God and Hillary Clinton (11 page)

While the Methodist denomination (and all denominations, for that matter) clearly encourages a happy marriage as the proper environment to raise a child, it seems uncertain that faith and family were enough to hold the Clintons together. More plausible, especially given her actions in recent years, is that Hillary's own political ambi
tion played a part in her ability to turn the other cheek to Bill's indiscretions.

This difficult time and the host of questions that it elicited would only grow in legend as the profile of the couple increased, and though the couple would always share God, it was unclear whether faith or political ambition would be the glue that would hold them together in the turbulent years that lay ahead.

In November 1990, forty-four-year-old Governor Bill Clinton won his fourth consecutive election campaign, and fifth overall, trouncing the Republican challenger Nelson Sheffield, 57 percent to 42 percent. With a fifth term locked up, the path to the promised land—the White House—was wide open. But with this ambition also came a drawback: The Clintons would be open game to the national press, including relentless critics on the right, eager to dig up dirt on the governor. Here, Bill had been his own worst enemy, as there was no shortage of mud to clog the political effort to make the governor shiny and palatable to the American public.

Still, by the summer of 1992, the once unthinkable seemed possible: Republican president George H. W. Bush, who only a year earlier had a 91 percent approval rating because of his success in the Gulf War, was suddenly trailing this no-name governor from one of the smallest states in the Union. Most Democrats had dropped out of the race in 1991, not wanting to waste their time challenging such a
popular incumbent. Clinton, however, had kept his hat in the ring, with stunning results.

Just then, one of those women from the past, a bleached-blond TV news reporter from Little Rock named Gennifer Flowers, came out of the woodwork to tell the world about the man she slept with throughout the 1980s—behind the back of Mrs. Clinton. She even had taped phone conversations with the governor. She called a press conference, and a media sympathetic to Bill Clinton could do nothing to stop the avalanche that followed.

Hillary, however, could do something—she was not about to watch all of this get blown up now. She agreed to stand by her man, sitting next to him for an exclusive interview on CBS's
60 Minutes
, watched by millions, and performed a kind of miracle that would have made Jimmy Swaggart swagger. The two conceded some difficulties in their marriage in the past, but, they added, they were in love, and beyond those problems. When reporter Steve Kroft asked the Clintons if they had some kind of an “arrangement,” the two laughed heartily, and handled the question with aplomb.

Enough of the voting public accepted the Clintons' word; millions of Americans were willing to look beyond the past and vote for Bill, judging that the good governor's peccadilloes were behind him. His wife had forgiven him, after all. Besides, if elected president, he surely would not engage in this kind of activity in the White House.

What about Hillary? Was she a victim or a cold political operative in this situation? Here again, the sources differ. Norman King says that to cope with the betrayal by her husband, not to mention the national humiliation, Hillary “would make a habit, even when on the campaign trail,” of carrying a “tiny little Bible that has Proverbs, Psalms, and the New Testament.”
¹

King did not name his source, but it may have been Ed Matthews, who said in an interview for this book that during the 1992 presidential campaign, “She carried, in her purse, a Bible, and specifically the book of Psalms.” However, when asked in a follow-up interview to
expand on this imagery of Mrs. Clinton carrying a copy of the Book of Psalms with her in her purse, an image that might jolt some of her detractors, Matthews retracted: “I wouldn't say that she carried it; it was her companion that she referred to regularly. In her purse all the time would be an overstatement.” Matthews said she carried the Psalms with her in heart and mind.
²

Winning the White House

Of course, Bill's partner could not claim that his actions alone were a liability to their joint political ambitions (and their marriage). The woman that Bill hurt with his sexual past was hurting the Clinton-Gore ticket with her political past.

The Clinton strategy for 1992 was to run Bill as a “New Democrat,” a moderate Democrat. This was well planned: From 1990 to 1991, Bill chaired an important group called the Democratic Leadership Council, a collection of Democrats who understood that if their party was ever again to win the White House, they would need to stop running ultraliberals at the top of the ticket—no more McGoverns or Mondales. There, he was joined by a onetime moderate, the pro-life senator from Tennessee, Al Gore.

A moderate Democrat must, of course, be a religious Democrat. And Bill Clinton noted during the campaign that he was such a Democrat. “I pray virtually every day, usually at night, and I read the Bible every week,” the candidate told
U.S. News & World Report
. He added that he believed strongly in “old-fashioned things” like the “constancy of sin, the possibility of forgiveness, the reality of redemption.”
³
While these words might sound hollow from some candidates, from Clinton they were in line with his long-established beliefs and life experiences.

Yet, in trying to run as a New Democrat, Bill Clinton's biggest obstacle was not his background but that of his wife. He strove to
cultivate an image of a sensible Southern governor, not a “Massachusetts liberal” like Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee against Bush in 1988. However, his wife had actively supported many left-leaning causes that were far from moderate, making it difficult to convince much of the public that she was as middle ground as her husband. With Hillary around, it seemed as though there was a Massachusetts liberal, or at least a Wellesley, Massachusetts, liberal, on the ticket after all. This forced Bill into a defensive and disingenuous denial, arguing that to portray his wife “as some sort of left-wing figure based on her activities over the past 10 or 15 years is patently absurd.”
⁴

In the end, it would not matter. Clinton and his running mate spoiled George H. W. Bush's bid for reelection. Clinton did not receive a plurality of votes, and was helped enormously by the entry of Texas billionaire and Bush rival H. Ross Perot, who walked off with 20 percent of the vote, one of the biggest takes by a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in the 1912 election. Clinton needed only 44 percent of the popular vote to win handily. Meanwhile, Bush received only 36 percent, an astonishing drop from his 91 percent Gallup approval rating only a year earlier during the Gulf War—a plummet that his vice president, Dan Quayle, called the single greatest political free-fall in American history.

Clinton and Gore had tremendous success arguing that the economy was at its lowest point since the Great Depression, an exaggeration maybe not outdone by any politician since the Great Depression. Rather, the 1990–1991 recession, in complete recovery and full rebound by the time of the November 1992 vote, was America's worst since the 1982–1983 recession of the first Reagan term. No matter. The gross, unchecked exaggeration did wonders at the ballot box.

Hillary's husband defeated George W. Bush's father. The junior Bush was certain that the more honorable man had lost; he hated “to see a good man get whipped.”
⁵

The First Lady–Elect

Only two or three weeks after the November triumph, Hillary took to the dais to thank Marian Wright Edelman, and to begin looking for the next cause to advance in the left's sweeping social agenda. It was fitting that the first lady–elect's first major postelection speech was at a CDF dinner in Washington, where she described Edelman as her “mentor and leader” and asked a question that immediately signaled how those on her side would caricature conservative Republicans who stood in the way: “What on earth could be more important than making sure every child has the chance to be born healthy, to receive immunizations and health care as that child grows to be stimulated and learn so a child can be ready for school?”
⁶
Here again, CDF could be that vehicle for social justice. And Hillary Rodham Clinton knew exactly where to drive it next: national health care.

As the presidential inauguration approached, Hillary's husband, that Southern boy she met at Yale, was ready for the top job in the world. The partnership had persevered and produced amazing results; the possibilities seemed limitless. And though the perception of the Clintons at this time—by the right and the left—was not one that called to mind church bells, there was a man, then unknown to the national press, who stepped forward to tell Americans about a side of Hillary they had not seen. “This may sound corny, but the key to understanding Hillary is her spiritual center,” a fellow named Don Jones explained to
People
magazine as the inaugural neared. “Unlike some people who at a particular age land on a cause and become concerned, with Hillary I think of a continuous textured development. Her social concern and her political thought rest on a spiritual foundation.”
⁷

Jones's words were a revelation to everyone but him. Indeed there was far more to the new first lady than the public knew.

Bill Clinton, President

On the morning of January 20, 1993, Hillary and her husband readied to move into the most powerful house in the world—the White House.

That morning, in the final activity before the inaugural ceremony, a prayer service was held by the Clintons at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. The service, said Bill, “was important to me.” He picked the participating clergy, the music, and the vocalists, with input from Hillary and Al Gore. Both of the Clintons' ministers from Arkansas participated in the service, a Baptist and a Methodist, as did the pastor of Al and Tipper Gore, the father of close aide George Stephanopoulos, and the Greek Orthodox dean of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in New York.
⁸

Later that afternoon, Hillary's husband was inaugurated the forty-second president of the United States. The son of Virginia, that hardworking nurse from Arkansas, had gone from rags to riches. That poor fellow Billie Blythe, who had drowned in a few inches of water off Highway 60 on his way back to Hope, could not have imagined in his last breaths that he was leaving quite a legacy in his wife's womb: a future president. On the other side of the marriage, the girl from Park Ridge had now fulfilled the wildest expectations of those young women from Wellesley: She had made it to the White House. Of course, she was not president, but she was married to one, and would with him share power to an unprecedented degree for a first lady—the most powerful since Eleanor Roosevelt.

Few Americans then imagined that Hillary Rodham Clinton planned to one day parlay that seat near the presidential inaugural stand into her own presidential bid. To do that, she would, like her husband, require the votes of moderates, especially religious-minded voters. And yet, from day one, Bill Clinton took an action strongly favored by his wife that was poised to separate them from those voters.

In a flurry of unprecedented Oval Office activity, on that January
20, with Hillary's full backing, Bill Clinton signed five executive orders dramatically increasing the federal government's support and funding of elective abortion. He thrilled his wife and other supporters of abortion rights, yet he also made instant enemies, including the very religious constituencies that his wife would one day doggedly pursue in her bid to have her own day at that same inaugural stand with her hand on the Bible.

For instance, four days after the signing of the executive orders, the Vatican newspaper,
L'Osservatore Romano
, ran a dire editorial, stating grimly that the “renewal” that the man from Hope had promised during his campaign would now come “by way of death” and “by way of violence against innocent human beings.” The stage was set. As papal biographer George Weigel noted, it was the opening salvo in what would become “the most serious confrontation ever” between the U.S. government and the Holy See.
⁹

A New Methodist

That battle over abortion, however, was to come. For now, and now that they were in Washington together, and shared the White House together, the Clintons at last decided to join the same church. As George W. Bush later did for his wife and first lady, and Bush's father had done for the most recent first lady, Bill Clinton likewise joined the denomination of his wife and started attending a Methodist church. The Clintons chose Foundry United Methodist Church, less than a mile from the White House. This was a good match for the Clintons, a mixed, self-prided “inclusive” congregation. Young singles and married couples typically sat up front on the far left, whereas gay congregants preferred the far right.
¹⁰
Said Bill, listing the reasons he and Hillary picked Foundry: “We liked Foundry's pastor, Philip Wogaman, and the fact that the church included people of various
races, cultures, incomes, and political affiliations, and openly welcomed gays.”
¹¹

The Reverend Dr. J. Philip Wogaman is president of the American Theological Society and professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary. He is well known in religious, political, and academic circles, and particularly among Methodists. He was a delegate to the denomination's General Conferences of 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000, as well as a member of the World Methodist Council from 1986 to 1991. His published works include seventeen books. From 1966 to 1992, he not only taught at Wesley Theological Seminary, but served as dean from 1972 to 1983. Beginning in 1992, he became pastor at Foundry, a large historic church in the heart of the nation's capital, where he stayed until 2002, meaning he was there for the entire Clinton presidency. In this capacity, he would spend more time giving spiritual counseling to the Baptist rather than the Methodist in the Clinton family.

As a liberal, Wogaman could be safely expected to focus on social justice and not cause the Clintons political embarrassment by doing untoward things like lecturing them from the pulpit on inconvenient matters like the sanctity and dignity of human life. In this respect, he was a perfect fit, particularly as it pertained to Hillary's brand of pro-choice Methodism. Wogaman himself stated that he aimed to be “prophetic” in his sermons “without embarrassing the president.”
¹²
Indeed, the staunchly pro-choice Wogaman even opened his pulpit to fellow Methodist and author of
Roe v. Wade
, Harry Blackman, one day in 1995. According to Mark Tooley of the Institution on Religion and Democracy, who was seated among the congregation, Wogaman was visibly displeased when Blackman, who was scheduled to visit, canceled his visit at the last minute because of pro-life demonstrators outside of the church. The reverend offered a stern rebuke to the demonstrators, calling their action a “tragedy.”