Connie Bruck has a huge piece on the Clintons in The New Yorker. It has a lot of anecdotal information and it is a pretty good read. There is a segment of the article that focuses on Bill Clinton’s biggest political defeat (his 1980 gubernatorial re-election bid) and how Hillary took over and rebuilt Bill’s self-esteem and his political operation. The interesting thing is how Bruck ties this all in to the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Al From, and others co-founded in 1985.
In any event, Bill and Hillary didn’t awaken to the fact that the election was in jeopardy until it was too late. The defeat was traumatic—not only for Bill, friends say, but for Hillary as well. “It shook both of them right down to their toes,” one friend declared. While the two may have been equally shaken, they responded in very different ways. Clinton, according to some people, seemed to experience losing not just as an electoral defeat but as a personal rejection by a large number of those whom he had courted; he took it so much to heart that he seemed emotionally undone. “It took all the air out of his normal resilience,” Max Brantley, the editor of the weekly Arkansas Times, recalled. “He was going around giving this Hamlet soliloquy—‘All is lost, what can I do?’ ” An acquaintance said, “After Bill lost, it was pathetic.” Recalling Clinton’s early efforts to reintroduce himself to voters, this person continued, “It seemed as if you might find him, almost any hour of the day or night, at this supermarket out on Markham—he’d catch you at the end of the aisle, or he’d be waiting at the register, and he’d say, ‘You know, I used to be governor, and . . .’ ”
Hillary Rodham took charge. This was when Betsey Wright was brought in, to begin strategizing for a comeback. According to one of the Clintons’ advisers, “The experience of watching Bill screw up made Hillary realize she should jump into the breach.” This person added, “She had to—he was so shaken, and was not a particularly good strategist anyway. There was no way he was going to win again unless she came in.” This adviser acknowledged that Bill Clinton is a supremely political animal but maintained that “she is a better political animal in terms of strategy, and the dynamics of a campaign.” Saying that Hillary participated in most strategic meetings in 1981 and 1982, and “injected a dose of realism into Bill’s politics,” this person continued, “Hillary was the strategist and the pragmatist, Bill the intellectual and the candidate.”
That was the critical juncture, for both Hillary and Bill, in their shared political life. It seems to have involved a great deal of letting go for Bill Clinton—both of a degree of idealism and of various people who had been his aides and close friends in his first term. (Stephen Smith, for example, the deputy chief of staff, was one of Clinton’s closest friends, and Clinton was godfather to Smith’s son, but over the next decade the two rarely saw each other.) That so few of the key first-termers were asked to rejoin him when he regained the governorship in 1982 was said by some to have been in large part Hillary’s decision. A member of the first administration said, echoing a widely expressed view, “She became very conscious of political realities. The Bill Clinton of those earlier years, for example, would not have been involved with the D.L.C.”—the Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton co-founded in 1985—“for anything. But from that point forward they were on a march. They were headed for the White House.”
For Hillary, the accommodation was different. The staff people who were left behind were not her good friends, and the centrist shift in Clinton’s politics probably caused her little, if any, discomfort.
This narrative is a lot different, I think, from the common perception of the political differences between Bill and Hillary Clinton. Most people would probably assume that Hillary was the more instinctively liberal of the two. I know a lot of Democrats that think of Hillary as the champion of universal health care (and she did do her best) and think of Bill as the guy that enacted Welfare Reform. But, according to this article, it was Hillary that shook up Bill’s staff and got him to focus on a more centrist agenda.
In any case, it’s a good article.
according to this article, it was Hillary that shook up Bill’s staff and got him to focus on a more centrist agenda.
All the more reason not to want her as the Dems’ standard bearer. We need some vision, not elastic pragmatism. Off to read the New Yorker. Thanks for the tip.
Let us note that Gore opposed the war, while DLC core people supported it strongly.
It’s funny how you’ve injected Gore essentially out of context.
Gore was hardly ever the DLC’s key player; Clinton was the honcho, for the most part.
DLC people like Al From didn’t like Gore’s populist platform in 2000, and since then, Gore’s and DLC’s path have diverged quite a bit as seen for example with the way they approached the invasion of Iraq: DLC went neocon, and Gore was the most prominent opponent of the invasion, with his what should now be considered a landmark speech. See also Sam Parry’s The Politics of Preemption.
if anything.
Peretz is said to like Al Gore going back to the time when he was Gore’s professor. His endorsement seems to be more personal than ideological. Further, Peretz is just one person (without a whole a lot of clout) and he is free to endorse whomever he likes.
What is more relevant, however, is that Gore got 57% of the vote at dKos in a recent FP poll and also won prominent straw polls at both alternet and TNR (the last one by a narrow margin) last summer.
The logical conclusion: Gore can unite. And, of course, he can govern.
Modulo neutralizing the rightwing noise machine, of course.
She’s the political brains of the outfit, he’s the …well, he’s the political heart plus some other important bodily parts.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
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Early in the Clinton Presidency.
(Clinton I, that is.)
Bill and Hillary are riding through DC in the usual hoottest thing ever Presidential motorcade.
Suddenly Hillary says to the driver “Pull over!!! Right NOW!!!”
He does so and the motorcade screeches to a panicked halt.
Hillary gets out of the limo, Secret Service men posing in shooting stances all over the place. She walks up to a homeless man sitting dejectedly on the curb, kneels down next to him and says a few words, reaches into her purse and gives him a card, and then gets back in the limo and says “OK, we can go now” and they start back up.
Bill turns to Hillary and says “What was THAT all about?” and she answers “Oh…I recognized that guy. I used to go out with him before I met you and I hated seeing him in that state, so I figured I’d see if there was something I could do to help him. He was an alright sorta guy…just down on his luck a little, I think.”
Bill swelled up a little (as he did so well, so often…) and said “Hillary, I’ll bet you’re glad you married me instead of him. Now you’re married to the President of the United States!!!”
And Hillary patiently answered him.
“Bill…you still don’t understand, do you? If I had married him, he’d be the President of the United States.”
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Yup.
Now it’s her turn.
Haven’t women been saying all along “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.” (Irving Berlin, “Annie Get Your Gun”. Well, alright. Irving was probably a man. But the sentiment holds, doesn’t it?)
And now that a woman IS taking care of mainstream political business in the United States…and doing damned well at it so far, if being elected tgwice by huge majorities, continually covered by the media, having a hit TV series produced that was essentially written about what would happen if she WAS elected and raising money are any indicators…what do we hear?
From women as well as men on the left?
“Ahhh…she ain’t shit.”
I don’t get it, folks.,
Who’re you holding out for?
Rosa Luxembourg?
Hell…she couldn’t even carry New York City.
Let ALONE any of the border states.
She sure as hell would be pure lefty though.
Good thing she’s dead or some of you would be working on a “Draft Rosa” movement.
Sheesh!!!
Cut Hillary some slack.
Get right down to it…she’s all you are going to get.
Watch.
AG
I think you just want a new Senator.
Busted.
Yeah, you’re right.
I hear Rosa L. is thinking of running.
AG