Press Release AIPR - HILLARY: Will she or won’t she?

And there is the possibility that, as the US contemplates its first female president, she will face other questions. Sure, some Republican women might be tempted to cross party lines to vote for a woman. But how many? Do those years as first lady really count as political experience?

By Holly Yeager - FT
At first it had all the makings of an ordinary Washington event with Hillary Clinton. The former first lady was sitting in an armchair on an empty basement stage in the imposing neoclassical National Archives building, where she had come to talk to the archivist of the US, Allen Weinstein.
The week-night chat last month was one of a series of discussions Weinstein has been holding with influential Americans about the “use of American heritage” and Clinton was wearing one of her familiar political uniforms, bright pink jacket and pearls over a deep blue trousersuit.
The crowd was small and friendly, and Weinstein’s questioning gentle. And, for just a moment, she abandoned some of her usual rigid caution and began to talk about what so many people still don’t understand about her: why did she run for office?
By her account, she had no idea she would one day be Senator Hillary Clinton. As late as 1998, she said, when the House of Representatives was preparing to impeach Bill Clinton and his family was starting to imagine life beyond the White House, “I thought I would continue doing what I had always done, which was to be an advocate, be a volunteer, be a cheerleader.”
But then the eminent New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced in November 1998 that he would retire when his term expired in 2000.
“I started, within literally minutes, getting phone calls from New Yorkers asking me if I would consider running,” Clinton said. First to call was the gravel-voiced Charles Rangel, congressman from Harlem and dean of the state’s Washington delegation. Clinton suddenly dropped her voice to imitate Rangel: “We really want you to think of running.” People sitting around me giggled.
“That is ridiculous,” she told him. “I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that.” But after Rangel, the calls kept coming and the pressure grew. “I said no, I said I thought it was sort of an absurd proposition.”
Some wanted her to run because they thought she would be a good senator. Others just wanted a Democrat who stood a chance against Rudolph Giuliani, the popular mayor of New York.
“Well, if you don’t win, it would be a great race,” one New Yorker told her. “Thank you very much!” she squawked, her eyes wide open.
It wasn’t until a few months later that she decided to think about the race seriously, persuaded, she said - a bit too neatly to be the whole story - by a high school basketball player she met at the premiere of a television special about women in sports. The young woman leaned down and whispered: “Dare to compete, Mrs Clinton. Dare to compete.”
“I had spent so much of my adult life urging young women to be whatever they wanted to be, to do whatever they could do. To go to college. To run for office, to try out for this or that,” she said. “When this young woman said this to me, I thought, ‘I need to explore this, and really decide if it is something that I want to try.’”
From the corner of the room, I found myself trying to reconcile what she called that “surprising decision” six years ago, with her current status as the leading Democratic candidate for the next presidential election in 2008.
Her election to the Senate was surprising enough. On the campaign trail, aides had to remind her to say “I” instead of “he” or “we” as she adjusted to the role of candidate. Clinton’s they-talked-me-into-it stance helped deflect accusations that she was an opportunistic carpetbagger. And Giuliani’s decision not to run - he was battling prostate cancer, and his marriage was publicly disintegrating - helped her to victory.
But today she dominates nearly any discussion of US politics. When Democrats are asked who they are likely to support for the party’s 2008 presidential nomination, she outscores all other candidates by 25 percentage points.
Her Senate re-election campaign has raised nearly $40m. Anything left over from the race, in which she does not face a serious challenger, could be used for a presidential campaign.
But there is something other politicians will envy even more: her fundraising appeal is so strong, her supporters so motivated, and her network so well organised, that Clinton is able to avoid the fate of most of her Senate colleagues, governors and other prominent candidates, who must spend demeaning hours on the telephone each week asking for campaign contributions. She doesn’t even call the “surrogates” who make fundraising calls on behalf of a candidate, each with a set goal of, say, $100,000. The money just rolls in.
“She’s operating at a different level,” said one Democratic fundraiser.
The numbers are convincing, and off-putting for any lesser-known Democrat thinking of a run for the White House. But can this woman who became a public figure as the wife of a politician, who was best known for standing by her man despite his dalliances, and whose largest public policy role had been as the front-person for a botched effort to establish a national healthcare system, really be elected president?
Clinton, 58, refuses to discuss publicly any ambitions beyond winning re-election to the Senate in November. But everyone else is taking it seriously.
Some Republicans are looking forward to the chance to campaign against such a polarising figure, eager to portray her as an old-school liberal who wanted the government to take over the US healthcare system. An ABC News/Washington Post poll last month found that while 84 per cent of Democrats have a favourable impression of her, 73 per cent of Republicans have an unfavourable view. Many in the party are rallying around the independent-minded Arizona senator, John McCain, because they think he stands the best chance of beating her. The most interesting drama, though, is among Democrats, a lot of whom are questioning whether she deserves the top job.
Some worry that she would be “unelectable” for any number of reasons, and, desperate not to blow their chance to recapture the White House, are searching for an un-Hillary candidate. Others fear that the Democratic party with her in the lead would move to the centre, just as public dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress should encourage Democrats to flex their liberal muscles. And centrists in the party, who should be excited about the direction she’s taken, worry about the “fatigue factor”.
“The anxiety about her running is really growing,” one strategist told me. “It’s like a television show we’ve seen before. Do we really want to watch it again?” (She is such a commanding frontrunner, however, that it is hard to get people to put their complaints on the record.)
Longtime supporters say they remain committed to her. “Generally with Hillary, she’s polarising in prospect,” said one. “Then it changes the minute people meet her.”
But they are aware of the risks of a Clinton candidacy, using terms such as “nervously excited” when I asked what they thought about the idea of her running for president. Some of those closest to Clinton almost blame her ascendancy on the weakness of the Democratic party and the paucity of other candidates. “How can she not run? Who else is going to?” one supporter told me.
Many people are thinking about it. John Kerry, who lost in 2004 to George Bush, is ready to try again, although few Democrats are enthusiastic about following him. John Edwards, his running mate, has been hard at work, building his liberal bona fides. There are assorted governors in the mix, most notably Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, whose experience is attractive to Democrats who think he could boost the party’s appeal in the South.
But the un-Hillary man of the moment is Al Gore, who won the popular vote in 2000 but lost out to Bush in a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Gore was far from a perfect candidate, easily mocked for his wooden delivery. But lately he has evolved into a fervent campaigner against global warming. As he promotes a new documentary on the topic, Gore’s passion has put him on the top of some Democrats’ list - and fuelled frustration with Clinton’s rigid discipline.
“I would like someone who is authentic and unmanipulated,” said one long-time Clinton supporter, giving voice to frustration with both her self-restraint and the dominance of campaign consultants in US politics.
To call Clinton restrained is an understatement. The clearest evidence I saw of her discipline came late last month, during what was billed as a major address on energy policy. Washington, New York and points in between were buzzing that morning over a front-page story in The New York Times, based on interviews with some 50 people, on the state of the Clinton marriage. The story delivered less than it promised, reporting that, since the start of 2005, the Clintons have been together about 14 days a month on average - not bad for a globetrotting power couple. But it was on everyone’s mind as we awaited Clinton’s remarks.
She offered not a glimmer of a reaction. Nor did she react to two women who disrupted her comments, shouting about her support for the Iraq war until they were dragged out of the room. There was brief mention of her baseball allegiances (the Cubs and the Yankees), and, other than that, 45 minutes of “carbon dioxide sequestration” and “cellulosic ethanol”. The whole thing was “probably a lot more wonkish” than the crowd expected, she said.
Spontaneity can be risky. During her husband’s first presidential campaign Clinton snapped to a reporter who asked about her work as a lawyer, “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” The comment haunted her for months, and encouraged a conservative story-line that she was hostile to stay-at-home mothers.
Many other politicians, even prominent ones, are less gun-shy. The easiest time to speak to US senators, for example, is when the two party caucuses meet for lunch, usually on a Tuesday, while reporters linger in the corridors just off the Senate floor. John McCain is almost always willing to stop for 10 minutes or so, joking and discussing the events of the day, such as immigration, Iraq, lobbying reform - even the regulation of baseball.
I will confess that, as I followed Clinton around for countless hours over the past few months, I was hoping for a “cookies and tea” moment. Watching her at congressional meetings, awards presentations, speeches and press conferences, I got as close as her just-as-disciplined staff would allow. Could I glimpse her with a few sandwich crumbs on her scarf, or stomping out of a meeting in frustration, or crossing some rhetorical line? No such luck.
There were a few moments of levity. Once, a reporter interrupted a press conference called by Clinton and Harry Reid, Democratic leader in the Senate, both of whom had just faced Republican accusations of voting for a tax increase. “Are you worried about being targeted by Republicans?” the journalist shouted.
Clinton, who famously charged that her husband was the victim of a “vast rightwing conspiracy”, looked up in disbelief. “Am I worried about being targeted by Republicans?” She waited for the laughing press corps to quieten down, then went back to script. “I’m worried about what the Republican fiscal policies are doing to the future of our country.”
Clinton’s campaign team was christened Hillaryland in their corner of the Little Rock campaign headquarters in 1992 and the name has stuck to describe an inner circle of staff and advisers. Its mostly female residents include Ann Lewis, a longtime Democratic activist and top campaign aide; Patti Solis Doyle, who began as her scheduler in 1992, the first person Clinton hired for the campaign; and Neera Tanden, a policy adviser to Clinton in the White House and former staffer in her Senate office who now works at the Centre for American Progress, a liberal think-tank. Hillaryland is as disciplined as its namesake - much more so than the Clinton White House (as Hillary Clinton wrote in her 2003 memoir, Living History: “While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did”).
But the result is a politician whose circumspection makes it difficult to see exactly who she is. I became desperate for details that would reveal some inner passion, some personality quirk, something to fill in the details of this poised politician. Standing around the stage after she spoke at the Archives, while Clinton was getting her picture taken with local high school students, I mentioned to her Washington press secretary, Philippe Reines, that I had noticed that the bottle of Perrier water that had been set out on the table for her was removed before she sat down, and replaced with a bottle of Evian. “Doesn’t she like bubbles?” I wondered. He wouldn’t dare say.
I was in touch with Reines on and off for several months, keeping track of Clinton’s schedule and hoping for a chance to interview her. My final attempt was denied this month. There wouldn’t even be time for a few minutes on the phone, though he did say “a couple of questions on the fly is a possibility, especially if they focus on policy”.
Two day later, I was told: “Please don’t just spring stuff on her, you won’t get anywhere.”
The New York Post had more luck, getting Clinton to reveal last month the 1,000 or so songs stored on her iPod - a birthday gift last year from her husband. Unfortunately, the playlist wasn’t too inspiring: lots of Rolling Stones, The Eagles and The Beatles (”Hey Jude” is a favourite), plus U2’s “Beautiful Day” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”.
Her Democratic detractors have much more serious questions about what Clinton really stands for, and at the top of the list is Iraq. Clinton voted for the 2002 resolution that authorised Bush to go to war and she has not backed away from that support. Instead, in a carefully parsed phrase, she has said repeatedly, “I regret the way the president used the authority he was given.”
But as the war becomes increasingly unpopular, many are growing impatient with that stance, and some party activists have called on Clinton to follow the lead of John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, who renounced his vote.
There have been signs that she may be preparing to shift her stance. When she formally launched her Senate re-election campaign this month in Buffalo at the state Democratic convention - which approved a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops at the earliest practical date - Clinton sharpened her language a bit. “Stand with me as we put pressure on both the administration and the new Iraqi government to get behind a real plan for the Iraqis to assume a growing responsibility for their own security and safety, so that we can begin to bring our troops home.”
While Clinton is usually a reliable Democratic vote in the Senate, she has taken other stances that have worried - and angered - the party’s left. Late last year she lent her support to a Republican bill that would make it a crime to burn the American flag. In a much-discussed speech in January 2005, she appeared to soften the language she used to discuss abortion, but did not veer from her support for abortion rights.
She has worked with Bill Frist, Republican majority leader in the Senate, to encourage a move toward electronic medical records, and with Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House and one of her husband’s sharpest critics, on modest steps to reform the healthcare system.
The day she chatted at the Archives, I had watched her for nearly two hours in the morning lead a discussion on the challenges facing defence manufacturers. It was a very serious exchange on high performance chip manufacturing, visa policies and what she called “a real need for a national vision on technology and education policy”. As the session wound down, Clinton thanked the industry executives who had participated, and then highlighted her bipartisan work on the issue with the other senator who had organised the event - Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who helped run the impeachment case against her husband. “Lindsey and I are also the chairs of the Strange Bedfellows Committee,” she said, smiling.
The newest member of that committee is Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul. His empire - with the Fox News cable channel in the lead - had been at the centre of Clinton’s alleged rightwing conspiracy, and his New York Post had a field day with her 2000 Senate campaign. But, six years on, he shocked the political-media establishment by deciding to host a fundraiser for her re-election campaign in July because, he said, he was pleased with her work as a senator.
Clinton’s critics on the left saw it as more worrying evidence of her shift to the centre. “He’s my constituent, and I’m very gratified that he thinks I’m doing a good job,” she said the day the news broke, when a few of us managed to corner her - briefly - in a Senate meeting room.
When Allen Weinstein, the national archivist, pressed her on her recent record of building consensus and working with Republicans, Clinton was unapologetic: “I have done what I believe was right... Sometimes it might be to the right, it might be to the left, it might be in the centre but it’s been historically important for people on both sides of the aisle to try to find common ground in that centre... I think that’s the best place to be, it’s the most comfortable place for me.” (Consensus-building started at home - her father, a small businessman, was a Republican, and her mother, a homemaker, a “silent Democrat”.)
Clinton is often praised for her hard work, her intellect and her knowledge of the issues. A popular fundraiser for other Democratic candidates, she travels frequently and her schedule is gruelling (enough time, one friend quipped, to get her hair done, but not to get to the gym as often as she would like).
Back in New York, the question in the Senate race is not whether she will win, but how much she will improve on the 55 per cent of the vote she captured in 2000, allowing her to boast, nationally, of her broad appeal. She has taken other steps to prepare for a bigger national role. Some are simple, such as maintaining a coterie of friends and associates from across the country. “She sends Christmas cards, makes phone calls, sends the occasional note,” said one supporter who met her in the mid-1980s, when both were working on children’s issues. “If I need to talk to her about something, I always get a call back.”
Others are more complex. Clinton has tried to take the lead in shaping the debate about the future of the Democratic party. This summer she is working with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and several other groups that are trying to draft a unified Democratic agenda. She has also played a role in establishing the Centre for American Progress, a three-year-old liberal think-tank run by John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton.
“This is really a remarkable political emergence of someone who had been in an odd and fringelike position in the political world to somebody who is certainly the most formidable figure in the Democratic party today, with the possible exception of her husband,” said Steven Rattner, a New York private equity investor and active Democratic fundraiser.
There are many dangers for Clinton. She often mentions the failed healthcare reform effort in her speeches, telling crowds, “I did a little work on healthcare myself and still have the scars to show for it.” Both her critics and fans agree that she knows more than nearly anyone about the complicated topic. But it still poses a dilemma.
“If they mention healthcare, Hillarycare gets thrown at them,” said one person who worked on the 1993-94 reform team. “If they ignore healthcare, they get accused of being disingenuous.”
And there is the possibility that, as the US contemplates its first female president, she will face other questions. Sure, some Republican women might be tempted to cross party lines to vote for a woman. But how many? Do those years as first lady really count as political experience?
There is another risk for Clinton, one that has begun to assert itself in recent weeks as her potential candidacy draws ever more scrutiny: that her status as wife - and her sometimes rocky marriage - will become the story. That was clearly what happened with her energy speech, when The New York Times story crowded out her policy prescriptions.
In Living History, Clinton neatly set out the “spouse problem” she faced as she considered a run for the Senate. “If I were to announce my candidacy at a kick-off event would the President of the United States sit quietly behind me on the stage, or would he speak too? Over the course of the race, would he campaign on my behalf, as he would for other Democratic candidates across the country, or would that consign me to being his surrogate again? A fine line would have to be drawn between asserting myself as a candidate in my own right and taking advantage of the President’s support and advice.” While her husband is now a former president, he is wildly popular - a huge potential asset as an advocate on the campaign trail, but a liability if he overshadows her.
I got a taste of this tricky dance on a late spring evening at the Castle, the Washington headquarters of the Smithsonian, the national museum system. (The New York Times story cited the event as what it called one of their rare appearances together.)
A crowd of about 200 had gathered, but these were members of the Clinton inner circle - family, friends, Clinton administration officials, Hillaryland residents. James Carville, strategist on the 1992 campaign, was there, along with Chelsea, the Clintons’ daughter, all gathered in an ornate, long narrow hall for the unveiling of two portraits - one of each Clinton - commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.
Hers marked the first time the gallery had commissioned a portrait of a first lady. When the blue curtain came up, it was breathtaking - in profile, wearing yellow, on a brown background, edged with gold leaf on either side. It could have been painted by Bronzino. “I always aspired in my life to be a Renaissance man,” the former president said. “I’m not sure I made it, but I wound up with a wife straight out of the Renaissance.”
His portrait didn’t go over so well. “It looks like Ted Koppel,” someone near me said as soon as it was visible, expressing the broad consensus of the room. It took keener eyes a little longer to notice that the former president, portrayed leaning on a fireplace mantel in the Oval Office, did not appear to be wearing a wedding ring.
Nelson Shanks, who painted the portrait, reported later that the ring simply was not visible and said he had never seen Clinton without his ring. But, for some, that became the story of the portraits.
“The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York,” Clinton wrote in Living History. But, based on her brief comments at the Castle, she seems close to making another.
Clinton quoted her portraitist, Ginny Stanford, who once said that, as she begins a painting, she thinks about what emotion she wants to evoke, what colour she wants to see, and poses “an open-ended question: what if?”
Clinton seized on the “what if?”
“As Americans, we’re at our best when we begin with ‘what if?’ and when we decide that what we see before us is a future filled with possibility and potential,” she said. “The possibilities are endless and unlimited.” That’s true, but only if the voters go along.