This audience knows about the ex-president’s ability to put other people’s money where his mouth is. Big money. At the second annual Clinton Global Initiative in September, he extracted more than $7 billion in commitments to address world problems. Hosting a conference of the Slate 60 largest charitable givers in the United States last week at his presidential library in Little Rock, he joked to the assembled billionaires, “I looked in the mirror and realized I’d become an NGO.”
But can a “nongovernmental organization” like Clinton Partners retake the U.S. government? On this evening, Hillary is in the audience, Bill the featured performer. Even for a crowd of old friends unimpressed by his celebrity, the former president’s seemingly offhand stump speech does not disappoint. In the past year, he has taken his already-impressive rhetorical game to a new level, offering a thoughtful synthesis of the world’s problems and opportunities.
He’s a master of display. Statistics that would be deadly in other hands (“Den-mark’s had a 50 percent increase in its economy with a zero percent increase in energy consumption”) come alive. Describing fluorescent lighting, new windows and other ways to go green and get rich at the same time, he deadpans, “Boring, right?” before answering his own question with patented casual intensity: “But it’s important.” Like a high-tech camera circumnavigating a subject, he clicks images from a dozen angles, then defends complexity, flexibility, uncertainty.
The beauty of the Democratic Party midterm victory, Clinton muses, is that voters said no to ideology. They wanted to move past fearmongering and demonizing toward true debate. “America rejected shorthand,” he says. “People are thinking again.” But they are not thinking of a set of liberal policy prescriptions. He argues that the election was about more than Iraq and corruption; it turned on the unmet needs of middle-class voters for whom the country “isn’t working anymore.” And yet no one is exactly sure how to make it work again. “The people didn’t give Democrats a mandate,” the former president cautions. “They gave us a chance.”
But a chance to do what? To compromise with the president to achieve something to show voters the next time? Or to lay out an agenda to run on in the 2008 campaign? (The first cattle-call primary debates, if you can believe it, are only six or seven months away.) The answer will be some of both, of course, with the calibration of the two approaches determined as much by Hillary Clinton and her husband as by Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. All that is clear so far is that “the chance” will inevitably take centrist form. Just as every Republican candidate has for decades been required to describe himself as a conservative, every Democratic candidate in 2008 will don the Clintonesque cloak of moderation. It’s a vindication of Clinton’s “Third Way” presidency, though ironic considering that the Democrats lost the Congress in the first place in 1994 in part because of the alleged excesses of “Hillarycare.” Now the former First Lady, whose impressive 67 percent re-election to the Senate showed she could win the support of independent swing voters and even a quarter of Republicans, is betting that a moderate image will erase the phony national impression of her as a left-wing harridan.
Chance, as Louis Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind, and none is more prepared in the Democratic Party than that of HRC. Her orderly and substantive approach to issues has brought raves from colleagues in both parties. Her political orbit, dubbed “Hillaryland,” is a frighteningly disciplined constellation of aides, none of whom (to the annoyance of the press) will talk out of school about a 2008 presidential race. While the campaign-in-waiting has not done as much recruitment of workers in Iowa as rivals assume, it would not take long to put the pieces in place. It’s still possible that she’ll forgo a 2008 campaign in order to stay in a job she loves in the Senate (and become majority leader within a few years). But unless personal concerns surface soon, the odds strongly favor her jumping in early next year.
If she does, it will not be because her party is clamoring for her to do so. While her celebrity and command of issues always draw friendly crowds, they cannot be fairly described as tumultuous. While Bill is a virtuoso at weaving together seemingly unrelated threads, Hillary is still too often what one of her biographers, Michael Tomasky, calls the “Laundry Lady,” reciting a laundry list of worthy ideas that don’t yet add up to a compelling vision.
One conventional take on Hillary is that while she is a prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination, she cannot win the general election. But the reverse may be closer to the truth. With the map of the Electoral College shading blue, any Democrat strong enough to win the nomination can conceivably prevail in November. The last four Democratic nominees have all received more than 250 electoral votes (with 270 needed to elect). Bill Clinton used to tell friends that the first woman president of the United States would be like Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain–a conservative. He no longer makes that argument. The challenge in the 2008 general election might be less about Hillary’s gender (or any collateral damage caused from a failure by Pelosi) than her core political skills. Could she avoid being Swift-Boated as a lefty? Probably so. Hillary has the thick skin and war-room experience to fend off the GOP demonizers, who are not quite so formidable after their 2006 wipeout.
The bigger problem for her would be getting past Barack Obama, who now seems poised to run. With much less name recognition than Clinton, he trails her by only 12 points in the latest Gallup poll (the rest of the Democrats are far back). And Obama won the first trial heat of ‘08: he was the biggest draw for other Democratic candidates this fall with a magnetism on the trail unmatched by anyone in politics. (hot chicks dig obama read one button at a Nashville rally). His stump speech is rousing and redemptive and more compelling than, say, Bill Clinton’s was in 1991.
Of course, Obama is inexperienced and untested: while he’d likely have enough Internet-generated money to be competitive, he could wilt under the relentless scrutiny of a presidential campaign. But the Illinois senator, who in 2008 will be three years older than JFK was when he was elected in 1960, brings two big advantages that have not been fully appreciated.
The first is on the war in Iraq. You know what’s coming if he runs: “Obama is like a Grand Marnier soufflé still rising in the oven. It will taste delicious when it’s finished, but it’s not there yet. A trip to Israel and a trip to Africa are not going to give him foreign-policy credentials,” says one Clinton backer unwilling to criticize Obama on the record. But should Hillary and other experienced candidates jab at Obama’s lack of foreign-policy experience, he would quickly reply that he was right and they were wrong on the critical question of going to war in 2003. (Obama was an early and outspoken critic of the war before being elected to the Senate.)
More important, the pri-mary schedule favors Obama. Hillary Clinton has no Rove-like master strategist yet (other than her husband), but the logic of her front-runner game plan suggests building a firewall in the South to recover if she’s upset in Iowa or New Hampshire. Bill Clinton’s popularity with blacks has been presumed to carry over to her and help her win the important South Carolina primary, where nearly 50 percent of Democratic voters are African-American, and other similar Southern primaries critical to the nomination. But that doesn’t account for Obama, who would likely crush her among black voters.
The larger danger for Hillary is that for all the novelty of her gender, she becomes a variation on former vice president Walter Mondale in 1984–strong on organization but weak on passion, a candidate of the past instead of the future. And Clinton Fatigue may be lurking in the party’s central nervous system. If Hillary were elected and re-elected president, it would mean the presence of a Bush or a Clinton on every ticket from 1980 to 2016–36 years.
The team that would try to make that happen is mostly from the East Wing of the Clinton White House (Patti Solis Doyle, Caprice Marshall), not the West Wing. “Some of us who were with him will be with her; a lot of others won’t be,” says one former White House aide unwilling to publicly identify which is which. Pollster Mark Penn, fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe and media adviser Mandy Grunwald are onboard, and James Carville and Paul Begala would help from the sidelines. The Clinton camp is not the monolith conservatives make it out to be. Carville’s call last week for the ouster of Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee was his initiative, and came without the approval of the Clintons, who aren’t spoiling for a fight with Dean. “I’m 62 years old and my parents are gone. I don’t ask permission,” Carville says.
Of course, the Democratic nominee could easily be neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama. Two years before the 1992 election, the presumed Democratic front runners were Mario Cuomo and Al Gore. Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, an African-American candidate, was considered an intriguing choice. Far down the list of possibilities, languishing in polls as Evan Bayh and Chris Dodd are today, was an obscure governor named Bill Clinton.
