Hillary Clinton, in her memoir, “Living History,” recalled the first words she heard out of Bill Clinton’s mouth. It was the fall of 1970 at Yale Law School, and Bill (she thought that he resembled a Viking) was excitedly telling classmates about the virtues of his home state. “And not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world!” he boasted as Hillary Rodham happened to walk by. Hillary asked a friend who he was. “Oh, that’s Bill Clinton,” the friend told her. “He’s from Arkansas, and that’s all he ever talks about.”
Thirty-seven years later, on the Sunday before Labor Day, the ex-President and First Lady stood in a barn at the Hopkinton State Fair, in New Hampshire, and inspected the finalists in an annual pumpkin-growing contest—which inevitably led to talk about watermelons. Bill, in a pink checked shirt and white pants, reminisced about the enormous melons of his Arkansas youth as he admired the champion gourd, which, at a thousand and four pounds, sat triumphantly before them; he asked the grower, Bruce Whittier, detailed questions about the art and science of raising oversized fruit. Hillary smiled and chatted politely, but she seemed ready to move on to the cows and sheep.
Bill, now an expert, was asked how much water pumpkins need. “No, no, don’t tell them,” Hillary said. “It’s a trade secret.” Striking a pensive pose, arms folded across his chest, Bill paused for a second before overruling his wife. “Way over fifty gallons a day,” he said, with genuine astonishment. Then, as he began to talk about the differences between watermelon- and pumpkin-growing, Hillary turned away to talk to the governor of New Hampshire and eventually left her husband behind in the pumpkin stall.
She was halfway to Jeff Jordan’s Sheep Barn when Bill’s ruminations turned into a full-fledged press conference. “I don’t know what the latest record was, but the last record I saw was, like, two hundred and seventy-something pounds,” the former President explained, as reporters thrust recorders into his face. “So that’s like a quarter of the size of the winner here, a little more than a quarter. But that’s a huge watermelon.” Returning to the message of the day—that Hillary knows when to “stand her ground” and when to “find common ground”—he went on to offer a startling comparison between fruit competitions and serving in the White House: “When you grow a big pumpkin or you’re in a watermelon contest, if you give it too much water and the skin breaks, you’re eliminated. And if you give it too little somebody else beats you, because they got a bigger melon or a bigger pumpkin. So it’s like, at the end, and in very tense circumstances, there are these constant judgment calls. You know, it’s kind of like being President—you want to make it as big as you can without breaking the skin.” With that, Bill Clinton may have aptly described his role in his wife’s campaign.
After the pumpkin press conference, Bill noticed that Hillary and her entourage were out of sight. “Where’d they go?” he asked an aide. “Do they just not shake hands with as many people as I do?” Though Bill is a more loquacious politician and a more vigorous campaigner than Hillary, her aides have decided that his popularity among Democrats outweighs the considerable risk that he will overshadow her. He has become suddenly ubiquitous, especially in New Hampshire, which is set to hold the season’s first Presidential primary, in January, and where Clinton nostalgia is a potent force. (Clinton’s surprise second-place showing in 1992, behind Paul Tsongas, propelled him toward his party’s nomination.) When he’s not introducing his wife at rallies or sitting down for interviews with Oprah and Larry King, as he did last week, he is wooing old friends on her behalf. In June, Clinton met with ten Democratic activists whose endorsement Hillary covets. Kathy Sullivan, the former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair, who hosted the gathering, told me that after the meeting Clinton had just one question for her: “Do you think I helped Hillary?”
Although Hillary Clinton’s candidacy insures that her husband’s eight years as President will be central to the 2008 campaign, he also hovered over the two previous primary seasons, in each of which the field narrowed to a Clinton candidate and an anti-Clinton candidate. In 2000, Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, characterized the Clinton Presidency as timid and accommodationist, while Vice-President Al Gore ran on Clinton’s record. In 2004, Howard Dean ran on an antiwar message, but he tried to rally Democrats who believed that Clintonism was fundamentally unprincipled; John Kerry recruited people from the Clinton White House and associated himself with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Hillary’s advisers argue that the obvious lesson of those two campaigns is that invoking Democratic resentment about Clinton’s ideological and personal failings does not work. But his prominence this time makes the strategy irresistible. “The whole race is going to end up there,” a spokesman for one of Hillary’s rivals told me. “It has to, because that’s what she’s running on. She’s running on Bill Clinton. If she were running on her Senate record or some new ideas for the future, rather than the nineties, it would be different. But her biggest strength is Bill Clinton, so the only way to attack her is to take that head on.”
Barack Obama has been pondering his place in a post-Clinton world for several years. In the spring of 2004, a few weeks after he won the Illinois Democratic primary for U.S. senator, I visited him in Springfield. During a stroll from the Capitol, where he had served for eight years as a state senator, to his campaign office, downtown, Obama talked about the politics of Bill Clinton, saying, “The way a lot of the Democratic debate has gotten framed these days is you’re tied to either this hidebound nineteen-sixties liberalism or, in some cases, nineteen-thirties liberalism, or, alternatively, you’re this Democratic Leadership Council centrist who isn’t willing to make big bold steps to deal with issues like jobs and health care.”
For Obama, policy boldness represented not a break with Clintonism but the natural next step. “My suspicion is that if Bill Clinton were around here now he would be doing this,” he told me. “He captured appropriately, I think, the mood of the country and a needed correction within the Democratic Party that was appropriate in the early nineties. Well, we have to do the same thing in 2004 that was done in 1992. And you can’t assume that that just means you go back to 1992, because circumstances have changed.”
In Obama’s recent book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he could be harsh about the Clinton years. He described some of Clinton’s more calculated political moves, such as his criticism of the rapper Sister Souljah, as “clumsy and transparent,” and he called the campaign-season execution of a mentally damaged man on Arkansas’s death row “frighteningly coldhearted.” Obama acknowledged some of the virtues of Clinton’s centrism, but, discussing Washington’s toxic political environment after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994—the year of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America—he wrote, “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage.” Obama argued that the effect of the polarizing Clinton years was a stronger conservative movement that eventually “would take over the United States government.”
This past June, on the way to a campaign event in Boone, Iowa, I asked Obama again about Clinton’s legacy. “I think his basic instincts were sound in suggesting that we’ve got to break out of a lot of these false divisions that exist in our politics,” he said. “Is government the problem? Is crime just a function of individual immorality, or is it institutional racism or poverty?” But he was also critical of the direction that his party had taken since the nineties, saying that a lot of Democrats had concluded that “the message of Bill Clinton and his electoral success is that we should split the difference with the other side on every issue.” Choosing his words carefully, Obama went on, “I do think that for a variety of reasons, including some of the appalling tactics of the Gingrich Republicans and the conservative right, he was never able to make that full case to the American people in a way that would create a broad base of consensus for change. So, politically, you never had the capital, you never had the tools to actually deliver on that vision on big projects. What you would end up getting instead were great insights, but the applications were modest.”
Obama may be right to believe that, in the wake of Bush’s sharp drop in popularity and the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, a Democrat of bold ideas who presents himself as the anti-Clinton could be successful. The Party’s interest groups certainly feel emboldened. There is little appetite for unrestricted free trade, a cornerstone of Clinton’s economic strategy, starting with his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement during the 1992 campaign. The Service Employees International Union, one of the most liberal unions in America, has successfully pushed every Democrat in the race into supporting universal health care. And, with an economy that is producing historic levels of inequality and stagnant median wages, there is an opening for a more populist message. There is some evidence that such a message worked in 2006. Senators Jon Tester, of Montana, and Jim Webb, of Virginia, arguably won last year by challenging the Wall Street wing of their party.
But it’s not clear that Obama is the right candidate for that message. He has made a fetish of the politics of consensus at a moment when his party seems to want confrontation. And although he has correctly diagnosed what alienated some Democrats from Clintonism, he seems at times more concerned with distancing himself from liberals than with embracing them. An outside adviser to Obama sounded exasperated as he described the complicated ideological terrain of the Democratic Party in 2007: “The frustration is that there is a revival of old-fashioned populism out there. Edwards is embracing it, and Clinton is embracing it, too. If Obama gets up and says something extremely populist on, say, trade, to appeal to the left-wing base of the Party or to the unions, wide groups of voters and insiders say, ‘Oh, is he really a liberal candidate? We’re no longer going to view him as a uniter who brings people together. We’re going view him as a left-wing panderer.’ ”
The issue of health care has been particularly vexing. It has not proved to be the liability for Clinton that her opponents assumed it would. “At the S.E.I.U. health-care forum in Las Vegas, it doesn’t go that well for Barack,” the Obama adviser explained, referring to one of the numerous candidate cattle calls this season. “He tried to leave it at the highest level of principle, and then he’s roundly panned. S.E.I.U. says, ‘You’re a joker.’ They asked, ‘What is your plan?’ He did what all the experts said to do: just get up and say what your general view is, because if you release details you get hammered. The public reaction and the S.E.I.U. reaction was extremely negative.”
In describing this dynamic, Obama’s adviser became more and more agitated. “Then Hillary Clinton doesn’t come out with any plan! Because she just says, ‘I know a lot about health care,’ they have let her go for months without a plan! And then her advisers, on background, criticize Obama’s plan, even though they don’t have one.” He continued, “Coming up with a plan to solve America’s health-care crisis is not an easy thing. We pulled a lot of all-nighters. And I’m, like, Why doesn’t she have to come out with a plan?” (Clinton is scheduled to unveil a plan soon.) The adviser was baffled about why many experts in the health-care field believe that Hillary’s experience in 1993 and 1994 is an asset. “I’m sure George Bush learned how not to invade Iraq,” he said. “Should we then trust him to invade Iran?”
It is true that Hillary Clinton’s unhappy experience with health care has been remade into a political selling point. During her first two years as First Lady, her five-hundred-person Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which worked in secret, came to symbolize everything that was wrong with her approach—arrogance, a lack of consultation with Congress, a final product that pleased no one. Its failure set back the cause of universal health care and probably cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1994. Now she uses what happened as a parable about hubris and lessons learned—a reminder that, more than any other candidate, she understands the limits of the American political system’s capacity for sweeping change. “We came in and, largely propelled by a lot of the stories from back-yard meetings and living-room gatherings in New Hampshire, determined to do something about health care,” she told a gathering of voters in Concord. “But we didn’t have a good enough grasp of how to get it done. And if we had known then what we know now it would have been a lot different.”
Much of Clinton’s case for doing better this time rests upon the graduate degree in legislative politics that she feels she has earned since her election to the Senate, in 2000. Gone is the style that she brought to Washington in 1993, when she became the first First Lady to have an office in the West Wing—and faced ferocious criticism when she tried to use it. Now she talked about being “flexible” in working with the House and the Senate and about respecting the “prerogatives that the Congress wants to claim,” and she scoffed at what she sees as the naïveté of her Democratic rivals. “When my colleagues who are running against me, who are all wonderful people, say things like ‘We’re going to make it happen!’—well, we’ve got to get the vote, and we’ve got to be able to make the persuasion. And that very often means you’ve got to compromise, which is not a word that people in a Democratic primary want to hear, because we all want to think that we can go in and do exactly what we believe in and make it happen. The fact is you can’t. And I think we learned that as well. When Bill passed the deficit-reduction act, it was with one vote. And I’m glad he passed it with one vote, but it sort of set up a lot of the political problems to come.”
Karl Rove recently attacked Clinton as a “fatally flawed” candidate, arguing that nobody who started the primary season with disapproval ratings as high as hers (they are in the high forties) has ever won the Presidency. She claims, however, that her faults, because they are well known, are actually a strength, and that nominating a candidate who is relatively unknown to the public would be a dangerous course. “The tactic used, effectively, will be to drive up the negatives of whoever our nominee is,” she said at the close of her talk in Concord. “And it will all be fresh information. It will all be ‘Oh, you didn’t know? Let us tell you. Let us paint a caricature. Let us give you this picture.’ Whereas I have the somewhat mixed but rather fortunate blessing of already starting with those negatives. And I mean for me that’s a plus.” Clinton’s argument is that she offers electability, plus everything that voters loved about the Clinton era and none of the things that they hated. As she finished up, she said, “I’m running because I think I can win and I can take the White House back for us, and, frankly, build on the positives of the nineties and avoid some of the mistakes.”
Obama may have decided that there is no percentage in trying to mount an ideological challenge to Clintonism, and that his case against the Clintons should be more subtle. Earlier this year, his campaign attacked Hillary for her association with a controversial fund-raiser named Sant Singh Chatwal. More recently, Obama has been the only candidate to raise, however obliquely, the sensitive subject of a Clinton dynasty. “I didn’t come through the back door,” he said, raising his voice and shaking his head, during a recent speech in front of a labor audience in Waterloo, Iowa, minutes after Hillary addressed the same forum. “I didn’t come from some fancy congressional internship. My daddy wasn’t in politics. I didn’t inherit this.”
One morning in mid-August, John Edwards’s staffers were milling outside the lobby of the Sheraton hotel in Iowa City. Joe Trippi, one of the campaign’s newest additions, was talking on his cell phone. “I’m getting on the bus to prep him,” Trippi said. Trippi is best remembered as Howard Dean’s Svengali in 2004, but he also worked for the Presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy (1980), Walter Mondale (1984), Gary Hart (1987), Dick Gephardt (1988), and Jerry Brown (1992). His specialty is populist, outsider campaigns for candidates who bring with them a dash of anger. He joined the Edwards team in April, and has emerged as the campaign’s chief strategist.
With Trippi’s encouragement, Edwards has taken a turn to the left, and he has been attacking the Clinton legacy more and more frequently. During a recent speech on trade, Edwards charged that “triangulation and compromise won’t fix anything” and reminded his audience that trade deals, like NAFTA, were the work of “Presidents from both parties.” At a debate broadcast on the gay-oriented cable network Logo, Edwards sharply noted that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era policy effectively barring openly gay men and women from serving in the military, which Edwards would overturn, “is not just wrong now, it was wrong when it began.” Edwards, more than Obama, seems determined to test liberal fealty to Clintonism.
On the last day of a week-long tour through Iowa, Edwards travelled from Polly Bukta’s Annual Corn Boil, in Clinton, to the Scott County Democrats Summer Picnic, in Davenport. Edwards’s blue campaign bus felt lived in, with stacks of papers strewn about and suitcases obstructing the aisle. Edwards doesn’t have a day job, and he spends a lot of time campaigning, especially in Iowa, where he placed second in 2004, and where recent polls have often shown him in the lead. The conventional wisdom is that he must win the state’s caucuses in January to have a chance at the nomination.
Edwards, in faded Levi’s and a blue-and-white striped button-down shirt, exuded a sense of comfort that was missing during his last campaign, when, as he admitted, he lacked “seasoning” and “substance.” As we talked, he twirled a bent paperclip between his thumb and forefinger, dropping it occasionally to gesture or to emphasize a point. Describing the Clinton years, he said, “I think they did a lot of good. You know, balanced the budget, helped create an economy that was showing significant growth. I think in general it was a period of prosperity.” He added, “We’re just in a different era. Things have changed.”
In public, he subtly reminds liberals of what they found distasteful about the Clinton Administration but carefully avoids criticism of Bill Clinton himself, revealing another of the complications of running against Hillary. Edwards has heretical things to say about deficit reduction and free trade, two pillars of Clintonomics. “My view about the deficit is it’s relatively not as bad as when Clinton took office,” he explained. “It’s about two per cent of G.D.P.” (When Clinton took office, it was about five per cent of G.D.P.) “And, secondly, I just think that we have these other big structural problems that need to be fixed. I’m willing to tolerate some level of deficit, yes.” Many liberals believe that Clinton’s obsessive focus on deficit reduction was the greatest obstacle to achieving other big goals. Gene Sperling, Clinton’s chief economic adviser and now a top adviser to Hillary, recently wrote that at the White House he fielded many complaints from “exasperated progressives” eager to vent on this issue.
The resentment among some Democrats toward Clinton-era free-trade deals is even stronger. “On trade, there’s no question, there’s still a huge amount of bitterness toward Bill Clinton,” Thea Lee, the policy director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., told me. Clinton’s record “is just terrible,” Douglas McCarron, the head of the carpenters’ union, which recently endorsed Edwards, says. “Clinton gave us NAFTA. He gave us the World Trade Organization. He and his Labor Secretary really wouldn’t say the word ‘union’ for two years when they were first elected.” Clinton himself recently acknowledged the reaction. In a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in late July, he said, “There is one problem that we all have to admit still divides our party and divides the country, where our position right now is not popular, and that is trade. There is a sweeping rejection of globalization and a withdrawal from more trade relations, not just in the United States but in virtually every wealthy country in the world.” Trade is the core of Edwards’s anti-Clinton attack, especially in Iowa, where there is considerable protectionist sentiment.
When a voter in Iowa asked Edwards for his thoughts about NAFTA, the candidate looked at him intently and made a thumbs-down gesture. Aboard his bus, Edwards told me, “I’ve always been against NAFTA.” In his speeches, he has gone even further, declaring that he doesn’t want “fast-track” authority, which limits congressional involvement in trade deals, and suggesting that he won’t support free-trade deals unless labor and environmental standards are written into the text of the agreements. Clinton tried to improve labor and environmental rules, but he never allowed them to ruin an opportunity to open up new markets.
Edwards presents not only an ideological challenge to Clintonism but a tactical one as well. Describing the difference between him and Hillary, he said, simply, “She is the status quo and I am change.” Edwards, who was the first candidate this year to present a detailed universal-health-care proposal, argued that Clinton learned the wrong lesson from her policy defeat. “For me, the lesson of the Clinton health-care experience is you can’t compromise and negotiate with these people who stand between us and change—insurance companies, drug companies, lobbyists. I think she’s got just the opposite conclusion. Or, at least, the way she responds seems to be an opposite conclusion: that the way to bring about change is you have to work with these people.” He went on, “That’s what we saw happen in the nineteen-nineties. And I think now we’re going to have to actually take them on in a serious way, with the backing of the American people, and beat them.”
Edwards dismisses Obama’s argument that more consensus is needed in Washington. The difference between them, Edwards told me, is the difference between “Kumbaya” and “saying, ‘This is a battle. It’s a fight.’ ” When I asked whether he’s a populist, he lifted a riff from his stump speech: “If it means you’re willing to stand up for ordinary people, the kind of people that I grew up with, against very powerful, entrenched interests, then yes, I am a populist.”
The terminal at the airport in Concord, New Hampshire, is small and shabby, and filled with seventies-era office furniture. Inside the main waiting room, the only relief from the stained carpet and the bare walls is a bright-colored mural of children’s heads popping up from behind boulders, trees, and knolls. On a recent morning, a Secret Service agent, a Clinton campaign staffer, and I waited for Hillary Clinton to arrive as we watched helicopters take off and land at a National Guard base across the tarmac.
Hillary stepped out of her black S.U.V. in oversized sunglasses and a fitted sapphire jacket that gave her a vaguely martial appearance. She was followed by several Secret Service agents and accompanied by her travelling chief of staff, Huma Abedin, a strikingly attractive woman of Indian and Pakistani descent who recently showed up in a photo spread in Vogue. I went with Clinton to a small office; she took a seat behind a metal desk and joked about the ambience of the place. “We’ve got the dead bugs in the light fixture,” she said, laughing and pointing.
Hillary Clinton’s ideology has been one of the white whales of American politics. Conservatives once caricatured her as a virtual Marxist. More recently, antiwar Democrats have savaged her as a neoconservative hawk. During the first great ideological debate within the Clinton Administration, Hillary sided with the liberals who believed that the deficit hawks were sacrificing the progressive soul of the Clinton agenda in order to satisfy Alan Greenspan and the bond markets. “We didn’t come here to spend all our time cutting deficits created by Republicans,” she asserted at the time, according to Carl Bernstein’s recent Hillary biography, “A Woman in Charge.” But after the Gingrich revolutionaries won Congress, in 1994, Hillary became a fervent advocate of triangulation. She boosted the influence inside the White House of the unwaveringly centrist consultant Mark Penn, who is now the chief strategist for her Presidential campaign. By 1996, she was supporting her husband’s decision to sign a welfare-reform bill after he vetoed two previous versions that she opposed. The legislation assured his reëlection.
Sitting across the desk, raising and lowering her voice in response to airplane engines whirring outside, she sounded like a candidate traversing the current political moment as adeptly as her husband did when, after his shaky early years in the White House, he shifted to the center and, in 1995, outmaneuvered Gingrich in their confrontation over the government shutdown. Whereas in 1999 and 2000 George W. Bush emphasized his independence from his father’s Administration, Hillary showed no hesitation in discussing the Clinton Presidency as a joint venture. Speaking of a recent address she gave on the credit-mortgage crisis, she told me, “We had the same kinds of events in ’92, in New Hampshire. And then, during the nineties, we didn’t have these problems. And it’s like déjà vu all over again. You know, here we are, with middle-class people worrying about whether they’re going to keep their homes, and afford their health care, and send their kid to college.” She spoke of her Presidency as an inevitability. “So, unfortunately, after making progress during the nineties on a lot of these bread-and-butter issues, I’m back to facing them again, and will have to deal with them as President.”
But she looks at Clintonism as if it were a buffet—she takes only the parts she likes. When I asked her about what has changed since the nineties, she mentioned being “older and wiser” and “the learning process” and how “we have to look at the world as it is now.” At a conference of liberal bloggers in Chicago last month, someone brought up four of Bill Clinton’s policies and asked Hillary if she would renounce her support for them: welfare reform, NAFTA, the Defense of Marriage Act (which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage), and the 1996 Telecommunications Act (which weakened restrictions on media consolidation). She said that the positive aspects of welfare reform outweighed the negative; repudiated parts of the marriage act; distanced herself from NAFTA; and, on the telecom law, said, “You’ll have to ask Al Gore,” who championed it. Most pointedly, she has moved away from her husband’s pro-free-trade rhetoric, making it clear that Edwards’s attempts to distinguish himself will be difficult. “A trade policy without labor and environmental standards that are enforceable is just no longer feasible,” she told me. Asked if NAFTA, which Bill Clinton cites as one of his most significant achievements, was a mistake, she replied, matter-of-factly, “I think that NAFTA didn’t realize the benefits that were advertised.” She added, “Well, you know, you don’t remain static—you have to continue to evaluate what was and wasn’t done.” On the deficit, Hillary did not sound as hawkish as her husband. Is it necessary to get the deficit to zero? She wants it on a “declining trajectory,” she said, but quickly noted the importance of her health-care and energy plans.
When I brought up Edwards’s attacks on Clintonism as timid and tactical, she became more animated. She threw her head back and slapped the desk, clanking her watch on the surface. She rejected the idea that she is simply running for a third Clinton term, but she had a warning for an opponent who thinks he can defeat her by taking on her husband: “Any Democrat who rejects the only two-term Democratic President we’ve had since Franklin Roosevelt is rejecting an important part of how we are in a position to be able to run and win in the 2008 election. There was a lot of business taken care of in the nineties—you know, Democrats can be good stewards of the economy. In fact, given Bush and Cheney, better stewards than Republicans. Democrats don’t take a back seat to anybody on crime and national security. Democrats have the biggest expansion of health care, with the Children’s Health Insurance Program, since Lyndon Johnson. So why would we want to reject what we’ve accomplished? If I were not named Clinton, I would be saying, ‘Good for us!’ ” She paused and added, “But, you know, that was then. This is now.” ♦
