The Amateur (2 page)

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Authors: Edward Klein

Later, one of those witnesses would recall for this book: “The argument about her running had been going on for days, if not for weeks, and Hillary was clearly exasperated with Bill. He wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer. There was a reason Bill didn’t want to wait until the next presidential cycle, in 2016, when Hillary’ll be sixty-nine and Bill’ll be seventy. Bill’s had a lot of serious health setbacks—quadruple bypass surgery, a collapsed lung, two coronary stents—and all that’s left him feeling like he’s living on borrowed time.”
In the middle of their argument, Hillary’s BlackBerry went off and she answered it. Bill kept right on talking over her phone conversation. Then Hillary’s other BlackBerry rang, and she picked that one up, too, and placed it against her other ear, and now she was talking into two phones at once, making important decisions about foreign policy, but Bill continued to argue with her, and she looked really pissed; she made a throat-cutting motion for him to shut up.
When she hung up, Bill began to rattle off the results of a secret poll in which potential voters had been asked how they would feel about Hillary’s making a run against Obama for the White House in 2012.
“Your poll numbers are all positive,” Bill said, pacing the floor. “African-Americans are moving away from Obama and in your direction. Latinos, too. And Jews. Women and the elderly are all on your side. Young college boys are the only ones clinging to Obama. It’s a no-brainer. You can win if you want back in the White House as much as I do.”
A cloud passed over Hillary’s face. “Is it going to get out that you did this poll?” she asked.
Everyone in the room instantly grasped the implication of her question: Would Barack Obama find out about Bill’s act of political treachery?
“Nobody’s going to find out about it,” Bill assured her.
Hillary gave him a skeptical look; she didn’t have to be told that lying came easily to her husband.
“All of us in the room, including Hillary, assumed that Bill had commissioned the poll, although he didn’t specifically say so,” said one of their friends. “Of course, he could have been bluffing. That would be like him. Hillary has said many times that he plays liar’s poker even with her. He can’t help himself. The odd thing was that he didn’t have a bound notebook with the results. He just reeled off the number from his head. But that’s like him, too. He has an amazing ability to remember details of policy.”
Hillary was seated in a leather chair, stroking her toy poodle, Tally, perched on her lap. Bill’s chocolate lab, Seamus, was roaming around the room, and at one point Tally leapt off Hillary’s lap and chased Seamus out of the barn. Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.
But then Bill picked up the quarrel again, and he and Hillary were going at it full throttle when Chelsea showed up. She was alone, without her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. With her long, flowing blonde hair and stylish weekend outfit, she was the picture of a confident 31-year-old career woman. And in fact, Chelsea had recently joined the board of Barry Diller’s Internet media holding company IAC/InterActive Corp, and was in secret negotiations with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to become a special on-air correspondent.
Chelsea greeted her parents’ guests with a broad smile, but she looked pained to find her parents arguing with each other. She asked her mother to step outside, and they walked across the stone patio to the fenced-in swimming pool, where they could be seen engaging in animated conversation.
When they returned, Chelsea made it clear that she had come down on her father’s side of the argument: she wanted her mother to challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries.
Chelsea was still smarting from the results of the 2008 primary campaign, in which her mother racked up eighteen million votes and actually beat Obama in the popular vote, but lost to him chiefly because of the votes of super delegates. Chelsea wanted to wreak revenge against Obama’s campaign operatives who had dissed her mother and tried to paint her father as a racist.
“You
deserve
to be president,” Chelsea told her mother.
Bill agreed, and he said he might be able to persuade others to commission their own polls, matching up Hillary against Obama.
“What are you trying to do—force my hand?” Hillary said.
“I want everyone to know how strong you poll,” Bill said.
“Go ahead and knock yourself out,” Hillary said, shrugging.
Bill started to think out loud about political strategy. Maybe he would leak some of the findings in the poll. Or, alternatively, he could roll out the results of the poll to a media organization. He had friends at NBC News; he could trust that network. That’s why he had steered Chelsea to Steve Capus, the president of NBC’s news division. The important thing, he concluded, was getting out the poll’s main finding—namely, that while Obama’s numbers were in the toilet, Hillary was the most popular politician in America.
Listening to Bill Clinton, the master politician of his age, soliloquize about politics was an awesome experience, and everyone in the barn, including Hillary, hung on his every word.
Bill flashed a sheepish smile as he revealed that he had spent the past year writing a book about how to put America back to work. In his book, he intended to take some serious shots at Obama’s jobs and tax proposals. He thought Obama had made a huge mistake by attacking Wall Street executives, many of whom were Bill’s personal friends and had pledged to pay more taxes to help cut the deficit.
“The economy’s a mess, it’s dead flat,” he said. “America has lost its Triple-A rating. Hillary, you have years of experience on Obama. You know better than Obama does, and far better than those guys who are advising him. They don’t know what they’re doing. They govern in sound bites. You’d be the
ideal
candidate. You’d ... ”
He paused for a moment, as if a new thought had suddenly occurred to him.
“If you become president, will we have to build a second Clinton library?” he asked.
“You bet,” Hillary said, smiling for the first time.
“Listen,” Bill continued, “you can’t be blamed for the economy. People think of you as tough, experienced, and tested. You could defeat any Republican nominee better than Obama and keep control of Congress, or at least not bleed as many seats as Obama’ll bleed the party next year. The voters remember how they were better off when we were in the White House.
You
could fix the economy.
We
could fix it if
we
... I mean if
you
were president.”
Hillary rolled her eyes.
“I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s cabinet,” she pointed out. “I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about
loyalty
?”
“Loyalty is a joke,” Bill said. “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook. I’ve had two successors since I left the White House—Bush and Obama—and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s... he’s... ”
Bill’s voice was growing hoarse—he was speaking in a rough whisper—but he looked as though he could go on forever bashing Obama. And then, all at once and without warning, he stopped cold.
He bit his lower lip and scanned the faces in the room. He was plainly gratified to see that his audience was spellbound. They were waiting for the politician par excellence to deliver his final judgment on the forty-fourth president of the United States.
“Barack Obama,” said Bill Clinton, “is an amateur!”
PART I
 
CHICAGO, THAT TODDLIN’ TOWN
 
Chicago, Chicago that toddlin’ town
Chicago, Chicago I will show you around—I love it
Bet your bottom dollar you lose the blues in
Chicago, Chicago
The town that Billy Sunday could not shut down
 
 
 
—“Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)”
by Fred Fisher
 
CHAPTER 1
 
HOLLOW AT THE CORE
 
Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last.... I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
 
—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
 
O
f all the Chicago people I interviewed, none got to know Barack Obama quite the way David Scheiner, MD, did. Scheiner was Obama’s personal physician for twenty-two years—from the mid-1980s, when Obama was a community organizer, until he was elected president of the United States.
Today, at the age of seventy-three, Dr. Scheiner is a rail-thin, spunky, unreconstructed old lefty. He belongs to Physicians for a National Health Program, a far-leftwing organization that lobbies for single-payer national health insurance—or, in Dr. Scheiner’s own words, “socialized medicine.” He had great hopes for Obama in the White House, because when Obama was his patient he made no secret of the fact that he favored the kind of socialized medicine that is practiced in Canada and Western Europe.
Given Dr. Scheiner’s leftist leanings, I expected him to be a champion of his former patient. To my surprise, however, he turned out to be one of Obama’s most severe and unforgiving critics.
“I look at his healthcare program and I can’t see how it can work,” Scheiner said. “He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The [Congressional Budget Office] said it’s going to be incredibly expensive ... and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time.
“When Barack Obama planned this health program, he didn’t include on his healthcare team anyone who actually practiced medicine in the trenches the way I do,” Dr. Scheiner continued. “I’m an old-fashioned doctor. I still make house calls. I still use the first black bag that I got out of medical school. My patients have my home phone number. It’s true that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, was on the healthcare team, but Ezekiel is a medical oncologist, not a general physician.”
Dr. Scheiner’s grievances against Obama went well beyond Obama’s policies to the very nature of the man.
“My main objection to Barack Obama is that he is a great speaker and a lousy communicator,” Dr. Scheiner said. “He isn’t getting his message across to people. He isn’t showing that he really cares. To this day he hasn’t communicated with members of Congress.
“He’s got academic University of Chicago-type people around him who don’t care. Where is our Surgeon General, the obese Dr. Regina Benjamin? Why hasn’t
she
said anything during this healthcare debate? Ronald Reagan had C. Everett Koop as his surgeon general. Believe me, Regina Benjamin is no Everett Koop. In fact, Obama’s whole cabinet has been a disappointment. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is a joke.”
I asked Dr. Scheiner why he thought Obama had been such a dismal failure as president. He thought for a moment, then said:
“I can really relate to people, but I never really related to him. I never had the closeness with him that I had with other patients. It was a purely professional relationship. He was always gracious and polite. But I never really connected to him. He was distant. When I think of why he’s had problems in the White House, I think there is too much of the University of Chicago in him. By which I mean he’s academic, lacks passion and feeling, and doesn’t have the sense of humanity that I expected.
“Obama has an academic detachment,” he continued. “I treat many patients from the University of Chicago faculty, and I’ve been able to crack through their academic detachment. Not Obama. We never got to the point where we’d discuss intimate things. For instance I never heard anything about his family life. Other patients invited me to dinner and their homes, but Obama never did. Obama invited his barber to his inauguration—his
barber!
But
I
wasn’t invited. Believe me, that hurt.”

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