, and she was letting everyone know she had no faith in him.”

When John Kerry stepped down as chair of the key Senate Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee to run for President, it was Hillary who was tapped to take his place. The little-known committee was charged with putting out the party message to officials all over the country as well as approving appointments to Senate committees. Then she was given a seat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. This gave Hillary a pulpit from which to expound on Bush’s foreign policy as he prepared to wage war on Iraq.

Senator Clinton shrugged when it was pointed out that both jobs perfectly positioned her to expand her power base and influence for a run in 2008—if not sooner. “I just want,” she said, “to be effective.”

Hillary went back on the attack in January 2003, now charging that Bush’s Homeland Security plan was a “myth” and that Americans were more vulnerable to terrorism than ever. “Our vigilance has faded at the top, in the corridors of power in Washington,” she said, “where leaders are supposed to lead.” Once again, the senator said Bush put the interests of the wealthy above the security of ordinary citizens. “Will ending the dividend tax keep a dirty bomb out of New York harbor?” Hillary also accused the President of turning a blind eye to the nuclear threats in Iran and North Korea, and of being “fiscally irresponsible” by cutting taxes.